So here's your homework problem: What kind of cognitive algorithm, as felt from the inside, would generate the observed debate about "free will"? - Dissolving the Question
Edit: In the linked post by Eliezer, he shifts the debate around free will and determinism. Instead of asking which is true, or trying to resolve or dissolve the philosophical question, he asks a different but related question about human psychology. Why does it feel like it makes sense to have this philosophical debate in the first place? What is it about our psychology that makes positions vis-a-vis free will and determinism seem so compelling? It is this question that I have attempted to answer here.
Put a glass of water in front of yourself. Now, make a decision: take a drink, or do not take a drink. Or at least imagine doing so.
When you've made your decision and acted on it, get very clear on which option you chose. Perhaps you should write it down, or at least make a mental note. Do not proceed until you've come to this point.
Now, you have a memory, one in which you seem to have made a decision of your own free will. Why does it feel that way? And why might somebody else argue that, no, in fact, you were fated to make that decision?
Let's consider the one or two main choices you made for this exercise. The first choice was whether or not to comply with the instructions. If you did, the second choice was whether or not to take a drink. Of course, there were other choices: how exactly to carry this out (in your imagination or in real life? with water, or coffee?). But we'll ignore them for now.
The process of making these major decisions took place slowly enough that you have some felt memory of the psychological operations you experienced in the course of making them. You read the instructions. Then, you may have split the future into two imagined alternatives. Some mysterious further operations that you'd have a very hard time putting into words took place. Your subconscious mind was playing a role too, but that's beyond your comprehension. But you clearly remember taking the physical actions to bring about one world state or the other.
Some aspects of this process of thought and action took place slowly and consciously enough to leave an accessible memory. Others were too fast, or two unconscious, to leave a trace.
The words of the instructions, the sense of splitting the world into two options (or not doing so), and the physical action (or lack thereof) all happened slowly enough to create a memory.
When you access that memory and reconstruct for yourself your past experience, you imagine yourself conceiving of two options - to comply with or to bypass the instructions, to drink or not to drink - and a sensation of selecting, then acting upon one of the options.
What you do not remember, because it happened too quickly or unconsciously, was the process by which that selection occurred. Or the operations underneath that. There is a physical sensation of volition that some part of your brain produces, which is perhaps a purely somatosensory feeling. Moving your arm (or not) when no external force is yanking or constraining your body physically feels distinct from being acted upon by an external force. That somatosensory sensation is the feeling of volition that you find associated with this decision in your memory.
The reason why it feels that you have made this decision of your own "free will" is that you cannot detect the overwhelming evidence against it. The mysterious, rapid, unconscious core brain activity that structures your conscious qualitative experience is unavailable to you. You have learned by imitation to describe certain somatosensory sensations in terms like will and volition. The way the instructions were written demands that you describe this reconstruction of memory in terms of "choice."
The counterargument of determinism arises because we can observe ourselves sometimes experiencing a lack of the familiar association between the choice-making memory and the somatosensation of volition. At times, you remember making a conscious choice, but did not physically feel like you made a decision. At other times, you feel a sensation like volition, but do not remember making a conscious choice. These disturbing disconnects provide some of the missing evidence that an unconscious process is driving your psychological operations, your motor impulses, your somatosensations, and the formation of memory.
Furthermore, you realize that your ability to give an account of precisely which psychological operations led to a decision rapidly bottom out. For any given decision, after saying, "and why did you think that?" a finite (and probably small) number of times, you lose the ability to answer. Yet you infer that there must be a reason why. And you realize that reason is unavailable to conscious inspection, yet must have originated in your brain.
To really solve this homework question, you'd probably also need to explain the emotional valence of the debate, why people speculate on their own psychology in general, and why it is part of our culture. But I think this is a decent account of the mental mechanisms that produce an intuitive notion of free will, and also some evidence for an argument against it.
I'm not sure I understood these two points. Can you elaborate?
Actually, the state part. It's my original comment. Although maybe I wasn't as clear as I thought I was about it.
This isn't quite the same reductionism as understood in physics, it has to do with Whitehead's discussion of the problem of bifurcationism in nature (see the next block for details). In this context even a Jupiter-sized Culture-style AI Mind orders of orders of magnitude more complex than a human brain still counts as "physical reduction" in regards to "objective corporeality" if one assumes its computations capable of qualia-perception.
