Whether we have true free will depends, like many things, on the definition of it. The question of free will normally leads pretty quickly to the question of a deterministic universe.
Now, I think the universe is deterministic because something happening without a causal reason doesn't make much sense to me. But I also like to believe, that we have free will, in some form. With the general definitions of free will, it is not possible in a deterministic universe, so I thought about a definition that would make sense in such.
The freedom of will is the ability to comprehend why one will make / makes / made a certain decision.
need some feedback here, to build forth this thought.
I think the topic of free will is more clearly and compellingly addressed from a different perspective.
From a physical standpoint we are just a collection of atoms vibrating and interacting deterministically (at least in the classical physics picture of the universe). In my view, this is quite simple: either all of the particles that compose us obey a closed set of laws that determine the time evolution of all of physical properties, or they do not. If they do not, physics as we know it is fundamentally wrong. If they do, then there is no room whatsoever for any notion of free will, because we as physical beings affect the physical properties of ourselves and our environments simply by moving, and if there's such a thing as "free will" it means that the time evolution of the physical system (us+the rest of the universe) is not completely determined by physical law and initial conditions. Put another way, to disagree with the thesis that everything in the universe emerges from subatomic particles is to argue that there exists some strange property of the universe that can affect physical properties of the universe but not itself be determined by physical properties, thereby violating the self-closure of physical laws (which effectively say that all of the physical properties of the universe at some time can be completely determined from the initial conditions at some earlier time). However to agree with this thesis, one must admit everything must supervene on physics- and is therefore deterministic.
People like to argue that the universe is indeed not deterministic due to quantum mechanics, which is true, but quantum mechanics does not leave any room for free either. Rather, on small enough length scales, events are completely random (subject to some restraints). By completely random, I mean that there cannot be any "local hidden variable" like free will or something crazy, so this is just as detrimental to the concept of free will (i.e. free will != true randomness).
So, the fact that our genetics and environments seem to leave (at least) less room for "free will" is a reflection of that (multilayered) emergence: we are organisms that emerge from cells that emerge from molecules, etc. In principle, you could compute the time evolution of the world and everyone in it, it's just extraordinarily difficult (and there's a bit of quantum randomness that scrambles things.) Yet like all types of emergence, there are often some simple governing principles of a lesser or greater exactness (depending on what type of emergence you have) that operate on each emergent level. We humans are remarkably similar, mostly wanting the same things out of life and acting similarly. Of course on the individual scale there is a great degree of variability- and you would absolutely expect this type of "noise" from extraordinarily complex and interacting systems. But noise is not the same thing as "free will", it's just noise. And that noise vanishes as you pull back and observe collective human behavior from a birds-eye view. It's almost scary how deterministic collections of humans are.
In fact, I don't know what free will is- what does it mean for physics for free will to exists? What is the nature of free will? What are the implications for physical laws? I don't know if you can define it without it being a tautology, self-referential or downright meaningless.
Edit: maybe more succinctly, if everything is physics, there's no room for anything "free"
I'm a physicist by profession and I'm sick of hearing all this stuff about how "science shows we don't have free will"
What the laws of physics do is they can deterministically predict the future of a set of particles whose positions and velocities are precisely known for all time into the future.
But the laws of physics also clearly tell us in the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle that the position and velocity of a particle fundamentally cannot be measured but more than this is not defined //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
This caveat completely turns determinism on it's head and implies that it is free will that is supported by science and not determinism.
I cannot emphasize strongly enough that the position of electrons is fundamentally undefined, look at the structure of the p2 orbital //cis.payap.ac.th/?p=3613
The p2 orbital of the hydrogen atom is composed of an upper probability cloud where there is a high probability of finding an electron, a lower probability cloud where there is the same probability of finding the same electron seperated by an infinite plane of zero probability of finding the electron.
If the electrons position was defined then how does it get from the upper probability cloud to the lower probability cloud without passing through the plane in the middle???
Furthermore if there electron really was in one or the other dumbell it would affect the chemical properties of the hydrogen atom in a manner that isn't observed.
So the position and velocity of particles is fundamentally undefined this turns determinism on its head.
Determinists will argue that this is only the quantum realm and not macroscopic reality. By making such a claim they display their ignorance of chaos theory and the butterfly effect.
