To my mind, I have free will to the degree that there is an “I”. My decision is determined by my environment and my self. Were there, hypothetically, some other individual in my place they might well make a different decision. So I determine my actions, and can therefore be said to have free will.
It is true that my state follows from my history and my genetics (arguably a part of my history, in a sense), but I assert that this is irrelevant because of our main reasons for caring about “free will.” In my experience, people care about whether we have “free will” for two reasons. The first is a sort of despair in the face of inevitability that echoes the determinism of classical Greek mythology—the gods have something planned and no matter what you do it will happen. This, of course, is not a feature of physical determinism—what you do is a part of the system, and if you had done something else things might have turned out considerably differently. What you will do is determined, but it’s determined through who you are, not in spite of it.
The second reason people care about free will is to allow us to reason about responsibility and blame. This can also be dealt with by much of the above, however, along with an observation that blame and praise, and the brains expecting these, are themselves a part of the system.
To my mind, I have free will to the degree that there is an “I”. My decision is determined by my environment and my self. Were there, hypothetically, some other individual in my place they might well make a different decision. So I determine my actions, and can therefore be said to have free will.
It is true that my state follows from my history and my genetics (arguably a part of my history, in a sense), but I assert that this is irrelevant because of our main reasons for caring about “free will.” In my experience, people care about whether we have “free will” for two reasons. The first is a sort of despair in the face of inevitability that echoes the determinism of classical Greek mythology—the gods have something planned and no matter what you do it will happen. This, of course, is not a feature of physical determinism—what you do is a part of the system, and if you had done something else things might have turned out considerably differently. What you will do is determined, but it’s determined through who you are, not in spite of it.
The second reason people care about free will is to allow us to reason about responsibility and blame. This can also be dealt with by much of the above, however, along with an observation that blame and praise, and the brains expecting these, are themselves a part of the system.