Free Will: Fact or Fiction

[pocaracas]

If there were no rules punishing bad behavior, it would run rampart.

This statement suggests that people change their behavior based on awareness of external rules. How is that different than free will?

The difference is in the mechanism.
The simple awareness of external rules is embedded in the brain, as synapses and stuff like that.
My guess is that any decision, at any given moment, depends on the neurons and synapses you have at that particular time. An they will follow through regardless.
What I'm saying is your thought process is really just a physical/chemical process in your brain.
From this point of view, our will is not entirely free... it's bound by the brain's mechanics.

But, if we abstract from this layer of physical stuff, of course our thoughts are free... they roam free inside our neural-network.

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This is visible in kids born in the "I never lay a hand on my child" societies. Kids never learn the rules, hence they think they are free to do whatever their brains conjure up.

Ok you're off on a tangent but I've never had to hit my kids to get them to follow rules. But let's not turn this into a child rearing discussion.

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Aye.. there are exceptional kids out there.... it just happens that mine need that extra incentive.... just like most do.

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With all rigor, all our mental operations should lead to a predictable result. If we knew all the original conditions of a given grain (all the neurons, all the synapses, all the initial conditions), we would be able to predict the outcome.

I've seen this asserted before but not by anyone who seemed to have the qualifications to back it up. It is also self-contradictory to believe that a machine could be built to model every "thing" in the world, since that machine too would need to be modelled, leading to an infinite spiral of bigger and bigger machines.

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indeed, hence what I said after:

But, at the moment, we don't know them, and it seems to be impossible to know them [...].