This was discovered by Lorenz when he ran seemingly identical computer simulations twice. Look at the graph shown here. //www.stsci.edu/~lbradley/seminar/butterfly.html
It turned out that in one case the last digit was rounded down and in the other the last digit was rounded up, from an initial perturbation of one part in a million, initially the graphs seemed to track each other but as time progressed the trajectories diverged.
So while the uncertainty principle only leaves scope for uncertainty on the atomic scale the butterfly effect means that initial conditions that differ on the atomic scale can lead to wildly different macroscopic long term behaviour.
Then there is the libet experiment //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet
Where subjects were instructed to tell libet the time that they were conscious of making a decision to move their finger. Libet found that the time subjects reported being aware of deciding to move their finger was 300ms after the actual decision was measured by monitoring brain activity.
Yet even this is not inconsistent with free will if the act of noting the time is made sequentially after the free decision to move your hand.
If the subjects engage in the following sequence
Decide to move hand
Note time
Move hand
Then ofcourse people are going to note the time after they've freely decided to move their hand, they're hardly going to do that before they've decided! This experiment does not constitute a refutation of free will.
Furthermore bursts of neuronal noise are fundamental to learning and flashes of insight. //www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=2683
Science constantly tries to find patterns in the world but most psychology experiments are based on statistics from large samples. Anytime a sample behaves in a statistically significant manner that is different from the control the psychologists say "right we found something else about how the brain works" and they have. But only statistically, most samples still have a spread within them and there's plenty of room for free will in that spread.
But some scientists only see the pattern and forget the noise (and as a researcher I can tell you most data is extremely noisy)
It's this ignoring the noise that is biased, illogical and causes people to have far more faith in determinism than is warranted by the facts.
I have elaborate on these thoughts as well as morality and politics in this book I wrote.
//www.amazon.ca/Philosophical-Method-John-McCone/dp/1367673720
Furthermore a lot of free will skeptics assert that even if the universe is random we should believe that our decisions are "caused by a randomness completely outside our control" unless there is any reason to believe otherwise and since there is no evidence that our actions are not caused by a randomness outside our control believing in free will is unscientific.
This position is fallacious
This position asserts an understanding of the underlying source of all random events in the universe. An oxymoron, by definition a random event is an event whose cause is unknown (radioactive decay being the most famous but any kind of wave function collapse has an undetermined result that cannot be predicted prior to it's occurrence)
The very experience of free will serves as scientific evidence in support of its existence, perhaps not conclusive evidence but evidence that should not be dismissed in favour of bald assertions that cannot be backed up that all random occurrences including those in our brain, are beyond our control to influence.
Firstly let me say that the basis of all science is experience. The act of measurement is inseparably linked to the experience of taking a measurement. In a way science is the attempt to come up with the most consistent explanation for our experiences.
If you assume all experiences are an illusion until proven real, you have to throw more than free will out the window, you have to through general relativity, quantum mechanics, biology, chemistry absolutely all science out the window, because the basis of all science is recorded experience and if everything you experience is false (say because you are in the matrix and are in a VR suit from birth) then your experience of reading and being taught science is also false, even your experience of taking measurements in a lab demonstration could be a false illusion.
So the foundation of science is the default assumption that our experiences have weight unless they are inconsistent with other more consistent experiences that we have.
We experience free will, the sense of making decisions that we don't feel are predetermined, the sense that there were other possibilities open to us that we genuinely could have chosen but did not as a result of a decision making process that we ourselves willfully engaged in and are responsible for.
The confusion among free will skeptics, is the belief that the only scientific valid evidence arises from sense data. That that which we do not see, hear, touch, smell or taste has no scientific validity.
Let me explain the fallacy.
It's true that the only valid evidence of events taking place outside of our mind comes through the senses. In otherwords only the senses provide valid scientific evidence of events that take place outside of our mind.
But inner experience and feelings unrelated to senses do provide scientifically valid evidence of the workings of the mind itself. Don't believe me? Then consider psychology, in many psychological experiments that most people would agree are good science, psychologists will had out questionaires to subjects asking them various aspects of their feelings and subjective experience. The subjective answers that subjects give in these questionaires are taken as valid scientific evidence even if they are based on feelings of the subjects rather than recorded things they measured through our senses.
If we don't believe our mental experience of free will and personal agency in spite of the fact that there is nothing in science to contradict it, then why should we believe our sensory experience of the world or indeed that anything that science has discovered has any basis in reality (as opposed to making a default assumption of being inside the matrix)?