I’d say this is correct, but it’s also deeply counterintuitive. We don’t feel like we are just a process performing itself, or at least that’s way too abstract to wrap our heads around. The intuitive notion of free will is IMO something like the following:
had I been placed ten times in exactly the same circumstances, with exactly the same input conditions, I could theoretically have come up with different courses of action in response to them, even though one of them may make a lot more sense for me, based on some kind of ineffable non-deterministic quality that however isn’t random either, but it’s the manifestation of a self that exists somehow untethered from the laws of causality
Of course not exactly worded that way in most people’s minds, but I think that’s really the intuition that clashes against pure determinism. It’s a materialistic viewpoint, and lots of people are consciously or not dualists—implicitly assuming there’s one special set of rules that applies to the self/mind/soul that doesn’t apply to everything else.
I’d say this is correct, but it’s also deeply counterintuitive. We don’t feel like we are just a process performing itself, or at least that’s way too abstract to wrap our heads around. The intuitive notion of free will is IMO something like the following:
had I been placed ten times in exactly the same circumstances, with exactly the same input conditions, I could theoretically have come up with different courses of action in response to them, even though one of them may make a lot more sense for me, based on some kind of ineffable non-deterministic quality that however isn’t random either, but it’s the manifestation of a self that exists somehow untethered from the laws of causality
Of course not exactly worded that way in most people’s minds, but I think that’s really the intuition that clashes against pure determinism. It’s a materialistic viewpoint, and lots of people are consciously or not dualists—implicitly assuming there’s one special set of rules that applies to the self/mind/soul that doesn’t apply to everything else.