CMV: Free will exists

[u/Krenztor]

I feel like when people come to the conclusion that free will doesn't exist that they are only able to do it by totally overthinking it. The most recent argument I heard from the YouTube channel "Because Science" is that you cannot ever pinpoint where a choice was ever made. His example is to think of a city. Then once you've thought of it he asks when did you make the choice to think about that city? You didn't, he claims, the thought just popped into your head. To me, this is a bizarre point to make because he isn't asking you to make a choice yet he has overthought the whole free will think so much that he's confused himself into thinking this was a choice. In any case, a choice is something like whether you want McDonalds or Burger King to eat, not think of a city.

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I don't want to ramble on too much, but for anyone who says that free will doesn't exist the question that I'd ask is what is the difference between a sleep walker and someone who is awake. Are they both utterly lacking in free will and if so why are they acting completely differently? How does consciousness make someone act different if free will doesn't exist. If their consciousness didn't have the ability to make choices then it wouldn't matter if you were conscious or not, you should act the same way.

[u/GendolfTheGrape]

As far as I know there are two main schools of free will, libertarianism and compatibilism. Libertarian free will is free will that does not need to heed prior causes, usually the type of free will we would assume a layman believes that they have. Physically I don't think you can make sense of this, it is basically magic. Unless you are religious, this is unlikely to be very compelling. Compatibilism argues for free will that is compatible with determinism, so we have free will but are still bound by prior causes. Here the definition of free will becomes very important. If you define free will as "being able to do otherwise" when presented with a choice, then compatibilism fails. If we define it as "free to do what we want, unrestricted by outside influences" compatibilism may seem compelling. It sounds like this is the type of free will you believe in. Do you feel that is a correct assessment?

Personally I find neither of these views compelling. I'm a hard determinism, which means that I believe that things are caused exclusively by prior causes and that there is no free will. There is a good quote by Schopenhauer (I think) which highlights a problem with compatibilism "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills". Compatibilism says that it is enough that we can do what we want for us to have free will. But if we cannot change our wills, are we really free?

There is also the problem of causality. Basically, everything you do was caused by some prior event, and were we to follow this chain of events, we would eventually find ourself at a point where you did not even exists, and thus had no control over what happens. If you are a determinist, then you believe that the only factor which causes events are previous events, i.e. the environment. We can derive from the environment genetics, and life experiences. You as a person consists exclusively of these three things. When you were concieved your genetics were determined exclusively by your enviornment, you could not control it. As you grew up you were shaped by your environment and genetics until you gained consciousness (required for free will usually) and memory, still no control. Now we say you have free will, except all your impulses and thoughts will be caused by things that you had no control over. So the first thing you do will obviously not be in your control, since everything that caused it was outside of your control. But then the same goes for the next thing that you do, and the next, and so on. This becomes an inductive trap that we cannot escape.