I agree that not to focus on free will first may be a mistake in itself and it makes me ask questions that are irrelevant from the get go.

Just in case you last question is not rhetorical:

In a potentially mistaken model where free will is considered an objective reality then not having free will does not have any feelings and an example is flowing water in a river, it doesn't think feel, or decide, it just flown governed by gravity, etc.

But again, the above answer is useless if free will is an illusion.

I will try your method of defining the opposite first!

I think that I have two possible errors in my argument:

1. Deterministic processes do not permit free thinking.
2. Free thinking needs randomness in its underlying process.

I agree with you that behavior in complex systems seems non-deterministic even though the underlying processes are deterministic (like the software example you give above).

So our perception of consciousness and even the dichotomy "randomness vs certainty" could be a mental illusion.

I think my possible argumentative error is:

P1: I observe free will in the behavior of living things.

P2: Deterministic physical mechanical processes don't permit free will.

C: Therefore physics must include random processes.

I think I only see a solution of free will in randomness, but maybe there are other solutions ( I will read the Free Will Sequence here on LW!)

• Consequence of previous events: when things pass from state to state as a consequence of a causal chain of actions that are not initiated or continued by a living decision maker that purposely provoked them.

• Consequence of decision making: when a living being acted on a chain of physical events and modified them according to its will and therefore the pattern of the sequence is not consistent with random mechanical events.

If your decisions aren't a consequence of previous events, then they are just meaningless randomness.

I agree with the idea that living things make decision based on the observation of reality and must not initiate actions out of nowhere.

And randomness is very distinct from the old concept of free will. Randomness is not your will. You have no control over it. Rather it controls you.

When I mention free will on my OP I am not referring to the ideological concept,but just my personal opinion that decision making in our brains must obey to some randomness in order to be free of regular certainty in physics.

I don't think that randomness is in our brains,I think there must be randomness in the mechanics of physics.

Thx for the complete answer I like your thinking process!

Note that fundamentally random processes viewpoint and hidden variables viewpoint are equivalent -- they produce the same predictions -- so choosing one is the matter of convenience.

I agree that they are equivalent in that they denote a lack of understanding of the underlying mechanics, but in the case of randomness, even though it could be an illusion, I still subjectively (naive view) favor the existence of randomness (and probability) in the base physical mechanics because I fail to see a connection between certainty and our brain's apparent non-bound decision making.

Nevertheless I am open to the option that physics is only deterministic and that such a process may recreate our consciousness (I have to think more about that though).

I assume they are using the "physics is deterministic" assumption when they tell me our thought process is a physical process.

My OP above questions this and I speculate that there is randomness in base physics (quantum or somewhere else, maybe at macro level too when systems cross certain levels of complexity).

If the bottom level is quantum, is there a space for randomness or non-causal mechanical processes?

I agree my view is naive, but from the standpoint of knowledge of the matter since I am not a scientist and I am new to rationality overall.

I am not naive in the sense that I support free will just for the sake of it, for political or idealistic reasons. Personally I prefer the truth rather than a "feel good" moment.

I am very open to learn and discuss these issues and I hope LessWrong is a good place for this.

Thx for the good question!

I think that my observation of the existence arbitrary decisions is that as living things we interrupt randomness and cause things to behave in ways that are not the product of free physical mechanics, but the product of what is going on in our minds.

Here we come back to the "what goes on in our minds is also the product of physical processes" argument, and I agree, only that it seems not determined, but "decided".

The fact that I use the word "seems" confirms that it might be an illusion too.

I don't have an attachment to free will I think its a mental construct like time. What I think is that we make decisions and we seem to arbitrarily change the course of things, even if they are physical processes, I think there must be a component of randomness in physics that enables this.