>>11406531>reach a contradictionNope. People are physical processes operating through the same cause and effect relationships other physical processes operate through. Ours are just more convoluted than simple machines like a lever or a wheel. Speaking of "free will" is a convenient fiction that keeps us from needing to go through the trouble of discussing all the literal details of how our biological functions work by substituting in the all-purpose cartoon character known as "I" and retroactively attributing everything a body does that isn't too obviously straightforward and explicable
e.g. A heart attack generally isn't described as an act of "my" or "your" will, but being able to produce words in the form of symbols written out to represent sounds and ideas and being able to string them together into complete sentences to express some line of thought is generally described as something "you" or "I" do. And of course this is bullshit since no such act of willing ever makes knowledge of associations between symbols and/or sounds and the evolving meaning of concatenating them with one another come into existence.
It's either produced or it isn't, and it's a physical matter which of those two possibilities plays out. With the right sort of brain injury or disease language will no longer happen for the sufferer and the ability to understand another or the ability to communicate through language can both be lost through these purely physical routes.
And while it's an open question how much of the world is absolutely deterministic vs. probabilistic, that doesn't change anything. Hypothetical genuinely random number generators wouldnt have any more free will than a deterministic algorithm would. It just has inconsistency in which results it can produce given multiple instances of identical inputs.
