When reasoning about an HTTPS connection I don’t start delving into details about how light bounces around in a fiber optic cable. It’s irrelevant. Free will to me is ultimately the same thing. While understanding how gluons hold stuff together is beautiful, it doesn’t change that I think that people should take ownership of their actions. Besides, say that we lived in some other world where consequence was fundamentally indeterminable in order to embue our existence with “true free will” or some such. Would it be a better world? I like that our world is coherent and understandable. I don’t need magic voodoo to have a soul. My soul is made up of stuff that I can understand.
No they're not, they are not even close. They are only good rough models of the brain if you want to look at the brain in the most over-simplified way. I blame the 'blue brain' project for myths like these.
there seems to be a distinction between Free Will (the ability to act in the moment, I don't believe it exists) and Self Awareness (the ability to consider your-self & your actions in the past or future, which apparently does exist for me).
To me, it seems we have no choice about what to do in the moment. But the moment afterward, we begin to reflect on our experience, replay those sensory signals & imagine our different responses or outcomes, and rewire our brain for the next opportunity to automatically respond in a "free-will" scenario.
if luck causes everything, we might as well call it circumstance.
as luck would have it, I thought the article was total garbage... it raises no questions and offers no valuable insights beyond: historic circumstances exist.