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MonteChristo0321 OP t1_jbkt8dh wrote

Reply to comment by ElephantintheRoom404 in I just published an article in The Journal of Mind and Behavior arguing that free will is real. Here is the PhilPapers link with free PDF. Tell me what you think. by MonteChristo0321

That's not really a critique of my idea at all. Free will requires unpredictability, but not all unpredictability is free will. Driving a car requires motion but not all motion is driving a car. Get it?
Here are a couple of relevant lines from my paper:

"This paper will not claim indeterminism as a source of free will."

"There are views in which determinism and predictability are both said to be eliminated in the context of human choice by quantum indeterminacy. But critics of these views point out that if the relevant cause of an action is an indeterminate quantum event, then the human agent can not determine what he does, and thus can not be the source of his own actions. I agree with the critics on this point. In contrast to quantum indeterminacy, undecidable dynamics are deterministic, and are a property of the human system taken as a whole, not a property of some little part of a human."

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GlitchSurfer t1_jblsmky wrote

> Free will requires unpredictability, but not all unpredictability is free will.

Then you may want to update the abstract, because there you explicitly claim otherwise:

> If human action is fundamentally unpredictable, then we have free will.

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ElephantintheRoom404 t1_jblste8 wrote

I'm not exactly certain what you are saying but I think the implication is that you posit that the quantum uncertainty doesn't have an influence on the macro universe in a direct way. Every experiment with quantum mechanics that proves its existence and defines its properties are an undeniable example of quantum effects directly affecting the macro universe and therefore must be taken into account.

But none of this really matters in a discussion of free will. No action can be taken without that action being directly affected by genetic predispositions and environmental influences. You can not have free control over your genetic predispositions nor do you have free control over your environmental influences therefore no action can ever be made that is a free action.

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MonteChristo0321 OP t1_jblvbn1 wrote

No, I think quantum effects do propagate up into the macro world. But that's just beside the point of what I argue in the paper.

Your guesses about what I mean haven't been great so far. I would explain what I mean, but that was the whole point of writing the paper. If you don't want to read it, don't. But it is the explanation of what I mean.

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