You heard it from me first, I guessed this years ago.

Our actions are not preordained, we are not billiard balls. We escape predetermination because there's a random element to our decisions. The lack of determinism allows the belief that we have free will.

Science Daily:
Does 'free will' stem from brain noise?

I can accomplish the same thing just by using a quantum random number generator to decide what to have for dinner. My choice would be non-deterministic. I don't know how that explains free will though.

Under a parallel universe interpretation, it wouldn't even be non-deterministic. Observers would have no rational basis to predict my choice, but that's because they will split into versions that observe each of my choices.

"The lack of determinism allows the belief that we have free will."

The usual challenge to the existence of free will is that it's really all billiard balls. But it isn't. We correctly intuit that our actions are not predetermined. The lack of determinism feels like the freedom to choose, although the choosing is likely a function of randomness rather than the classic free will of a truly autonomous agent. So it's admittedly a redefined version of free will :-)

This redefinition of "free will" doesn't require indeterminism.

On the contrary, most philosophers believe that free will is compatible with everything being like billiard balls, in fact they think that everything being like billiard balls, at least at the level of cognitive decision making, is a requirement for the existence of free will. So if it's not all billiard balls at the level of decision making, then that's a challenge to the existence of free will, not the other way around, according to most philosophers.

Please explain how there can be free will in a deterministic universe.

My understanding is that if it is all billiard balls, then a person's every action could be predicted, given unlimited information. That, to me, is the definition of no free will. We just think we have volition, but that's just gloss on predetermined actions.

Is it not true by definition? The existence of randomness creates the condition of indeterminacy. And in the article in question, randomness also makes human decisions a collection of probabilities rather than fixed.

Zumby, if you're lurking take note of this, all those little surveys about alleged compatibilist intuitions, all bullpucky This is how most people think.

Bill, it explains itself. Most philosophers think that free will is compatible with determinism. They think that free will is the ability to deliberate, to reflect on the reasons for your actions, to be free from external coercion like a person pointing a gun at your head; it does not require that the outcome cannot be fixed in advance, although a side note, it is possible for an outcome to be fully determined and fundamentally unpredictable even given full information. Btw, I disagree with most philosophers, but my view is that free will is incoherent, because I agree with you that if it's all like billiard balls then it's not "free", but if it's random noise then it's not "will".

Wouldn't such a philosophical perspective mean that this particular experiment has nothing to do with free will? There's no deliberation or reflection on the reasons for the actions involved in this experiment. It almost seems to be explicitly about how people would act in the complete absence of deliberation or reflection. The activity is merely to react and this experiment would show that reactions are predictable.

There is no will that is free of the laws of the universe, since all will is the product of the universe. I am yet to see a human launch themselves into flight and defy the law of gravity. I am yet to see a human walk through a powerful tornado. Whether there is a will which is free of others coercion or free of any other specified variables is up for debate, but every thought you have stems from the collective history of yourself and the extended history of your genes.

To that extent, there are no thoughts which are free of the chain of cause-and-effect that led to their formation. To suggest that certain causes have no influence on a particular thought can be accurate, but to suggest that a thought can be formed free of any and all influences is erroneous. An individual that can not receive any sensory input would be highly limited in their array of thoughts (if any at all).

You can only have an approximation of freedom; jfc I already explained this on here.

Well, that's not the definition I was using.

Randomness is not free will. A random choice is not a willed choice at all. Free will requires something that's neither determinism (causation) nor randomness (the lack of causation). If you can imagine such a thing, please explain it to me.

It's not free will to say that I perform X with probably 65% and Y with 35%.

All that does is say that determinism would be ultimately less predictable than previously assumed.

If we were to say that my actions are randomly selected from all available ones this wouldn't get around the problem. What we want in our desire for free will isn't randomness, it's conscious purposeful selection from the available choices.

That's sounds like a definition given above -- free will is the subjective experience of weighing choices and making them, which can still exist even if actions are actually predetermined but we just experience them as volition. The very definition precludes the existence of free will. But I'm interested in another definition.

