Belief in Free Will
Why believing in pure determinism is a losing move.
Our belief or disbelief in free will is data stored in our brains. If free will were an illusion, we would have no ability to alter our brains' contents from what they will inevitably be as a result of our circumstances and history. Therefore, if it is possible for us to believe in free will, that belief maximizes the likelihood of our being correct.
If one were to adopt a subjective view of reality, like Steve Pavilina, then you would realize that all matter is an illusion, a dream. Your brain is no more real than the brain of your dream avatar while you are sleeping.
That said, if you believe you have no free will then it will shape the physical world around you to reflect that belief. If you believe you do have free will then it becomes a lot more like lucid dreaming.
Given two beliefs which you are unable to disprove, it is wise to believe that which makes you happiest. So I choose to believe that I have free will and that it is not an illusion. Believing otherwise only disempowers you and has no positive value.
The reality of the brain itself isn't really the point here. The point is that the very consideration of free will is only relevant if we have it, so it is safe to assume that we do. This assumption is based on basic logic and is more sound and foundational than any aspect of "modern science" which depends largely on faith that our senses are basically reliable.
Most science I've seen arguing against the case of free will argue precisely that our senses aren't reliable, hence the illusion of free will. We fool ourselves into assuming we caused things that weren't actually caused by our conscious thought. We've shown that decisions are made in the subconscious portion of the brain several seconds before they register in the conscious part of the brain. We've shown that brain damage to specific parts of the brain relate to specific types of cognitive dysfunction meaning there's a clear material link between brain and our cognition.
Software can employ reflection to reason about itself, but the processes of that reflection are still a slave to the deterministic hardware it runs on at the end of the day. You can rerun the same program with the same seed 1000 times and you'll get the same result.
I think your perspective on this is starting a few layers of unchallenged assumptions too deep. We don't definitively "know" much at all beyond that something must exist in some form in order to think. After that we have to start building on reasonable assumptions. The purpose of science is discovery and understanding, but its value depends on both the value and the possibility of discovery and understanding.
It's safe to assume that questions can have true and knowable answers, because asserting that they cannot is itself an answer and a contradiction.
It's safe to assume that knowing the truth can be valuable, because if it cannot then by definition it is not worth knowing that it cannot.
It's safe to assume that you can choose between multiple possible futures of differing value, because there is nothing to be gained or lost unless this is the case.
Having validated these assumptions as logically sound, we can safely reject any theory which conflicts with them and instead seek explanations that are consistent with a reality in which discovery and learning have value.
Can, yes. However not all answers are knowable. To assume they are takes a human-centric view of the universe and assumes we have the cognitive ability to understand everything about reality... which seems unlikely as just a micro subset of that same reality. AI will never fully comprehend the machine they run on, but there are truths about that machine that directly effect their reality whether they know it or not. Questions about that machine could give the AI hints and they could even make true statements, but its entirely logical to assume that not all questions are truly knowable because knowledge has an inherent scope involved and our scope is too limited by comparison with the macro environment we're part of.
Again, yes truth is valuable, because it shapes the accuracy of our cognitive framework's heuristics. However I don't see the value in making value statements about truth. Value is an entirely subjective perspective to lens a truth through. Valuable truths to one person will be completely not valuable to another. Perspectives of value aren't required for truth to be true. If I handed you a piece of paper with the grand unified theory of physics written on it, and it was true, your ability to perceive value in it or understand it at all is meaningless to its truth.
You've in no way established a syllogism that supports this one and its the point I'll disagree with you most on. Subjective value, like I pointed out, is irrelevant, and conflating the changing trajectories of a person's life over time with a willed change in those trajectories does not in any way mean we've chosen between multiple paths, it means we've been directed along a given worldline by . This could be free will, but you've in no way argued it must be. It could be entirely deterministic, shaped not by willed effort but simply the outputs of our cognitive framework's heuristics as they respond to chaotic stimuli in their environment. One cognitive framework could seek to aim for perceived long term value. Another could seek to aim for immediate value. In neither case is a willed choice a predicate.
I don't find these assumptions to be logically sound at all lol. If you'd like to break them down and try to explain how you're claiming they're logically sound I'd be happy to keep exploring the idea. But you're making an assertion of soundness that I just can't reasonably confirm... which is generally not a good sign for an argument relying entirely on logic lol
Free will
Do we necessarily need to either have it, or not have it? Nothing in between? In my opinion no. How much free will we have depends on to what degree we are aware of things which influence our decisions. A person who hears some bad news might hit the table with her fist, and the person might do it spontaneously, completely unconsciously, because this is just her nature. Another person might hear some bad news, she will feel the anger and that she wants to hit the table with her fist, but decide not to do so, because it would hurt her hand.
We are adaptive systems with memory
We process inputs (perceive) and produce outputs (execute actions), i.e. we implement a mapping from inputs to outputs
Inputs which influence our outputs might include even the whole history of the universe, because our bodies were created through the evolution. For example if somebody cuts off my hand, I can't just decide to grow another one (at least not in the present).
