Every six months I come back to thinking about free will, and wishing it were easier to grok the latest received wisdom... As I posted elsewhere, I have a couple of my own thoughts.
One is that on the apparent contradiction between free will and predestination is that if you imagine "me" is some abstract supernatural spirit completely divorced from matter, but mysteriously acting in concert with it, then you face all sorts of logical problems, including "if what I chose to do is determined by the laws of physics acting on neurons in my brain, then am I constrained by that". However, if (as I do) I think I am the arrangement of neurons in my brain, then I'm not being controlled by anything else, I am those physical processes. I think that's as free as you can ask for.
I prefer to call that "the concept of free will is an approach to several different things we understand intuitively, but doesn't correspond to a single coherent concept, and coherent definitions of it are either obviously valid or obviously invalid". But as far as I can tell, it's the same idea as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism, even though I disagree with the name.
The second thought is, as with any question, to ask "what would it mean for us NOT to have free will". Well, actually, we have very good examples of that. What we think of as our will is often overridden by impulses: impulses to be generous, impulses to be lazy, etc, etc, that pretend at the time there's a good reason for them, but really, we act on them on impulse because our rational brain doesn't override it quickly enough. In fact, both the impulsive and rational parts of me are all "me", but that process of being overridden is a very good illustration of what it means to not have free will. If that's NOT having free will, then it at least gives hope that the rest of the time, we do have free will.
A last thought, what is the evidence that we DO have free will (if that means anything). I've read many people trying to explain this, and I'm not sure if there's good arguments I'm missing. Because to me, most arguments boil down to "I really want to believe this is true" and "it feels like it's true" both of which apply all the time to things that actually aren't true.
One is that on the apparent contradiction between free will and predestination is that if you imagine "me" is some abstract supernatural spirit completely divorced from matter, but mysteriously acting in concert with it, then you face all sorts of logical problems, including "if what I chose to do is determined by the laws of physics acting on neurons in my brain, then am I constrained by that". However, if (as I do) I think I am the arrangement of neurons in my brain, then I'm not being controlled by anything else, I am those physical processes. I think that's as free as you can ask for.
I prefer to call that "the concept of free will is an approach to several different things we understand intuitively, but doesn't correspond to a single coherent concept, and coherent definitions of it are either obviously valid or obviously invalid". But as far as I can tell, it's the same idea as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism, even though I disagree with the name.
The second thought is, as with any question, to ask "what would it mean for us NOT to have free will". Well, actually, we have very good examples of that. What we think of as our will is often overridden by impulses: impulses to be generous, impulses to be lazy, etc, etc, that pretend at the time there's a good reason for them, but really, we act on them on impulse because our rational brain doesn't override it quickly enough. In fact, both the impulsive and rational parts of me are all "me", but that process of being overridden is a very good illustration of what it means to not have free will. If that's NOT having free will, then it at least gives hope that the rest of the time, we do have free will.
A last thought, what is the evidence that we DO have free will (if that means anything). I've read many people trying to explain this, and I'm not sure if there's good arguments I'm missing. Because to me, most arguments boil down to "I really want to believe this is true" and "it feels like it's true" both of which apply all the time to things that actually aren't true.