"Coincidentally at almost exactly the same time as Jamaica relaxed its cannabis laws…"

Ah, now there's the source of the real problem . . .

"Unless and until we come up with a theory which unites the micro (quantum) world with the macro (Newtonian) world no atheist/materialist/reductionist can possibly believe in the actual existence of free will. And even if we were to do so, it is likely that such a belief in free will would not sit well with our derived answer. "
Do you perhaps have any reason for saying this. Or are you going to just leave the first statement as an unsupported inference. As evidenced by my earlier comments I completely disagree, so I'm curious what your logic is.

@Thucy.

"This of course should remain uncontroversial with all of us. All I've said so far is "nothing is certain, but we must believe what appear to be true to us.""
-With you so far.
"These are simple things. Selfhood and agency - which appears through a thought life"
This is correct. In fact sometimes have suggested that infants become aware of and attempt to determine the consequences of their actions as young as 2 months of age.

I think you are missing the point of Dirge's comment. Which is completely understandable if you don't have a lot of background in programming. Having spent the entire day at work building and rebuilding a program which engages in unsupervised learning. It can from a set of data, with no external guidance organize it into clusters of data. The way the code is written it frequently "observes" its own decision making process. Yet despite being able to observe its own decision making process, it is in no way sentient. Ergo, being aware of your thinking process does not equal sentience.
I'm not clear on how it ties into free will though.

"And last (again I am not trying to push a distinct order for these. For now it's enough to say they all come at once) and probably most contentious, I see an appearance or intuition or purpose or value. There is a sense of a why. We feel we exist, but not simply that, also that we must exist for a reason."
I would disagree with this. However I don't think its particularly relevant to the point of free will so I'm not going to engage with it.

"Similarly, if the progression of scientific inquiry, which is based on the intuition of natural law, begins to seem to suggest for instance that there is no self, this is a sign that you may have lost your way. None of those our initial appearance can be used with any legitimacy to undermine another, because none has any authority for that.

You would use Truth to undermine value and ethics? You forget that you must value truth to do this. You would use your understanding of Nature's existence to undermine your own existence (materialism)? "

My problem with this argument is that materialism isn't about undermining the existence of the self. Perhaps it refines the idea of the self, or destroy's the idea of a metaphysical-self, in favour of a purely physical one. But unless you'd like to demonstrate otherwise I simply cannot accept your conclusion.

I need a break from writing about this. More later.

@damian,

" Yet despite being able to observe its own decision making process, it is in no way sentient. Ergo, being aware of your thinking process does not equal sentience. I'm not clear on how it ties into free will though. "

I don't think I'd say your program is "aware" of its process. Here, of course, we are just using the word "aware" in different ways. The point is, in which way was Thucy using it?

"On the other hand perhaps free will is the manifestation of being "made in God's image"?"

I tend to think so. The universe itself has its own agency and can be thought of as the will of God. The only parts of the universe that are not completely subject to this will are human beings, with wills and designs of their own.

It's just a conjecture but I'm inclined to see some truth to it.

And no, that program is not "self-aware." It's like I said before, the only true proof of being conscious, intelligent, having free will is the experience of having it it can't (as yet) be proved externally. And so it's really just a kind of "call it like we see it" situation. The computer is no more self-aware than is the reptile that "monitors" its own body temperate and behaves accordingly, or the tree that "warns" its brethren of a logger by releasing an airborne chemical when attacked.

These are incredible behaviors, as indeed the computer program is incredible, but they do not constitute beings of their own.

Not till a computer program begins to try to answer the question of what it is and how the world works will I be convinced it is intelligent.

"Not till a computer program begins to try to answer the question of what it is and how the world works will I be convinced it is intelligent."

Would passing the Turing test be close enough?

"Not till a computer program begins to try to answer the question of what it is and how the world works will I be convinced it is intelligent."

A good number of humans cannot answer that...

@PSM, notice the word "try."

Ah, you are completely right. I am embarrassed.

I will rephrase:

A good number of humans never attempt this...

Really? That's not my experience. I guess I can see that some don't, but I think most do at least at some point in their life. Care to elaborate?

And don't be embarrassed, we all misread sometimes, some of us often.

Also, in response to damian's original post:

"However if we now consider that the brain is capable of learning, and evaluating problems using baeysian style inferences, to modify the probabilities of each choice over time based on prior experience or other inputs. It becomes clear that the choice between the two actions is indeed a choice, a weighing of the inputs and a learning to act in a favourable…”moral” way over time, where the action chosen cannot be determined before hand based solely on the input, because the action will be chosen probabilistically."

So you're saying that free will exists because random (uncontrollable) 'choices' lead to still random (still uncontrollable) future 'choices,' however slightly skewed they are from the past 'choices'? This isn't free will. We are still slaves to the probability distributions of the atoms inside ourselves.

I suppose I kept the wording from the previous statement, semck83. Would you be happy with:

A number of humans never attempt this...

