[perl4ever]

I never see people discussing the statistical aspects of free will.

For instance, I may decide to have an apple tonight, or spaghetti, or whatever. Thus, I seem to have free will. But if one collected statistics on what I ate over time, there would be patterns and it would be much more difficult for me to overcome those patterns with "will". The more time and events you look at the more you see things like unconcious maintenance of weight, preferences of types of food, and so on.

Yet the long term patterns are made up of the individual choices that seem free.

I have this vague idea that some further exploration of this might be compared to the statistical ideas of quantum mechanics.

[tsimionescu]

That's because it's not an interesting thought as related to the notion of free will. Everyone accepts that humans have subconscious biases that impact their decisions. The discussion of free will is higher level than that. The fact that you can't will yourself into not breathing is not a refutation of free will.

The question is essentially, when all biases are accounted for, is there some aspect of free will that remains? You experience free will constantly, and you assume it in all interactions with other agents. Is that an illusion, are we just puppets in a play? Many philosophers believe that it isn't, even if determinism is real. I'm not sure if super-determinism is still compatible or not, but it may well be.

[perl4ever]

I mean, I can will myself into not breathing. I used to hold my breath between subway stations. But that's about as long as I can do it.

I feel like there's some sort of analogy between how you can have local violations of conservation of energy where particles pop into existence from nowhere, but longer term it has to even out.

Bias isn't the word I would use.