this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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After listening to the podcast; a lot of his argument boils down to the lack of a "causeless cause" and thus no free will can exist, because every decision was caused by something, which in turn was caused by something else...etc
There could be a very compelling argument about free will being the emergent property of incomputability; as you say if you boil every decision down to the constituent parts then nothing is truly causeless, but precisely by not doing that we get the chaotic interaction of factors that look a lot like free will; chaos is not random but by definition it is not computable.
In this model decisions become probability spaces rather than absolutes.
It's a bit like asking if solid walls exists. You say of course I can see one right there, but then I say but the walls are made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are mostly just empty space. Therefore the wall isn't really there, just empty space with nuclear forces acting to prevent us moving through that space.
Does it matter that everything is made of quarks which are probably just energy and that when you dig into the components walls and the air are the same? Or does the illusion of the wall fulfilling the purpose of a wall mean that walls are real?