I'm thinking, there is this very interesting phenomenon where matter can attain consciousness and reflect on itself and this process can change events. This seems distinct from insensate balls knocking together. Can free will be found in consciousness? I think a necessary component of my definition of free will is that events not be predetermined. This condition can be met if there is randomness. True, it's not the radical free will described and apparently rejected by bladesman. But it does free us a little bit from the prison of absolute determinism.

It's all about definitions.

Then all we're doing is shifting the focus from physical objects (brains) to what we currently call a non-physical thing (consciousness). Does the consciousness behave by laws of cause/effect or not? When you speak of randomness, do you mean on the level of the consciousness, or do you just mean lack of "physical" causes? (There can be predeterminism behind the decisions of the consciousness, but apparent randomness when observing the physical interactions.)

Such a thing is free will. You have to abandon the deterministic/random dichotomy to make room for it.

The primary gap is "not predictable implies random implies not free will." The first implication fails.

From a christian theological perspective, man doesn't have free will. Martin Luther wrote a book in 1525 regarding the subject (On the Bondage of the Will).

I'm pretty sure that the free will discussion contained in that book is not the free will discussion contained in this thread.

If a theory requires me to abandon the principle of excluded middle, it's not a theory I'll be making room for.
I didn't say not predictable (since that would be open to interpretation), I said not caused. It could be that you and I have differing definitions of random. I define random as "not caused" (no cause whatsoever, physical or spiritual), so my implication amounts to, "Not caused implies not caused."

Ultimately though, I think the free will debate boils down to what Bill Haywood said: Suppose we have souls which are responsible for our actions. Then our actions, if not random, are determined by the nature of our souls. Since our souls didn't choose their own nature, then whether/not they have free will depends on your definition of free will.

You mean is it mechanical and could be predicted? That's the question at hand. I'm arguing that the actions of a conscious agent cannot be predicted 100% because there is free will/randomness.

I am considering randomness to be events that cannot be predicted 100%, even in theory. We can theoretically predict dice, given sufficient physical data. But we can't predict when tritium will shed neutrons by any known method or theory. I suggest that true randomness exists in the universe (possibly deriving ultimately from the quantum world). And since the universe is not 100% deterministic, we can posit that free will exists, when defined as a conscious agent being unpredictable even in theory. The conscious agent can rest assured that her every move or thought is not predetermined.

The artificial seems to be considering the point that our actions might be effected by background electrical noise.

I think this might well be true, but disagree with the conclusions made from this.

Where does the background electrical noise come from?

I remember a paper which gave evidence that a persons actions could be influenced by outside magnetic stimulus. That it is possible to influence someone’s decisions by creating the 'background electrical noise' the article talks about.

In other words this leads towards the diametrically opposite conclusion, 'we can all be controlled like puppets' from much the same theory.

I mean it could be "mechanical" with a different set of mechanics, say "spiritual mechanics" that aren't found in the physics textbooks. It would be unpredictable by physicists, but still "predictable" as in caused and not random. What you linked to only talks about physical mechanisms. Simply proving physical randomness (if that could be done) -- lack of physical cause -- would not prove absolute randomness (the lack of any cause whatsoever).

Okay. But it's not necessarily the case that you have a true dichotomy. It's coming right down to your definitions. You can definitionally rule out free will by saying "predictable" = "not random" and "random" = "not predictable" and call it a day. But when you do that, you define yourself out of any ability to comment or criticize on any level other than "I don't believe that."

I think this would make your observations about randomness very peculiar. It's far from clear to me that this usage is consistent with your usages of "random" ITT.

It will always depends on the definition. There's no way around it.

Because of the peculiarity of your definition of random, I feel as though I should expand slightly on what I'm seeing.

Under your definition of random, this reads:

I struggle to make sense of the first sentence. The second sentence has meaning, but I don't agree with it unless you're defining the will to be a source of causation. But then if the will is a source of causation, then the next sentence loses meaning:

Free will is now a source of causation, but that would be defined as a form of determinism. This is not necessarily problematic, but it does start to create some confusion about your various other objections.