The way people talk about it makes it sound indistinguishable from “random will”. If you believe in the existence of a “self” in any form, be it the chemical signals and electrical impulses in your material brain, or a ghost existing outside of space and time controlling your body like a puppeteer, you must believe in one of you believe in that self having free will.
Say you were to run a scenario many times on the same person, perfectly resetting every single measurable thing including that person’s memory. If you observe them doing the same thing each time then they don’t have this quality of free will? But if you do different things each time are you really “yourself”? How are your choices changed in a way that preserves an idea of a “self” and isn’t just a dice roll? Doesn’t that put an idea of free will in contradiction with itself?
Edit: I found this article that says what I was trying to say in much gooder words
Functionally I don’t see how it would make any difference one way or the other in this argument. I’m not a big philosophy guy I’m sorry if I’m saying something reductive or ignorant here.
Agreed, I mostly commented this because I see these models as fully compatible with reality. Sorry I don’t have more to contribute. I don’t think you’re being reductive, but I do feel that modeling freedom of will by repeatedly experimentally observing an actor in a fixed context and condition and summarizing the distribution of their choices doesn’t capture some ideas I intuitively associate with the notion of free will (assuming it is not entirely an illusion, though there are results in neuroscience that show that in certain cases, people only become aware of a stimulus after their motor cortex has commanded their muscles to respond to it, so in some cases, free will is either illusory or absent):
-an individual in the experiment may be exercising significant mental effort to prevent an autonomic or habitual response to a repeated stimulus, and if they succeed every time, their sequence of decisions is constant, but it is also constant if they fail every time
hardly. if you can’t measure or observe something it existing or not becomes equivalent and therefore we shouldn’t assume wildly complex things incongruent with all our other observations.
maybe we’re talking about different things here, but here’s where I’m coming from: modern experimental neuroscience has developed and continues to churn out new ways of probing self-organizing patterns in neural activity that have meaning encoded in them
I’m thinking of the ghost as neural signals themselves and not their representations in a brain, where I’m modeling a conscious being as the pairing of the representations of said patterns and the feedback loops that perpetuate them, which is physical in the sense that it’s implemented in a physical machine, but is non-physical in the same way that these words have meaning in your mind: they’re signals.
sorry if I’m being ambiguous/imprecise
i guess i don’t think trying to use “ghost” language for physical phenomena is clarifying or helpful when a huge proportion of people are still dualists and/or believe in magic spirits and use the analogy’s terms literally.
The signals are still some physical thing with electrons and shit
You make strong points.