It seems unlikely to me that we are conscious and affecting the world around us by free will, but rather a pattern which emerged in the sea of matter and energy which comprises reality. Much like a tree, just with a more obvious ability to physically affect our reality. That the patterns of matter & energy in our brains lead to a hallucination of free will is hardly unexpected.
You can’t “not be conscious” because an “illusion of consciousness” has to be experienced by something so that means you have consciousness, even if that “you” is something you don’t understand. If there was no consciousness than you wouldn’t experience the illusion of consciousness and your own subjective experience would not happen, and we would all just do the superficially same things without anyone experiencing them until the end of time. This is demonstrably not true because you experience the things. We could argue about solipsism (which I also disagree with) but to deny one’s own consciousness is to blatantly deny evidence.
Free will was a nonsensical concept in the first place, a completely meaningless term which would require coming from complete nothingness to possess
This doesn’t mean we don’t make decisions, it just means we aren’t independent Ubermensch separated from history
Google compatibilism, it's the generally widely-accepted view of free will among philosophers
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
It's possible that the world works mostly deterministically (with a bit of randomness) and will can still be real. It's not "free" in the Libertarian idealist sense, but we still make choices and are accountable for our actions. It doesn't really matter if we were always going to make a choice, we still made it.
It's not clear why the world being non-deterministic and more random would allow more free will to occur anyway. Random =/= free will.
It seems unlikely to me that we are conscious and affecting the world around us by free will, but rather a pattern which emerged in the sea of matter and energy which comprises reality. Much like a tree, just with a more obvious ability to physically affect our reality. That the patterns of matter & energy in our brains lead to a hallucination of free will is hardly unexpected.
You can’t “not be conscious” because an “illusion of consciousness” has to be experienced by something so that means you have consciousness, even if that “you” is something you don’t understand. If there was no consciousness than you wouldn’t experience the illusion of consciousness and your own subjective experience would not happen, and we would all just do the superficially same things without anyone experiencing them until the end of time. This is demonstrably not true because you experience the things. We could argue about solipsism (which I also disagree with) but to deny one’s own consciousness is to blatantly deny evidence.
Free will was a nonsensical concept in the first place, a completely meaningless term which would require coming from complete nothingness to possess
This doesn’t mean we don’t make decisions, it just means we aren’t independent Ubermensch separated from history
Google compatibilism, it's the generally widely-accepted view of free will among philosophers
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
It's possible that the world works mostly deterministically (with a bit of randomness) and will can still be real. It's not "free" in the Libertarian idealist sense, but we still make choices and are accountable for our actions. It doesn't really matter if we were always going to make a choice, we still made it.
It's not clear why the world being non-deterministic and more random would allow more free will to occur anyway. Random =/= free will.