> You brain has hallucinated not just the outside world, but your internal world as well.
Very interesting. I agree with these statements--yet I also think they are perfectly consistent with people making choices. In your ultra-physicalist language, human brains hallucinating "the outside world" and "the internal world" are just part of the causal processes that happen inside those brains. And those causal processes still have effects outside those brains even so.
Those causal processes still have effects outside those brains does not remove the idea that your brain only exists because of external causal events, and your brain is only reacting to those external causal events. At no point is there a spontaneous reaction that is unpredictable according to the known laws of physics, therefore, you don't have free will.
> your brain is only reacting to those external causal events
No, it isn't "only reacting". It is processing the incoming causal events, in a very complex way that "only reacting" doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of describing.
> At no point is there a spontaneous reaction that is unpredictable according to the known laws of physics, therefore, you don't have free will.
This definition of "free will" is pointless. Obviously nobody can violate the laws of physics, so if "free will" means violating the laws of physics, of course it's impossible. But nobody cares about that kind of "free will". The kind of free will people care about is having their right to make choices respected. Your metaphysical claims do not address that at all; and from what I can gather of your image of what society should be, it would be a horror worse than the worst tyrannies in history.
You can't claim it that "only reacting" doesn't help explain the process because at the end of they day, you, nor I, can exactly explain how consciousness works. The only evidence we have to likely explain it is that it likely is a cause and effect system like EVERYTHING we can observe externally so far.
And again, just because you claim my world view would be tyrannical DOES NOT make it true. My definition of free will is the common understanding of free will that you are trying to redefine to fit your world view.
Of course consciousness is a cause and effect system like everything else. I have never claimed otherwise, and the viewpoint I am defending certainly does not require otherwise.
> My definition of free will is the common understanding of free will
The common understanding of free will is that people can make choices and that those choices affect what happens to them. That can be true even in the deterministic universe you say you believe in.
It is not free will in the sense that you can spontaneously decide it for yourself. I can choose to eat vanilla yogurt or plain yogurt. That is the narrative my brain hallucinates. The reality behind the illusion is that the choice was made before I even am aware of the "story I tell myself" that I chose one or the other.
> It is not free will in the sense that you can spontaneously decide it for yourself.
If "spontaneously" means "outside of the laws of physics", then of course I agree. I just don't think that kind of "free will" is the only possible kind of free will, nor do I think that impossible kind of free will is the kind of free will that matters.
> I can choose to eat vanilla yogurt or plain yogurt. That is the narrative my brain hallucinates. The reality behind the illusion is that the choice was made before I even am aware of the "story I tell myself" that I chose one or the other.
Of course this is true in the sense that, as far as we can tell, the brain process of you being aware of your choice happens either at the same time as, or after, the brain process that makes your choice. But so what? All those processes are still happening in your brain.
Compare what you just described with this scenario: you want vanilla yogurt, but I force you to have plain yogurt instead because I believe it's healthier for you. Here there are still processes happening in your brain, which, if I weren't there, might well have led to you eating vanilla yogurt--but because I am there and I force you to eat plain yogurt, your brain processes do not determine what kind of yogurt you eat--instead, my brain processes do.
Do you see any meaningful difference between those scenarios? I sure do. (And note that I think that difference is meaningful even if it is true that the plain yogurt would be healthier.) If you don't, then we have a fundamental disagreement that I don't think any discussion can resolve.
You can't redefine what free will means and expect people to take you seriously. Free will means you have the ability to choose, and if you agree with me that the universe is deterministic, then you have to admit that making a choice is only an illusion. I can make choices in the same way that a neutron chooses to move toward more massive objects. I eat vanilla ice cream over dirt because I have taste buds that allow me to taste the difference between the two. Eating dirt instead doesn't prove I had a choice, because now I'm not eating dirt for taste, but to win an imaginary argument about free will. It's not the external world I'm reacting to now, but the internal one.
Your scenario is irrelevant because you admit that those processes, which you don't control happening in your brain, are still you. But if they are you, and you don't have control over them, you only become aware of them after the fact, then you JUST ADMITTED you don't have any choice. The choice was already made by something you have no control over, but only watch as a passenger. Your heart beats without your choice. You will pass out and have to breath because your brain will force you to at some point stop holding your breath. You will remove your hand from an external heat source that you did not expect AUTOMATICALLY, and only then become aware that your body moved milliseconds after the stimulus has already short-circuited through your PNS and not your CNS. If you think that the distinction doesn't matter, then you are still willfully lying about the reality, or intentionally want to deceive people about the physical world and how it works by redefining any word you need to to maintain your hallucinated reality.
Please stop getting hung up on the term "free will" as an excuse to avoid answering my actual question.
You proposed a perfectly clear scenario, and I proposed a perfectly clear second scenario. In scenario A, causal processes in your brain determine that you eat vanilla yogurt. In scenario B, causal processes in your brain determine that you want to eat vanilla yogurt, but causal processes in my brain determine that I force you to eat plain yogurt instead.
I see an important difference between these two scenarios: the first allows your brain processes to determine what kind of yogurt you eat; the second does not, it has my brain processes determining what kind of yogurt you eat.
Do you think that difference is important? Yes or no.
In both scenarios, no free will exists. I didn't trigger my brain processes, only observed them. Neither did you.
You are trying to paint a single scenario in which there is an important distinction and then ignore any other scenario where your reasoning fails.
For instance, if I chose to kill myself, and you stop me, and I later thank you for stopping me from killing myself, is that difference important? Yes or no?
Not by your definition, no. It does by mine. As I have repeatedly remarked in various places in this discussion, please stop getting hung up on that term; I purposely did not use it at all in my description of the two scenarios in order to avoid that.
> I didn't trigger my brain processes, only observed them. Neither did you.
Your brain processes are part of you, just as my brain processes are part of me. So to say "you" didn't trigger your brain processes is nonsense.
> if I chose to kill myself, and you stop me, and I later thank you for stopping me from killing myself, is that difference important?
You mean the difference that you thanked me afterwards? As opposed to telling me you wished I hadn't stopped you? Yes, that difference is important, because it tells me whether or not my choice to stop you was the right one.
However, your implication that my reasoning "fails" in a situation like this is incorrect. I have never claimed that respecting other people's free choice is the only value, or that it should automatically override all other values. One can always find cases where different values clash, and there is no way to resolve any such case without violating some value. So pointing out that my viewpoint is vulnerable to this proves nothing. So is yours. So is anyone's.
Your definition is wrong. It is not what people think making choices are. People feel they are free to make choices. That doesn't mean they actually had a choice if you permit that you are not on control of your brain processes even if you consider that "you". Your subjective experience of those processes is what people associate with choice, not an observation of some part "you" making the decisions that you are unaware of. You indeed are just a chest in the machine according to your owns words just now in these scenarios. It's intellectually dishonest to just redefine making choices however you want. It's a non- starter.
Further more, you claim any your reasoning doesn't fail, and yet you also admit your viewpoint is vulnerable? It is an admission outright that your arguments don't withstand rational scrutiny. However, you have yet to articulate a an argument that does make my position vulnerable to scrutiny.
Very interesting. I agree with these statements--yet I also think they are perfectly consistent with people making choices. In your ultra-physicalist language, human brains hallucinating "the outside world" and "the internal world" are just part of the causal processes that happen inside those brains. And those causal processes still have effects outside those brains even so.