Did you read the third paragraph of my first reply? I already addressed the acausal mind idea. It's untenable - either it would be indistinguishable from a purely causal mind, or it would make decisions randomly (which sort of defeats the point of free will).

And sure, mosquitoes have free will. So do trees, mushrooms, and bacteria. To a much lesser extent than humans (their decision space is way more constrained), but it's there.

The human mind can be entirely deterministic and still possess free will, for any coherent definition of free will. That is literally my entire point. What definition of free will are you using?

that human is also entirely an effect of previous causes

What else could they be? You've missed the more important part of my argument. How can you define free will in a way that is independent of previous causes?

Free will doesn't require any part of a person to exist outside of causality. Really, the idea of anything existing outside of causality is sort of incoherent.

To exposit a bit on compatibilism, the idea is that a self-consistent idea of free will must be compatible with a mechanistic world. The only requirement for free will, in this view, is that a free-willed actor must control their actions - that is, what you are decides what you do. A rock isn't free-willed because it can't take make decisions or take actions. A person is free-willed because they make decisions that lead to actions; a person would not be free-willed if their decisions had no effect on their actions (e.g. they were mind-controlled by a compliance chip). Yes, in a mechanistic world, those actions might be pre-determined, but they are pre-determined in part by the actor. A person is part of the universe; a free-willed actor is a cause in itself. Having unchosen desires doesn't negate this. (Side note - the idea of "chosen desires" is shaky too; in the absence of pre-existing, unchosen desires, why would anyone choose to desire anything? Inherent value doesn't exist, so without at least one unchosen first-principle desire, there would be no reason to choose to desire one thing over the other. And without desire, why exercise free will?)

The problem with most people's concept of free will is that it assumes its own negation. If free will means being outside causality, unaffected by the universe, then it can't meaningfully affect anything in the universe. Free will can't mean making decisions regardless of causal input, because those decisions would be baseless. Really, fully baseless, to the point of incoherence - how could anyone make a decision without knowing what they're deciding between? If part of the human mind was "outside causality," what would that even look like? Either the acausal mind is internally consistent, and would make the same decisions as an identically conditioned causal mind (in which case there would be no real difference), or the acausal mind would make decisions randomly. I don't think randomness is a requirement for free will - the exact opposite, actually. If actions are essentially random, then the actor has no agency.

This is why I'm asking people to define free will in their terms. Almost no one here has.

If no one is experiencing, where does experience come from? If no one is observing, how can observation exist? This is just kicking the can down the road.

I think you're internally defining a "self" in a more restrictive way than I am. It's entirely plausible that consciousness is made up only of observation. That still means that consciousness exists.

Who's watching the movie?

This one's inspired by the other, since that one was deleted. I try to strike while the iron is fresh.

I agree that any simplified or limited understanding of sensation wouldn't be the same as subjective experience - even fully simulating a human mind wouldn't be sufficient - but I don't think that means experience can't be physical.

Imagine an impossibly complex computer, purely composed of physical and electrical components. Imagine it's capable of self-observation, that it has a basic form of consciousness. We could document every bit of that computer's innards, understand every input and output. We could scrutinize its self-observation. We still wouldn't know what it feels like to "be" that computer. We couldn't access its qualia, even though it would be purely physical.

And yeah, the obvious rejoinder to that is that it wouldn't be experiencing qualia, and wouldn't be actually conscious. To me that feels like solipsism, but I admit that it's impossible to know. This whole thought experiment might be circular, actually. If a purely physical thing can experience qualia, then qualia must be physical, but if qualia aren't physical then a purely physical thing couldn't experience them. That question might be irresolvable.

Why do you say that qualia are necessarily non-physical? I think it's plausible that advances in neuroscience (far into the future, probably) could provide a robust physical description of how we experience sensation.

Yeah, I give this thread low odds of changing minds. I'm mostly just curious about how people justify their position. And there's always a chance that it'll at least get people to think about it in a way they haven't before.

I agree, revenge is pointless. I don't think the existence or nonexistence of free will changes that.

What would make retribution make more sense? The point of punishment, in my view, is to change behavior. It demonstrably does that; operant conditioning works by applying punishments and rewards. If we don't have free will now, why and how would adding free will change this? If changing behavior isn't the point, then what is?

You think we don't have free will, right? What would change if we did?