Q: DOES FREE WILL EXIST?
Excellent example of a question that is intentionally or not misunderstood and misrepresented.
Can we, and therefore are we responsible and accountable for our actions – particuarly in the sense of criminal, ethical, moral, seditious, and treasonous. The answer is obviously is yes. We have free will in the context of right and wrong.
The misrepresentation of this question is ‘are events and thoughts deterministic (soft determinism) or predetermined (hard determinism).
The answer is that all human be havior is categorically deterministic because we are all motivated by the marginally indifferent (assuming we conflate the sexes) incentives, within the same body form, with the same constraints.
But given that the distribution of the universe is determinable and determistic (categorizable by general rules) but not determined (these rules apply only chaotically in various distributions at varioius times in various conditions) and information is llimited to locality and humans are insulated from all but very great pressures (compared to background quantum events), and given that all human prediction is imprecise and combined of ideosyncratic experience and error, then no our actions are not pre-determined. and the cannot be.
My argument when I was very young was quite simple: human predictive error and choice because of that error is so pervasive that error alone would prohibit hard determinism.
So I’ve never really understdood how the presumptions of ‘mathematics’ could be appled to human behavior, when we have known for a very long time that economics has demonstrated the unpredictability of human behavior even when we have extraordinary volumes of precise information.
And the neurons in one person’s head make economics look trivial by comparison.
Ergo, free will exists within the limits of an individual’s experience, knowledge, competency, and error – and we are really good at ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, denail, deceit, fraud and every variation thereof.
Cheers