this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2024
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Three possibilities come to mind:

Is there an evolutionary purpose?

Does it arise as a consequence of our mental activities, a sort of side effect of our thinking?

Is it given a priori (something we have to think in order to think at all)?

EDIT: Thanks for all the responses! Just one thing I saw come up a few times I'd like to address: a lot of people are asking 'Why assume this?' The answer is: it's purely rhetorical! That said, I'm happy with a well thought-out 'I dispute the premiss' answer.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

Assuming we don't have free will, why do we have the illusion that we do?

You experience the world through your senses.

What sense that your body has would you expect to give your brain a different set of inputs if your brain's actions were not deterministic, not set by the laws of physics? How would you expect it to feel different?

You wouldn't expect to feel like some invisible force is in control of your limbs, which I think is perhaps what some people intuitively expect if someone says that their actions are pre-determined.

It's not talking about anything that your brain can sense; it's talking about how your brain works.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Yeah, this is it.

And to take a slightly different tack, if the biochemical and electrical activity in your brain were not deterministic, how would you ever know? It's one thing to believe that you made a decision on your own "Free Will", but how could you possibly rewind the entire universe (or at least some sufficiently small portion of it), including your brain's exact atomic state, and re-run the experiment to know for sure? At that point, what would "Free Will" even mean?

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