Quote:Are you (and when I say 'you' I mean all those who think free will doesn't exist) saying that when I make my decision it wasn't actually mine at all but simply an illusion. And if it wasn't my choice, who's was it?
What are the processes that went into that decision that all these years I thought were me?
I am not one of those people who belives in no free will. As I've said, I hold no belief. But let me describe what I imagine might be the case.
Imagine a computer that is programmed to do two things, make chess moves in response to external stimuli (opponent's moves + a random number input) and assess whether or not it has free will as a function of whether or not it decided to make the chess moves. Sometimes it responds to it's opponent's first chess move one way, sometimes another. After the opponent's move is made, it feeds that stimulus into its move decision making module, references a table of possible responses, awaits the input of the random number, and selects its response. When asked whether it has free will, it responds that it does have free will on the basis of observations that it goes through a process of making a decision as evidenced by the observation that it assesses options and makes a choice.
Now imagine that the computer evolved naturally. The behaviors it exhibits come into existence randomly and, lacking a disadvantage, are not deselected by natural selection. Does it have free will, or is everything that it is and does the product of chaotic events?
I think it more likely than not that we are chemical computers that evolved naturally, and that the sense of self is just a side effect of the non-disadvantageous, randomly evolved ability to self evaluate by processing stimuli to compute contextually dependent weights for application in our neural networks. When a context is new and/or no previous responses have produced positive feedback, stress hormones are produced in order to trigger the computer to generate new potential responses. Weighted by data produced by an assessment of possible outcomes, one of the responses is selected. Perhaps there is a neural structure that serves as a random number generator for breaking ties. But does resorting to an external source, such as a flipped coin, exhibit the ability to give up free will, or just one more tool in the computer's shed?
I know I've explained this to you before. What is it that you are having trouble understanding?
