Are we not free to make choices that make sense to us based on the data we have at hand?
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In my opinion, free will exists within finite boundaries of randomness that surround largely deterministic outcomes. If life was a book, I would suggest that many chapters and endings are pre-determined, but the immediate next sentence has some level of randomness caused by free will and stochastic processes.
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That apparent free choice is illusionary. You already made up your mind long before you were conscious of it and there is experiments proving this, neurologically speaking
All fields point to the same thing. Be it physics, neuroscience or biology
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^ this
We are condemned to freedom
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If I am free to chose, why wouldnât I make the choice that coincides with my conditions at that time? How do you know that I wouldnât make a different choice if provided with the magical computer required to calculate cause and effect to the quantum entanglement scale?
Youâre turning the question into âdo individual entities act in purely random waysâ which I donât think is the question but idk
A choice that matches your conditions is still your choice. Youâre describing what choosing is. Your reasons and your state producing your actions
Your argument shows choices are caused, it doesnât show caused choices arenât choices.
You and me keep deliberating because deliberation is part of the causal chain that produces outcomes
To quote a good german philosopher:
âyou can do what you will, but you canât will what you will.â
No my argument is that you would not be able to differentiate free will from deterministic outcomes, but this doesnât disprove free will
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May I ask for some example of deterministic outcomes that masquerade as free will?
Ask a philosophy student to debate free will?!
Donât threaten me with a good time!
edited to include an actual answer⌠sort of:
Iâll say, I donât know, but if a soul exists, Yes we do. If not, No. Now, Within the context of what I perceive as my life and my conception, perception, and agency within it, we MUST have free will. ie: Whether we do or do not makes no difference to our perceived agency (choice to take an action). We perceive that we made a choice, whether we actually did or did not. âWeâ being my not wholy justified assumption that we are all independent things, and that youâre not all just in my head.
Stand in the ashes of a trillion pumped Solrocks and ask the species collectors if free will matters. The silence is your answer.
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Javik approves!
Cheers!
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Weâre doin this?
Free will with terms and conditions exist
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You bet your ass I do 
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Looks like a 20-80 split so far.
First time post, one word answer. I dig it.
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20 yes 80 no?
Thereâs free will but also no free will. Your âwillâ is confined to the circumstances present in your life and the causal chain that leads you to those circumstances. Your perspective has nothing to do with it, as it only effects your personal belief supporting your own decisions.
If I present you with choosing dinner (a circumstance) and your choices are between tacos or meatloaf, then you have no agency to choose a ham sandwich, or to choose anything else outside of that. Your perception is you had free will to make a choice, but it was purely circumstantial and was greatly influenced by an outside force.
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To quote an excerpt from a âmanifestoâ written for a sci-fi story (still in progress) years ago:
We feel choice but we are the effect from a previous cause. We feel free will,
yet we only have will.The Inner God, the I or the Ego, falls back on its experience of reality as the
Truth. Reality strikes back through our scientific discoveries and the law of
causality: All effects must have a cause. Thus, everything is predetermined in
some way, even if in practice it is impossible to know all the ways in which
everything is predetermined. We would need a computer the size of the
Universe to do so.How are our decisions made? Either they are random (slaves to chance) or they
are according to a set of values, preferences, rules (slaves to inner
programming) or environmental inputs (slaves to external factors).We humankind delegate most of our inner metabolic processes to the genes and
DNA that forms our cells. These are automatic and not consciously controlled.
Our behaviours and thought patterns can be influenced as a response to
something (a reaction to a cause) either at present, or from the past, that past
now becoming routine. All this conserves resources, increasing our potential
survival. However, it does not show that our choice is independent and âfreeâ.If we probed into the âwhyâ of our choices, we would fall through an infinite
causal chain, where the reason of the reason is ever eluding, or we would reach
an arbitrary choice or preference based on genes that decide brain structure
in combination with epigenetic environmental interaction. One can still
grow and develop as a person and make better choices, but our trajectory is
already predetermined by our biology and physics.Therefore, we are not the ultimate authors of our own experience and
existence, and we blind ourselves to the full grandeur and possibility of
being alive if we deceive ourselves into thinking otherwise. Such is easier
said than done, as we were literally made and programmed to believe such an
illusion, shaped by natural selection to do so over millennia.
Iâll also add this excellent companion video (not mine) to the discussion of free will: You Are A Strange Loop