Well, yes, I suppose so. I'm still interested in the point, but it's a side point, so I'll PM.

Can atheists believe in free will? I don't see why atheists should. If free will is true, we have some kind of strange disembodied "mind" that is somehow physically separate from the brain. Mind-body dualism was discredited among philosophers ages ago, and modern neuroscience is providing ample empirical evidence against it.

But the question is not really about free will, and more about "who can we blame/feel morally superior to". The metaphysics of the hangman.

Plenty of people believe in free will without believing in substance dualism, putin.

Only by invoking the compatibilist cop-out. Or inventing some strange notions of quantum indeterminacy.

I don't see why one has to have a physical hypothesis for how free will could ohysicaly work to believe in it. I suspect my experience of mind is physical because everything else is physical. The quantum thing is tenuous, but I see need to hang on to it. Rather I just think something far outside our modern scientific comprehension goes on. My evidence for this is simple: I have direct experience of it.

This isn't some crazy-eyed zealot invoking the invisible spirits. This is a rational person observing the world he inhabits.

One last argument for free will. There are 4 outcomes:

1a: you believe in free will, and it exists
1b: you don't believe in free will, and it exists
2a: you believe in free will and it doesn't exist
2b: you don't believe in free will and it doesn't exist

Options 2a and 2b can be thrown out because they don't matter - if we don't have the choice to make anyway, the discussion is over. And 1b is a tragic outcome, which men like Dawkins are victims of.

Another way of understating this connects to what you said Damian. You said you don't see how purpose and meaning tie into free will. In fact they are inextricably linked. With free will, there is meaning, without, there is none.

Why? Without free will, everything has already happened. The show is over. There is nothing you can do about anything one way or another. You don't exist. You're a rock smashing into Titan 50 million years ago - an automatic process.

The ability to value and give meaning to things comes from humankind, and it comes from us because we are free agents. With free will comes imperative to act, comes responsibility. Without free will there is no responsibility, one had no choice.

With free will we can influence the world even as the world influences us, and therefore must do so for the better - this is meaning and value.

Ethics is tied up in the idea of value, purpose, and meaning.

Without free will there is indeed no ethics. Or none that can be justified anyway. And what would be the point of justifying them? No one can be convinced one way or another because no one has an actual choice to make, neither do you have a choice whether to justify it.

Without free will there is no purpose or meaning to life. Hence why materialists are so often nihilists outright, and, at least as often, keep at bay as a kin of demon at the door.

Sadly, people literally kill themselves because they see no purpose to their life. This is a state of affairs I would rather avoid. Elsewhere I've written:

"I call it wiser to embrace the ancient, if unfashionable counsel that we humans are creatures of meaning. All is vanity, perhaps, is simple and unpretentious fulfillment can be rightly called vain."

"Can you prove that you are self aware?"

Oh one last thought on free will and ethics. Kant pointed out, and rightly, that it is the free agency of human beings that is the source of the dignity of humans. The reason you can't raise children for meat is because they are beings with wills of their own.

It's a justification for ethics that, when removed, causes the whole grand design to collapse under its own weight, because every other justification is empty without free will.

@Synapse: yes, to myself, and no not to anyone else, conclusively anyway. So what?

Exactly the same. You can't prove to anyone else that you have free will.

Who cares? It's proved to myself, and if you are conscious like me, it's proved to you too.

Your statement betrays the mistake of a materialist I was talking about earlier. You take the objective universal view first, then apply it to the subjective, which is impossible because the subjective perspective is how you conceived of an objective universe in the first place.

Good discussion, Thucy, PSM, others.

"who can we blame/feel morally superior to"

Putin, not every discussion is a political one. Free will is personal. Politics is between people. Once, and if, free will is established, then relations between between people can be the next brick on the foundation, and even then politics is just one type of relationship. An important one, but just one.

It seems as though most atheists do not believe in free will. For those that do this seems to be a matter of faith rather than one of empiricism.

What interests me is that if atheists largely do not believe in free will where, in their view, does that leave the individual's responsibility for their own actions?

i don't really see where either of those are true fulhamish, the general response in the thread is "it's what we experience and all we have to go off of, so that's where we stand" which is neither "i take it on faith" nor "it doesn't exist" but "it doesn't matter whether or not it does exist, we experience it and can't contradict it"

"Exactly the same. You can't prove to anyone else that you have free will."

who gives a shit lol

why do other people need to know i have freewill? they're going to treat me as though i do unless it's clearly established that i don't, and i believe i have freewill and have no intention of clearly establishing otherwise

i hate to say 'this discussion is pointless' because it's not, but the tangent "can you prove it" clearly is pointless because it's completely irrelevant whether or not it can be proven, you experience it as a default state of existence until something changes that

So in your view free will is nothing more than a useful illusion/social construct then President? Something along the lines of "without (believe in) God anything is possible".

This all comes back to Wittgenstein really: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.