[Planktonne]

Any one of a number of things, one of which is volition.

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?

[ethanbond]

You cannot hear or read "What's 20% of 38?" and choose whether to process it or not. Your brain might resolve that into the correct answer, an incorrect answer, or a refusal to answer, but your brain just does it. If it's not your brain producing the sensation you call "volition," what is? If it is your brain, then what mechanism causes it that's neither deterministic nor random?

[Planktonne]

If that was true, then all mathematics teaching would be both impossible and superfluous.

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.

[ethanbond]

> you absolutely do choose to do the mathematical processing

And what makes you decide to choose to do the mathematical processing? Where does that signal come from?

[Planktonne]

As above, that's a separate issue and irrelevant to this once. Once a choice has been made regardless of the drivers of that initial choice, there is conscious direction of thought through the resultant process.

Same question again: do you really have no experience of logically and consciously working through a process?

[ethanbond]

The drivers of the initial choice (and really every choice thereafter) is the entire question. The universe has deterministic processes and it has random processes. The brain has deterministic processes and (potentially) random processes. Neither type of process creates room for anything resembling "free will." There is nowhere in the known universe for this to occur.

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.

[Planktonne]

Your experience of cognition isn't universal, and asserting a universal law based on your subjective experience is tenuous at best. There's a reason we've been discussing these exact ideas for millenia, rather than settling it all immediately. Other people report very different conceptualisations of cognition - why is theirs an illusion and not yours an ellision?

> 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.