Free Will Is Still Alive!

[Philosophy Now]

Carlo Filice questions recent attempts to question free will.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/124/Free_Will_Is_Still_Alive

[-1-]

I did not read the entire article because TO ME it was long and tedious. It's my fault, I have a terribly disturbing case of ADD. I am not faulting Ficile, but there were paragraphs I could not even continue to read after two or three words into it.

I got the paragraph about "randomized choices". Ficile argues that robots make randomized choices when there is no preference; but do humans? And then he branches into Hume, Descartes et al and he lost me again. I actually believe Ficile made no POINT about randomization and humans. He just presented two opposing factions, and left it at that.

In my opinion there is no randomized choices in humans behaviour. We (I am one, too, and so should you be, if you read these words) are equipped with a whole bunch of experiences, that built for us tons of preferences when facing a choice. We each may have a prefernce between two equally likely choices, which is to the left, or to the right. (When pulling cards random from spread.) We may have preferences built into us at birth, or developed throughout life. A young child who ought to have no preferences in pulling cards or in even knowing left from right, may have noticed and build preferences on mother's breast, quality of milk and supply, availability, quantity, ease of access.

Or may have learned a preference for shrill voices or for deep voices, depending which was predominant during most of the baby's feeding and / or dirtying the diapers.

I believe that random choices do not happen, although I do admit that preferences are guiding and followed which have nothing to do with the expected outcome of the choice.

This is a belief, and as such, I can't prove it. I am showing it because this, my, treatment of instances where free will is defeated by non-free will was absent from the article.

[jayjacobus]

The will is in the present. It responds to information, senses and emotions in the present. In this sense it is unbound to anything physical at all. Physical has no effect on the will unless physical is transformed into information, senses and emotions.

[Sabburi]

I found the article by Carlo Filice interesting I have a couple of points to make.Firstly the author raised the issue of levels of reality. I wish to suggest that several realities can coexist and so all levels are real. For example in an automobile, engine, piston, chassis are all real and so is the automobile. I do not see a problem here. Solid and liquid are just states of matter depending on temperature and thermodynamic laws. Both have the same atoms (or molecules). In the case of solid the atoms are closer leading to crystalline or amorphous structure. With regard to liquid state the atoms are farther apart. However there are scientific problems in extrapolating knowledge from one scale to the other. A good example is friction between solids. Knowledge at the nano level is unable to resolve macro friction as discussed in many journals of tribology. It may be noted the word tribology is derived from tribos that means rubbing.
At the subatomic level the problems involved are more striking. The quantum enigma is now well known and so is the old problem of wave-particle duality of light. Quantum enigma is suggesting the possible effect of consciousness on physical processes. Only time will tell whether something beyond physical-ism is involved. Hence I think physical-ism is not yet the last word. Free will may as well exist I do not like to lose my mind for the brain at the present stage of development.

[jayjacobus]

I don't know how the mind would be mechanized or why a mind would be useful at all without free will. The evolution of the mind seems to be to make choices. The mind actually seems to hinder a determinist universe.