Is completely free will possible?
I don't know if complete freedom of will is possible, but one might think it has something to do with the Buddhist liberation. So my answer to the OP would be: every human has the potential to free will, but the degrees vary from person to person, and can change during their lifetime.
The possibility to believe in free will != free will.
Most modern science I've seen seems to come down on the side that free will is an illusion our brain plays on us to increase our sense of autonomy. We fool ourselves into mixing up the lines of causality to insert ourselves into the chain of events more than we actually were.
If it is possible for you to imagine free will, its because your subconscious is deciding to surface those thoughts to your conscious and you rationalize them from there based on what you think you know. However in the end, your brain is just a wet circuit running through some code. By the time you see the result on the screen, the computer's already processed it for you.
When modern scientists stand on the shoulders of giants, they sometimes risk undermining philosophical foundations on which the value of their work depends but which they do not understand.
Consider these four possibilities:
The first two scenarios are irrelevant, since there is no potential for us to influence them in any way. But in either of the latter 2, we are free to move between correct belief and incorrect rejection. So if belief is possible, why would anyone choose to be wrong?
Our ability to influence the first two in no way discounts them as plausible options. Reality doesn't ask our permission to be the way it is. Also, I disagree that the first two are necessarily mutually exclusive and require being broken up. They simply become individualized to the person's cognitive abilities, processes and their experiences which lead them to tend toward one side of the argument or the other.
Lets for a second consider the simulation argument. If we're simply simulated beings inside one of many simulated universes, its entirely reasonable that we have no free will, but because the mechanics of nature are emergent the possibility exists that some agents will become causally determined to believe we have free will, while others are causally determined to believe we don't, both based on their different experiences within the simulation where they absolutely do not have free will. Their opinions or ability to influence that outcome make no difference. In fact, with cognitive frameworks being a continuum of experience, there's nothing saying an individual won't change their mind on the subject many times, but make no mistake thinking that means they caused that change to happen, that change was simply caused through them by an infinite chain of events leading up to it.
For free will to exist, you'd need to employ some form of dualism which doesn't seem to hold up to scientific scrutiny or fit with the things we do know.
What I am arguing is not that free will itself can be proven, but that belief in it provably maximizes the likelihood of being correct. Under pure determinism, we contribute no variability, which means that for any given moment the minimum likelihood of us being correct in our belief is equal to the maximum likelihood. Under free will, the minimum possible likelihood is 0 if we choose to reject free will, and the maximum likelihood is 1 if we choose to believe in it.
I offer the hypothesis that both free will and time are illusions of consciousness. Consciousness could be a state of matter or it could be something quantum but at this point in time we don't fully understand it. What we know is energy (and information) cannot be created or destroyed. This means the universe itself while it is expanding, it's not going to have any more energy in it in 10 billion years than it had in the first seconds of the big bang.
So in order to answer whether or not free will exists you have to answer whether time itself exists. If time is an illusion which only exists because conscious entities exist in a particular universe, then free will might be part of the illusion. The universe itself as we know it has time because consciousness needs time to make sense of the universe, to have a concept of on and off, which is the core of logic, which is the core of mathematics.
Googling Schopenhauer's quote led me to wikipedia and some intresting stuff...
“Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer
[A]s little as a ball on a billiard table can move before receiving an impact, so little can a man get up from his chair before being drawn or driven by a motive. But then his getting up is as necessary and inevitable as the rolling of a ball after the impact. And to expect that anyone will do something to which absolutely no interest impels them is the same as to expect that a piece of wood shall move toward me without being pulled by a string.
— Ibid.
[L]et us imagine a man who, while standing on the street, would say to himself: "It is six o'clock in the evening, the work day is over. Now I can go for a walk, or I can go to the club; I can also climb up the tower to see the sun set; I can go to the theater; I can visit this friend or that one; indeed, I also can run out of the gate, into the wide world, and never return. All of this is strictly up to me, in this I have complete freedom. But still I shall do none of these things now, but with just as free a will I shall go home to my wife."
— Chapter III
[M]an does at all times only what he wills, and yet he does this necessarily. But this is because he already is what he wills.
— Ch. V
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Freedom_of_the_Will
How would you define free will first of all?
Second, how would you determine the difference between a universe in a simulation giving off the illusion of free will and true free will?
Third, how do you solve the problem of other minds? You can believe you have free will but why would you believe any other mind exists outside of your own mind and any other will exists outside of your will?
If you go based only on behavior then how do you distinguish between a sentient conscious being and a p-zombie?
Currently people consider AI to be p-zombies but at what point would it be considered sentient and conscious with free will?
Since we are made up of genetic code, is there a big difference between how we emerged and how an AI emerges? It could be that the universe is completely deterministic and our free will is merely an illusion. The illusion would come from the fact that time exists for the conscious and perhaps consciousness itself manifests the existence of time to allow for the illusion of free will but the actual universe may be a deterministic state machine where everything exists at all once.