Don't see it as hugely important, but sure, maybe.

People holding beliefs because they're comfortable doesn't imply free will in and of itself. You'd need to be clearer about what you mean by 'impulsive decisions' (ie, avoid defining them solely as 'decisions not made by virtue of regarding a proposition as true').

The theological version of this is kind of interesting though, what would theists sooner give up if they can't make them compatible: God's omniscience or the only seemingly sensible answer (free will) to the problem of evil?

bump for reference to current thread.

PTB

I was going to chastise you for this thread bump - then I realized; You had no choice.

You are a magnificent moderator for making such a wise decision.


PairTheBoard

He is an eminent moderator, but maybe not quite Royalty like you

Due to the bump of this thread, my search for meaning in life, the acidic taste of my orange juice this morning and I'm sure many other reasons of which I'm unaware and cannot control, I'm compelled to make a tl;dr post ITT.


Trying to fathom how free will could exist in some form even though it appears incoherent in a deterministic system, I’ve run across a couple ideas. One states QM in our brains could somehow be a source or trigger for FW, and another is Dan Dennett's idea that FW may have evolved out of deterministic processes in a similar way life evolved from non-living matter. Neither proposes a mechanism, only speculates a framework. I would like to add a thought which could tie these two ideas together a bit, but regrettably still won’t give us anything in the way of an actual mechanism.

Part of the reason QM is interesting in this discussion is that randomness is incoherent according to determinism, so if quantum randomness actually does occur in nature then things apparently can and do break the rules of determinism after all. There is another place in nature we can look to see a breakdown of our understanding of the rules... a black hole.

Proponents of determinism claim determinism holds in every situation from the simplest to the most complex, and that no level of complexity will undermine the causal chain of events, but what if that's incorrect? One property of a black hole is its extremely low entropy, and many believe as we approach and cross the event horizon, causality takes a smoke break. A human brain is among the most organized objects we know of in the universe. What if at some point in our brain’s extremely high organization, an event horizon of sorts is formed past which the rules of causality are bent. Could humans be running around with singularities in our heads (some more supermassive than others) around which the rules of causality bend enough for us to inject some influence into the causal chain, granting us real responsibilty?

Pretty out there, I know. Even so, I doubt I’m the first to think of such a thing. I have no idea if we’ll ever be able to make the incoherent concept of free will coherent, but I have an idea of how rare intelligent life is in this universe (I think we’ve discovered way more black holes so far), so if it exists somewhere I think we’re looking in the right place.