30 May 2024
Do you believe in free will? I am not entirely sure that I do.
It certainly feels like I have free will as I go through my daily life. I don't feel that everything I do is compelled - in fact, I'm not sure what that would mean. Perhaps it would be like you see in some fiction, where you would simply be observing your own behavior without being able to choose your actions. But then would they be your actions?
In any case, I believe pretty much in a mechanistic universe - or, at any rate, a causal one, which I suppose is not quite the same thing. Anyway, if causality universally applies, how could there be free will? At first blush it seems as though free will would require some kind of magic spark, some sort of supernaturalism. And if there's anything I thoroughly disbelieve in, it's supernaturalism.
Supernatural means "outside of nature", or, in my opinion, "outside of reality" - in other words, not real. Imaginary. The supernatural cannot be real - if it were real, it wouldn't be called "supernatural".
Others might have a different notion of what "supernatural" means, but using my definitions, supernatural cannot be real. There are certainly phenomena we don't understand, but that doesn't make them supernatural. It just makes them a part of reality that we don't understand (yet).
Getting back to free will, I said "at first blush" because I have a notion I am working on of how this feeling of free will could come about from a causal universe. (Whether it's just a "feeling of free will" or "actual free will" is a distinction I am not making right now.)
I will write more on this later.