It is, we are talking about a human emergent property.
No, we are talking about a nonsense term.
EDIT: Also, calling it a “human emergent property” helps demonstrate how much this is about human egotism, the desire to believe that we are the center of the universe and beyond its rules.
So you say, but I will go for what others have said.
There is really little more nonsensical that a new born, and yet, they usually get better.
Also a projection launched to others with a different view. A baby straw man, cute, but a fallacy.
No, an accurate description of all the handwaving going on trying to justify belief in free will without ever even defining it (because it’s impossible).
"free will
/ˌfrē ˈwil/
noun
noun: free will; noun: freewill
- the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one’s own discretion."
And before you continue, you are indeed trying to approach this as if I’m saying that free will is all encompassing, it is not at many levels. It is mostly a human property. Full of contradictions and limitations..
Such is life…
Which doesn’t define the thing itself, just the phrase. It’s as always, so vague as to be meaningless. It might as well just be honest and say “magic because Humans Are Special”.
Straw man again.
Pot, meet kettle.
So the arguments made by supporters of your view are also useless comebacks? Do tell.
The point stands, free will is not useful in many situations; but at the human level, when humans see restrictions to it, they do notice it, and many times they to fight against those human imposed limitations.
No they don’t, because it doesn’t exist. Freedom isn’t free will; if anything it’s the opposite. Free will is incompatible with freedom, because choice cannot exist with free will. Free willed people could never “fight against those limitations”, because their thoughts, goals & desires have no correlation with their actions; that would be determinism, not free will.
That is still a category error.
And to show how a straw man that “It’s magic” argument/accusation was:
—But the emergence argument doesn’t invoke magic. It just says that thinking about free will in terms of determinism and fundamental laws is a dead end. A kind of category error, like trying to explain galaxies by looking at your digestive tract. It is part of a reductionist school of thinking about the universe that very successfully shaped science for a long time – but that is challenged by emergence.
The debate between the strictly reductionist point of view vs. the “emergentist” one is relatively new in science due, in part, to the tremendous success of the reductionist program in the first centuries after the birth of modern science. However, the emergentist approach has been increasingly vindicated in the last decades, especially by scientists working in complex systems.
“Emergence” isn’t something separate from determinism or randomness, and thus not free will. It’s not even a new idea.
Saying “emergence, thus free will” is no different than saying “something something quantum thus free will”. It’s still not a description or an explanation, just yet another desperate attempt to justify an irrational and impossible belief.
And this shows again that it is better to fight the straw man than what I’m saying; again, Free will is not an on or off switch. It has to have a lot of things present to be considered at the human level. The nonsensical thing is to fight against others as if we are not taking already into account what you complain about.
BTW, Yes, free will is not freedom, but is generally considered to be a crucial aspect of freedom.
No, it’s imaginary. That why nobody can actually define it, just insist it’s important while carefully avoiding doing so.
#Ball, Philip (2021): “Why free will is beyond physics”, Physics World, 34, 1, 17
"The sceptical physicist might then ask: so where does this “free will” come from that enables events to turn out differently than they might have? In response, we should turn the question around: what exactly caused events to turn out as they did? The underlying problem here is that the reducibility of phenomena – which is surely valid and well supported – is taken to imply a reducibility of cause. But that doesn’t follow at all. What “caused” the existence of chimpanzees? If we truly believe causes are reducible, we must ultimately say: conditions in the Big Bang. But it’s not just that a “cause” worthy of the name would be hard to discern there; it is fundamentally absent.
To account for chimps, we need to consider the historical specifics of how the environment plus random genetic mutations steered the course of evolution. In a chimp, matter has been shaped by evolutionary principles – we might justifiably call them “forces” – that are causally autonomous, even though they arise from more fine-grained phenomena. To complain that such “forces” cannot magically direct the blind interactions between particles is to fundamentally misconstrue what causation means. The evolutionary explanation for chimps is not a higher-level explanation of an underlying “chimpogenic” physics – it is the proper explanation. […]
If we recognize, as we should, that the origins of volitional decision-making lie in evolutionary biology, we must accept that the entire mode of its operation – the way in which brains imbued with innate tendencies and learned information process low-resolution stimuli – doesn’t share an epistemic language with Newtonian and quantum mechanics. To talk about causation in science at all demands that we seek causes commensurate with the phenomena: that’s simply good science and good epistemology.”
"It’s Magic!", in other words.
Point was, that no, many have defined it before. That you don’t like the definitions (and you miss that I don’t like many myself ) is a different thing.
That’s why I quoted Strawson. Points 1.-7. essentially define what it is to act freely, but I can give a brief paraphrase if that makes things easier (but would defer to Strawson if that muddles things): free actions are actions performed for a reason (1.), which is given by a certain mental state (2.), which must be due to the agent (3. and 4.), given by their preferences (5.), which themselves must be due to the agent (6. and 7.).
No, they handwave it and pretend that’s a definition.