>>12645311>See the post directly above yours.I completely agree. If we saw neurons popping off with no physically explainable cause then it would be reasonable to start looking for weird explanations. But that's a big if.
>The strong evidence is my own direct experience.We don't have direct experience of our neuronal activity. You can't see a neuron firing for no physically explainable reason. What you do have is direct experience of being a person who believes themselves to have free will.
>Free will is an illusion?Very likely. Inevitably depending on what "free will" means. I have free will in the sense that I can decide what to do with with my life. I decide which apple to pick up and eat. Those decisions are decisions of will, and they are made more or less freely.
But in all those cases it is very likely that the full chain of causation could - with careful enough measurement - be picked apart. My claim is that every stage of that chain would be a physical event caused by physical properties. It's a hard claim to prove definitively because huge numbers of neurons and neurotransmitters and many other factors will have contributed in some way to my hand reaching for a particular apple.
If you want to claim that we have free will in the sense that we have some non-physical input into that chain of events then you need to show physical things (like neurons) being affected by non-physical causes. This is a harder claim to support because it's assuming the world works in a way that's significantly different from how our best knowledge shows it to work.
It comes back to the same point. Show a neuron doing something which has no physical cause, and then we can start considering "non-physical observers", or souls, or whatever.
> If free will didn't exist, there wouldn't exist a concept of it.If God didn't exist, there wouldn't exist a concept of Him.
Humans make up simplifying concepts all the time.
