it's useful to be able to talk about whatever it is that we perceive ourselves to have even though we don't really have it.
I think it's more helpful to talk about whatever we have that we're trying to talk about, even if some of what we say about it isn't quite right, which is why I prefer notions of free will that don't become necessarily wrong if the universe is deterministic or there's an omnipotent god or whatever.
I agree that gravity makes a useful analogy. Gravity behaves in a sufficiently force-like way (at least in regions of weakish spacetime curvature, like everywhere any human being could possibly survive) that I think for most purposes it is much better to say "there is, more or less, a force of gravity, but note that in some situations we'll need to talk about it differently" than "there is no force of gravity". And I would say the same about "free will".
Do you think Pachinko machines have free will?
I don't know much about Pachinko machines, but I don't think they have any processes going on in them that at all resemble human deliberation, in which case I would not want to describe them as having free will even to the (very attenuated) extent that a chess program might have.
Does the atmosphere have free will?
Again, I don't think there are any sort of deliberative processes going on there, so no free will.
I mean this: [...] Decisions are made by my conscious self.
So there are two parts to this, and I'm not sure to what extent you actually intend them both. Part 1: decisions are made by conscious agents. Part 2: decisions are made, more specifically, by those agents' conscious "parts" (of course this terminology doesn't imply an actual physical division).
it must be actually possible for me to choose more than one alternative
Of course "actually possible" is pretty problematic language; what counts as possible? If I'm understanding you right, you'd cash it out roughly as follows: look at the probability distribution of possible outcomes in advance of the decision; then freedom = entropy of that probability distribution (or something of the kind).
So then freedom depends on what probability distribution you take, and you take the One True Measure of freedom to be what you get for an observer who knows everything about the universe immediately before the decision is made (more precisely, everything in the past light-cone of the decision); if the universe is deterministic then that's enough to determine the answer after the decision is made too, so no decisions are free.
One obvious problem with this is that our actual universe is not deterministic in the relevant sense. We can make a device based on radioactive decay or something for which knowledge of all that can be known in advance of its operation is not sufficient to tell you what it will output. For all we know, some or all of our decisions are actually affected enough by "amplified" quantum effects that they can't be reliably predicted even by an observer with access to everything in their past light-cone.
It might be worse. Perhaps some of our decisions are so affected and some not. If so, there's no reason (that I can see) to expect any connection between "degree of influence from quantum randomness" and any of the characteristics we generally think of as distinguishing free from not-so-free -- practical predictability by non-omniscient observers, the perception of freeness that you mentioned before, external constraints, etc.
It doesn't seem to me that predictability by a hypothetical "past-omniscient" observer has much connection with what in other contexts we call free will. Why make it part of the definition?
I prefer notions of free will that don't become necessarily wrong if the universe is deterministic or there's an omnipotent god or whatever.
That's like saying, "I prefer triangles with four sides." You are, of course, free to prefer whatever you want and to use words however you want. But the word "free" has an established meaning in English which is fundamentally incompatible with determinism. Free means, "not under the control or in the power of another; able to act or be done as one wishes." If my actions are determ...
[Originally published at Intentional Insights in response to Religious and Rational]
Spirituality and rationality seem completely opposed. But are they really?
To get at this question, let's start with a little thought experiment. Consider the following two questions:
1. If you were given a choice between reading a physical book (or an e-book) or listening to an audiobook, which would you prefer?
2. If you were given a choice between listening to music, or looking at the grooves of a phonograph record through a microscope, which would you prefer?
But I am more interested in the answer to a third question:
3. For which of the first two questions do you have a stronger preference between the two options?
Most people will have a stronger preference in the second case than the first. But why? Both situations are in some sense the same: there is information being fed into your brain, in one case through your ears and in the other through your eyes. So why should people's preference for ears be so much stronger in the case of music than books?
There is something in the essence of music that is lost in the translation between an audio and a visual rendering. The same loss happens for words too, but to a much lesser extent. Subtle shades of emphasis and tone of voice can convey essential information in spoken language. This is one of the reasons that email is so notorious for amplifying misunderstandings. But the loss in much greater in the case of music.
The same is true for other senses. Color is one example. A blind person can abstractly understand what light is, and that color is a byproduct of the wavelength of light, and that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation... yet there is no way for a blind person to experience subjectively the difference between red and blue and green. But just because some people can't see colors doesn't mean that colors aren't real.
The same is true for spiritual experiences.
Now, before I expand that thought, I want to give you my bona fides. I am a committed rationalist, and an atheist (though I don't like to self-identify as an atheist because I'd rather focus on what I *do* believe in rather than what I don't). So I am not trying to convince you that God exists. What I want to say is rather that certain kinds of spiritual experiences *might* be more than mere fantasies made up out of whole cloth. If we ignore this possibility we risk shutting ourselves off from a vital part of the human experience.
I grew up in the deep south (Kentucky and Tennessee) in a secular Jewish family. When I was 12 my parents sent me to a Christian summer camp (there were no other kinds in Kentucky back in those days). After a week of being relentlessly proselytized (read: teased and ostracized), I decided I was tired of being the camp punching bag and so I relented and gave my heart to Jesus. I prayed, confessed my sins, and just like that I was a member of the club.
I experienced a euphoria that I cannot render into words, in exactly the same way that one cannot render into words the subjective experience of listening to music or seeing colors or eating chocolate or having sex. If you have not experienced these things for yourself, no amount of description can fill the gap. Of course, you can come to an *intellectual* understanding that "feeling the presence of the holy spirit" has nothing to do with any holy spirit. You can intellectually grasp that it is an internal mental process resulting from (probably) some kind of neurotransmitter released in response to social and internal mental stimulus. But that won't allow you to understand *what it is like* any more than understanding physics will let you understand what colors look like or what music sounds like.
Happily, there are ways to stimulate the subjective experience that I'm describing other than accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Meditation, for example, can produce similar results. It can be a very powerful experience. It can even become addictive, almost like a drug.
I am not necessarily advocating that you go try to get yourself a hit of religious euphoria (though I wouldn’t discourage you either -- the experience can give you some interesting and useful perspective on life). Instead, I simply want to convince you to entertain the possibility that people might profess to believe in God for reasons other than indoctrination or stupidity. Religious texts and rituals might be attempts to share real subjective experiences that, in the absence of a detailed modern understanding of neuroscience, can appear to originate from mysterious, subtle external sources.
The reason I want to convince you to entertain this notion is that an awful lot of energy gets wasted by arguing against religious beliefs on logical grounds, pointing out contradictions in the Bible and whatnot. Such arguments tend to be ineffective, which can be very frustrating for those who advance them. The antidote for this frustration is to realize that spirituality is not about logic. It's about subjective experiences that not everyone is privy to. Logic is about looking at the grooves. Spirituality is about hearing the music.
The good news is that adopting science and reason doesn’t mean you have to give up on spirituality any more than you have to give up on music. There are myriad paths to spiritual experience, to a sense of awe and wonder at the grand tapestry of creation, to the essential existential mysteries of life and consciousness, to what religious people call “God.” Walking in the woods. Seeing the moons of Jupiter through a telescope. Gathering with friends to listen to music, or to sing, or simply to share the experience of being alive. Meditation. Any of these can be spiritual experiences if you allow them to be. In this sense, God is everywhere.