Do you believe in free will?

[The Grand Nudger]

Again, random does not mean free. As a poster above has mentioned, dice would have free will by this definition. Everything we know suggests an exceedingly coerced will, tons of trained responses, mountains of "choices" that can be assigned a reliable statistical value. Constrained on all sides by circumstance (some that we can see, or notice, and others that we may be blissfully unaware of personally, but are nevertheless present, and can be explored at length by a person so inclined). If we were willing to limit our definition of free will to being nothing more than unpredictability then we could point to some of that, but in most cases we wouldn't be able to point to our "will" as being the cause of that unpredictability, nor is that field so incredibly large as some would imagine. Even more than this, we're only talking about our ability to predict something at this point, we're not addressing why any given decision was made. That's fairly well removed from any classical notion of free will, wouldn't you agree? Our universe is chaotic, we are not.

Now, the amusing bit is this, I understand the many criticisms of the free will concept, obviously I don't think we actually have any free will whatsoever. I don't like the idea of not having free will, and I certainly feel that I'm making choices of my own accord, but it is impossible for me to determine whether or not this is just a ghost in the machine (and it's been similarly impossible for anyone interested in it from a scientific perspective, where the notion of a free will is pretty much completely out of favor, instead deferring to varying levels of conditioning operating over some standard responses to which we are not 100% privy, and which are capable of generating a vast amount of potential "choices" from those simple starting conditions.) I don't like the idea of being an automaton, but I can't confidently proclaim to anyone that I'm not. There is nothing to suggest that our thoughts or personalities arise from any place other than our brains, that they are anything more than an effect, and this being the case, when, precisely, can you be said to have "changed your mind"?