In order to answer the question of whether there is free will, we must become omniscient of all factors that might influence a person’s decision. For one thing, what is randomness? Is there true randomness or are all unpredictable events pseudorandom? Even down to the level of subatomic particles - when they exhibit “random” behavior, is it truly random or does some as yet undiscovered force determine what state they assume? Until then we cannot know if free will exists.
See, that is exactly what I am arguing against. If you are omniscient of all factors that influence a person’s decision, then you will no longer see a “person’s decision,” but instead, a collection of inhuman influences.
Pseudorandom or random? Does it really matter? If you reduce a decision to this, it is no longer the decision of a person, it is the decision of a chemical reaction.
My point is that free will does not exist on this scale. But it does exist on the human scale. Humans can recognize and possess free will, in relation to each other. Once you try to pose free will in relation to something omniscient, it disappears.
But that chemical reaction is part of the person, and what is a person anyway but a series of chemical reactions (and enough matter to sustain such reactions).
So then you’re defining “free will” relatively as those influences which an observer is not aware of? By that logic, we cannot say that “free will” doesn’t exist on the molecular scale. Quantum effects come into play there, including “randomness” (entanglement) and AFAIK nobody really knows what determines the result of detanglement. So just as, in your example, I might “seem” to you to have “free will”, a molecule, atom, or particle might also “seem” to have “free will” in the relative sense.
A person has little to do with the chemical reactions that compose him. The chemical reactions are on too small of a scale to be significant to the big picture. A person could inhabit any medium, as long as the social, motivational, and personal structure could be kept in tact.
I think that the whole idea that small-scale interactions have something to do with human free will is misguided. It is likely that they influence some decisions, but only when there is no human will involved.
I agree with this. Particles can exhibit free will. A physicist might see the behavior of particles as free will – they have certain motivations (e.g. electrons stay close to the nucleus, etc.) that constrain their behavior but do not determine it. However, I don’t think the free will of particles has any direct relationship to the free will of people. Even if a person makes a decision that seems unfathomable to other people, and even if this choice was ultimately determined by free particles, the freedom of the particles is not connected in any meaningful way to the freedom of the person! The particles know nothing of the circumstances surrounding the person, and the particles’ choice, relative to the person, is blind. In other words, because the particles do not understand the situation of the person, they are not controlling the person. The freedom of the particles and the freedom of the person are causally entwined, and yet wholely different.
Another way to look at this: suppose you decide to flip a coin, and if it comes up heads you will kill me. The coin isn’t choosing for you – it has no knowledge of the circumstances or the consequences. If you kill me, it was your choice – you were the one who decided to flip the coin and obey its outcome. Even if you are insane, and you are compelled to obey the coin, the causal connection between the outcome of the coin and the murder doesn’t mean that the source of your freedom is the coin. The source of your freedom is that I don’t know if you are going to try to kill me, until you actually do it. Even if I know that once you flip the coin you are a slave to it, to me, the source of your freedom was the decision to flip the coin, not the outcome of the toss.
I would have to say that free will does not necessarily require knowing the consequence of an action. For example, say somebody gets into a control center for a giant robot, unaware that the robot’s cameras are not hooked up. Say they fool with the controls for a minute and the robot proceeds to demolish something. It is clearly the person’s free will and not the robot’s that is accountable, even if the person doesn’t realize what transpired.
That is not to say that we are mindless robots controlled by billions of molecules. The molecules are part of the person, so their actions are part of the person’s actions, even though the molecules themselves are totally ignorant of the whole person.
I definitely agree with you about the coin toss example though.