[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.

[ethanbond]

Thankfully my argument doesn’t actually hinge on subjective experience, yours does.

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?

[hiAndrewQuinn]

To break the walls down on this thread, interested folks probably want to look at the question of qualia and the knowledge argument before they start wondering about free will in particular.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/

[ethanbond]

Not relevant. You need not know what someone else’s subjective experience is to know that it would violate all understanding of the physical universe for them to have free will.

“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.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

Totally relevant. You claim that someone having free will would violate all understanding of the physical universe. This is absurd, and therefore we should reject it.

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.

[ethanbond]

TKP doesn’t suggest “non-physical information” exists. It suggests that some information cannot be relayed through means other than direct personal experience. When the actual blue light hits Mary’s retina, that is net new information, and information that could not have been conveyed by numbers on a monochrome screen. It is very obviously physical: the text “blue light has a wavelength of 450nm” conveyed in light at 700nm is a totally different piece of information that will be processed by the retina and the brain totally differently from an actual beam of 450nm light.

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.