First of all, I need to say that, even if it is ignorant, I even do not bother to read philosophical speculations.
I am interested in empirical premises. I’ve heard that there is some research, where scientists, monitoring activity of a person’s brain, are able to predict which switch (s)he’s going to switch, before (s)he does, or maybe before (s)he’s conscious about the choice. This implies that our decisions are results of some chemical processes determined aside of our “free choice” and so called free will is only an illusion, a way in which alternatives presents to us, while the choice is made already deep in our minds unconsciously and maybe even deterministically. Does anybody know this research and could cite it?
Since I am constantly busy, I really sucks in the theory, so could anybody say what’s the Marxist stance on free will if any?
Whether or not it is practically possible to predict our actions doesn’t have any bearing on the question of free will. Neither does how we subjectively experience our decisions. Unless you redefine free will to mean something different and much lesser than most people understand it to mean. Which is why i asked how you define free will. If your definition of “free will” is simply that our actions are not predictable then dice have free will too. If you say that free will is simply having the impression that our choices are free then this is no longer a scientific debate but one about how we subjectively experience reality, which is certainly an interesting discussion but not what OP was asking.
Chaos theory is also in no way relevant here. Chaotic systems exist in classical physics too (two famous examples taught to every physics student are the double pendulum and the three body problem - do these have free will?) but classical physics is nevertheless deterministic.
The reason why chaotic systems are hard to predict far into the future is because we never have complete and perfect knowledge about the starting state. If we did and if we could run a simulation with arbitrarily high precision then we could in fact predict any classical system no matter how chaotic or complex.
The fact that this is not possible in practice is beside the point. A system is considered to be deterministic if it would be predictable given complete information and infinite computational power. It does not mean this has to be practically possible with any existing or even any possible future technology.
The definition of free will I use is the philosophical one from disctionart.com:
the doctrine that the conduct of human beings expresses personal choice and is not simply determined by physical or divine forces.
The argument against free will typically rests on the claim that human choices are determined. But if the universe has non-deterministic elements and small changes in conditions can have large changes in outcomes, then both of these together make human choice non-determined.
The analogy to dice fails because dice are not human decision makers.
We can’t have perfect knowledge of classical systems because those systems are built on top of a quantum system that has elements that are entirely probabilistic. Chaos theory is relevant for the very reason that they make systems impossible to predict. Again, going back to Schrödinger’s cat: we don’t know if it’s alive or dead until we open the box. The sensor is based on quantum mechanics, the cat and the gas are macro elements, but we can’t just ignore it because the decay does not fit with classical physics. It’s already been proven via the Uncertainty Principle that our knowledge can never be fully complete, so we would never be able to run such a simulation as you suggest.
Ultimately, the burden of proof is on those claiming that all choice is determined to show it, but considering the universe does not constrain choice to be 100% deterministic, there is no real reason to suspect it exists.
The analogy with the dice is precisely correct because all systems can be reduced down to their individual parts. Humans can be reduced to atoms, electrons, etc. Those particles are all governed by the laws of physics, not by human choice. Whether their behavior is deterministic or stochastic is irrelevant, we still have zero control over how the particles which make up our brain behave. And yes, quantum interactions have probabilistic outcomes and are thus non-deterministic. I repeat: the ability or inability to predict our actions is not sufficient to determine whether we have free will or not. This is also why quantum uncertainty plays no role at all in this. It would only play a role if non-predictability was the sole defining feature of “free will”. But free will as it is traditionally defined implies more than that, it implies a conscious choice. Saying that we have free will because quantum randomness exists implies that we can control how the “dice” of quantum randomness fall, and there simply is no evidence for that. It is in fact the position which claims that this physics-defying so-called “free will” exists which requires proof. Where in the chain of causality from subatomic quantum interactions to the actions taken by a human does the “free will” come in and how? Which particle is compelled by human will to behave differently than it would if it were only subject to the laws of physics (no matter whether the laws are deterministic or probabilistic)?
The reason i asked for a definition is because you can only argue that free will exists if you remove the element of choice/control and reduce it solely to a problem of predictability. That is not the definition you cited however. In your definition free will is “when the conduct of human beings […] is not simply determined by physical […] forces”. But you acknowledge that human behavior is the result of the behavior of the components which make up a human, and you also acknowledge that those components are subject to the laws of physics, therefore human behavior is determined by the laws of physics. The confusion stems from conflating this with determinism. A system does not need to be deterministic for its behavior to be “determined” (a better word to use here would be “governed” in order to avoid conflation with determinism) by the laws of physics.
The crux of your reply appears to rely on your claim that “all systems can be reduced down to their individual parts.” Before we continue, am I correct that you are in essence stating that emergence does not exist?
I think association between free will and probability comes back to Rene Descartes, who said that if we are perfectly deterministic, then we have no more free will than falling rock. But many his views are outdated and in stark contrast to materialists, so I write this comment only for some historical context.
