This topic has been buzzing around my mind for a while, so I figure it's time to externalize it. "Free will is an illusion" is a meme that I've seen quite a lot on this site especially. I don't think most people who repeat it have thought much about it.
Yeah, materialism (which I hear is popular around here) suggests a mechanistic universe, one without true randomness, defined solely by predictable input and output. That contradicts our intuition about independent free will, which seems unpredictable (or at least not fully predictable) when we experience it. I don't think a fully mechanistic universe is incompatible with free will, though - in fact, I think that any coherent definition of free will must necessarily exist even under a materialist lens. Those of you who are (like me) pop-philosophy dilettantes probably know that this position is called "compatibilism".
Obviously, though, people disagree. I want to know why. If you don't believe that free will exists, under what circumstances do you think it would exist? What do you think would change if it did exist according to your definition?
I do have a pretty unorthodox take which is that we can transition from a determinist world to a free will one, which I guess matters because i’m more of a hard determinist otherwise. The whole thing is a mess though because I also don’t believe in the unicity of beings over time.
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it’s pretty complicated, I don’t want to dox myself but i have an article (fingers crossed) in review on that. I’ll take the example of social determinism, this all goes out of the window if we’re all in an equal simulation, we wouldn’t be socially determined anymore, you can infer from that parcellar example how we can escape other forms of determinism or determinism in general