It’s a compelling argument because no one seems to have any idea where free will would come from and actually when you pay close attention to your own cognition, it doesn’t feel free-willy at all.
I can take a moment right now to consider whether I want to lift my right hand over my head - to no benefit of my own. I can also consider how free will plays into that and decide to lift my left hand instead, stay with my right hand, or lift no hands at all.
When you have the ability to do that, I think you have free will. At least, you have the closest thing to free will anyone can ever have.
By the way, I wiggled my right foot. That was my decision after my comment.
If so, I would be cautious about generalising that limitation to other people.
The majority of people are capable of determining both proximal and ultimate causes/motivations for their actions. They're influenced by external stimuli, sure, but humans are capable of directing their thoughts deliberately to, for example, perform simple mental arithmetic.
Every time someone thinks "What's 20% of 38?" or "How do I spell conceive?" or "What's the quickest way to Dave's house?", they are triggering a mental process. They are choosing to focus their thoughts in a particular direction to get a result that they will then use in future decision making.
It's not relevant what caused the thought that led to them making the decision; the decision still gets made and acted on by the person. The sequence of thoughts from the decision point to the result/abandonment is volitional.
Is that really not something you can do?
You don't choose whether or not to process the audio, but you absolutely do choose to do the mathematical processing to arrive at an answer. If that's a struggle to contemplate, increase the complexity of the problem until you can't reach the answer in one step, and then you should see the chain of thought.
And what makes you decide to choose to do the mathematical processing? Where does that signal come from?
Same question again: do you really have no experience of logically and consciously working through a process?
No of course I experience the same thing you experience. My argument is that it's an illusion, and it's one that you can actually peel away yourself.
Close your eyes and clear your mind -- you'll find thoughts simply emerging. Eventually, the thought to give up and open your eyes will occur to you. You didn't choose to have that thought prior to it appearing. Following that first thought, you might then give up, or you might have another thought not to give up. One of those thoughts will just immediately become the next behavior. In either case, you didn't choose those impulses prior to their appearance and you didn't choose which one ultimately turned into behavior.
So not only is there zero believable physical explanation as to how and where free will could exist, the subjective evidence doesn't pass even a basic "close your eyes and observe your own cognition" test.
> No of course I experience the same thing you experience.
It really doesn't sound like you do. Other people experience a decision making process -- one where they pick the impulse to follow or deny -- that is at least as valid as your immediate blur from thought to action. Many people are capable of having thoughts without acting on them, or of weighing up multiple thoughts, or of chaining together multiple thoughts (carry the 1, rotate this cube in your mind, etc.) towards a goal.
My explanation is dependent only on the known laws of the universe and biological systems. Your argument is effectively that those don’t matter because your subjective experience seems different. I disagree that’s what even your subjective experience really is, if you decided to pay close attention to it, but again it’s not actually important for my argument.
This was a somewhat reasonable debate before we came to understand that decisions, behaviors, sensory processing are done by the brain (or the biological system more holistically). Now we do understand that. So now in light of that, where does your phenomenon take place?
The universe has two kinds of phenomena, as far as we know: deterministic and random. Neither leaves room for free will. So again: where does it happen? Is our understanding of the physical universe wrong? Does thinking not happen in the brain? Is the brain exempt from physical laws?
Is there a better option that I’m failing to imagine?
“The wall” doesn’t come from any dispute around the subjective experience or the objective physical nature of the universe. It comes from the (understandable) discomfort with the conclusion and the necessary corollaries of that conclusion.
If, however, information which is non-physical information exists, like TKP suggests, then we have evidence of an ontological jailbreak. If one such jailbreak exists, it suddenly seems much more absurd to claim others can't for some reason.
Critically: in either case the brain will process those photons hitting the eye with a combination of random and deterministic processes. This is a physical fact, not a thought experiment, and so I think warrants a stronger rebuttal than simply asserting, “this is absurd, and therefore we should reject it.” If it’s not a physical fact, explain what other non-random and non-deterministic process is happening.
What specifically is absurd? That your subjective experience disagrees? We can reliably and trivially produce all sorts of illusions in which your subjective experience loses touch with objective reality.
No materialists have any idea perhaps. A more common sense approach is to deduce from our common experience of free will (and consciousness too) and lack of a matter based reason for that experience that we are not merely made of matter.
An alternate explanation is that my blink reflex is triggered locally by nerve cells around my eyes, regardless of what my brain does. My brain then receives sensory inputs indicating that I've blinked. It only finds out that something hit my face a split second (say 100ms, that seems to be one 'tick' for most brain things?) afterwards since touch data from that area of skin is fairly low resolution. At this point my brain feels pretty strongly that it wants to blink, to protect my eyes. Here comes the fun bit: Since there's always a strong and seemingly causal link between "something hitting face near eye", "eye has blinked", and "brain wants to blink" my brain is pretty sure it actually decided to blink just before the grit actually hit me.
This feels to me like I blink, out of nowhere, then a split second later feel something hit my face. How can you argue with my constant and empirical experience?