No, you have to be the ultimate source of your decisions. If anything else in your past, such as the initial condition of your brain, fully determined your decision, then clearly you did not.

Words like "you" are far more problematic than words like "consciousness" that you eschew.

After all, even a young infant shows unmistakable signs of awareness, while the "I" self-concept doesn't arise until the middle of the toddler stage. The problem with free will is that there is no actual "you" entity to have it. The "you" is simply a conceptual place-holder built up from ideas of an individual body and its sensations.

In order for you to have free will, there has to be a "you" entity in the first place. . .

One person doesn't need to pretend that he doesn't grasp something until a certain critical mass of the "right" people catch up. Correctness isn't up for a vote, and the feeling that it is is nothing more than an artifact of social wiring.

Anyone with a bit of insight and experience with the sociology of group behavior will read OB and see some glaringly obvious "artifacts of social wiring" in the psychology behind many of the postings and comments here.

Some commenters have recently expressed disturbance at the thought of constantly splitting into billions of other people, as is the straightforward and UNAVOIDABLE prediction of quantum mechanics.

Please. Generating so many paragraphs here displaying this sort of smug assurance in your own conclusions about highly controversial topics is the exact opposite of "overcoming bias".

I have noticed Robin gently reminding you of this fact; perhaps it is time to pay some attention to him, if not your other critics. . .

As pertains to brains, we have reasonable inferences that the mind is strictly anchored in a physical substance. Among the oldest I'm aware of is Heraclitis' observation that hitting someone in the head causes stupor, confusion, etc, so the mind probably resides there.

Yes and when I hit my radio with a rock it might stop working, change the station, if I rip out transistors it might make the sound distorted, etc. That really doesn't prove that the song is stored inside the radio, does it?

If you are interested in reality instead of just fitting in with current intellectual fashion, you really need to step outside the echo chamber sometime and engage with the best arguments against your current positions, not simply flail against strawmen.

And a special point for commentor Richard above -- you have an interesting and mostly thoughtful blog and you do a good job pointing out some reasons why eliminative materialism is a problematic belief. But then you stumble badly by claiming that only the only sane non-reductionist position is that mind arises from the brain. Claiming that people with different ideas than you must be insane is a position that has often been expressed in the history of intellectual discussion, but almost never by those on the correct side of a debate. . .

Anyway, I won't debate this point here any further because this blog is not interested in examining its philosophical biases towards materialism. I only wanted to point out an interesting reference book to those readers here not already utterly convinced that their beliefs are correct and their opponents not sane -- I know there are lurkers here that fit that description. . .

Matthew C., commenting here on OB, seems very excited about an informally specified "theory" by Rupert Sheldrake which "explains" such non-explanation-demanding phenomena as protein folding and snowflake symmetry.

Actually Eliezer I'm much more excited to be in nature doing landscape photography, spending time with my family, seeing if I can make money trading stocks, and chatting about the nondual nature of reality, among other things.

I'm become totally and completely uninterested in arguing with people who refuse to acquaint themselves with the evidence for things and then rail against them ex cathedra from the dogmas of "official science". The only reason I responded to your previous post on reductionism was TGGP kindly informed me of it and your mention of my query from last year, and I thought it only fair to point your readers to some relevant material.

Best,

Matthew C.