You Don't Have Free Will, but Don't Worry?

[structureoftruth (Matthew Dickau)]

This thread from a little while ago might interest you:

Is Free-Will Coherent With Physics?

@Rumraket, @John_Harshman, here’s how I (speculatively) think of libertarian free will. I don’t believe it is incoherent, but feel free to take a shot at it. The basic idea is that an agent has libertarian free will when it is able to act in some way without being caused to act in that way by something other than the agent. Correct me if I’m wrong, but your argument that this is incoherent seems to be that either: Something explains why the agent acted in that way, in which case the agent was (ultimately) caused to act in that way by something other than the agent. Nothing explains why the agent acted in that way, in which case the agent’s action is a brute fact that the agent has no control over. Here is the problem with this argument, from my perspective: neither of the implications in the second halves of those two options actually follow. Something can explain why the agent acted in some way without implying that the agent was caused to act by something else. For example, in m…

I linked to the post where @John_Harshman and I begin to go back and forth there on whether free will is incoherent - I won’t rehash that here - but the main topic of that thread is pertinent to this one as well.

As far as this topic goes, I think @nwrickert is correct that the activity of science presupposes the (in some sense free) choices of scientists - the argument of Bell’s theorem famously depends on this assumption, for example - so science cannot disprove free will without undermining itself. Even if our best models of physics are deterministic, the correct conclusion is not that free will is an illusion, but instead that physics isn’t the whole story.