Free will is always perceived as qualia. You perceive it in yourself and in others, similarly to how you perceive any other qualia.
Any attempt at reducing it to the physical aspects of a being describes at most the physical processes that occur in/with/to the object in correlation with that qualia. Therefore, two philosophical options arise:
a) One may assume the qualia thus perceived is as fundamental as the measurable properties of the corporeal object, thus irreducible to those measurable properties, and that the corporeal object is thus a composite of both measurable properties and qualia properties.
In this scenario the set of the measurable properties of a corporeal object can be abstracted from it forming a pseudo-entity, the "physical object", which is the object studied via mensuration, that is, via mathematical (and by extension logical) procedures and all they provide, among which statistical and probabilistic methods. Any conclusion arrived through them is then understood to describe the "physical object", which, being only part of the full corporeal object, makes any such conclusion partial by definition, as they never cover the entirety of all properties of the corporeal object, in particular never covering its qualitative properties, as all they ever cover are its quantitative properties.
b) Or one may assume the qualia thus perceived is a consequence of those measurable properties, reducible to them, and therefore the corporeal object is those measurable properties, that is, that the corporeal object and the physical object are one and the same.
The burden of proof for case "a" is much lighter than that of case "b". In fact, case "a" is the null hypothesis, as it corresponds to our direct perception of the world. Case "b", in contrast, goes against that perception, and therefore is the one that needs to provide proof of its assertions. In particular, in the case of free will, it'd need to identify all the measurables related to what's perceived as free will, then show with absolute rigor that they produce the perceived qualia of free will in something formerly devoid of it, and then, somehow, make that generated qualia perceptible as qualia to qualia-perceivers.
To use a classic analogy, even something much more simple, such as showing that the qualia "color red" is the electromagnetic range from 400 to 484 THz cannot be done yet. Note that this isn't the same as showing that the qualia "color red" is associated with and carried by that EM range. For instance, if I close my eyes and think about an apple, I can access that qualia without a 400~484 THz EM wave hitting my eyes. As such, my affirmation that the qualia "color red" is distinct from the EM wave is straightforward and needs no further proof, while any affirmation involving the assertion that the qualia "color red" is reducible to, first, the measurable physical property "400~484 THz EM wave", second, to the measurable physical properties of neurons in a brain, are the ones that need thorough proof.
While any such proof -- for colors, as the entry level "easy" case, then for the much more difficult stuff such as free will -- doesn't appear, opting for "a" or for "b" will remain an arbitrary preference, as philosophical arguments for one and for the other cancel out.
From the summary of the bifurcation problem I provided above I think it's more clear what I mean as indeterministic. From an "a" point of view QM is still entirely about physical objects, saying much about their measurable properties but nothing actually about their qualia. Hence, all it says is that some aspects of corporeal objects are fuzzy, the range of that fuzziness however being strictly determined and that, if MWI is correct, even this fuzziness is more apparent than real, since what it really is saying is not that such physically measurable aspects are fuzzy, but rather that the physical object branches very deterministically into so many ways.
Whether such "fuzziness within a determined range in a single world" or such "deterministic branching in many worlds" works as carriers for, or in correlation to, qualia properties of the full corporeal object, including but not limited to the free will qualia perceived by qualia-perceivers, is an entirely different problem, and there's no easy, straight jump from one domain to the other. I suppose there may be, but no matter how much physically measurable randomness properties one identifies and determines, there's still no self-evident link between this property of the physical object and the "free will" qualia of the full corporeal object.
From the exposed, you may have determinations in the form of single values or that of value ranges with inherent randomness while having no qualia, but stating these physical determinations imply having the "free will" qualia is a logical jump.
Taking from the "color red" example again, you may have an extremely energetic 400~484 THz EM wave, and yet no "color red" qualia at all for the simple lack of any qualia-perceiver in its path, or for the lack of any qualia-perceiver who however lacks the ability to extract a "color red" qualia from that carrier, or because the EM wave was absorbed by a black body etc.
Hence, while physically measurable randomness may be a "free will" qualia carrier, the lack of qualia perception would still result in the "free will" qualia carried by it to be lost. Conversely, a qualia-perceiver may have free will even in the absence of the typical physical carrier of "free will" qualia, as in the analogous case of a mind capable of imagining the "color red" qualia despite the absence of it usual "400~484 THz EM wave" carrier.