Free Will: Fact or Fiction

[Tino]

I'm sorry, did you just suggest it can't be proven it doesn't exist and so thats a good enough reason to believe it does?

I think he;s saying that he doesn't consider the evidence against it to be strong enough.

I think that we have free will, but are still affected by biology and our past experiences. We aren't slaves to our impulses, but they do give us suggestions. There are certain things we can't control at all, like reflexes, but on a macroscopic level, I think that we have enough control to call it free will.

What I mean is that we appear to have free will. People around me behave as if they have free will. The world appears to be populated by people with free will. If I were to imagine what a world would look like if populated by people with free will, it would look like ours. So my observation is that we do indeed have free will. Now if you want to create a compelling argument that we don't have free will, I consider that to be an extraordinary claim and it needs extraordinary evidence - not just button-pressing studies measuring neural response times that can be interpreted to have nothing to do with free will. So I'm asking for an experiment that really gets to the heart of it. I believe I'm free to follow my will. If I'm not, someone ought to be able to place me or someone else in an experiment that shows I can't act on my will as freely as I believe.