You're not disagreeing with anything I've said.
Conscious experience ≠ free will, but free will is a conscious experience.
Making decisions ≠ free will, but free will involves making decisions.

I'm not assuming; I know for certain that some special property emerges when you consider the brain as a whole. Conscious experience exists. It can't be coherently doubted.
But nothing you see when examining a dopamine receptor would tell you that.
So it follows that the properties of the little parts of the brain are not anything like the properties of the whole person.
Free will involves conscious decisions. That means it's a whole person level phenomenon. It's not just useful to think of it at this level. It's the only coherent way to think about it. Anything else would be like failing to find the conscious experience in a dopamine receptor.

Thanks for the reply.

The little mechanical parts that make up a human body are not relevant for answering certain questions (like about free will). But I don't mean they're irrelevant in every way.

What I'm saying is that the WHOLE brain (and peripheral nervous system) taken together is the relevant source of decisions. What do chronically overstimulated dopamine receptors produce on their own? Nothing resembling a choice. The choice comes from the irreducible self-referencing loops of interactions between the dopamine receptors and the other mechanical bits of the brain. No particular bit can generate human behavior; only all of the bits and the interactions between them taken together can do that. But taken together as one system, rather than as segmented bits of matter, that's usually called a person.

True

There's several things I disagree with here, but I'll only mention one because I have to go to work.

You're equivocating between all of my potential deaths as if they're all the same event. I can choose a lot of actions that lead to different deaths. So what if I can't choose to never die? I can't choose to fly like Superman either. No one thinking about free will ever thought I could.

I didn't have sight before I was born, but now I do.

I didn't have free will before I was born, but now I do.

I choose to be here every day.

Damn. I didn't consider that.

Yes, the whole emerges from the parts AND the parts are irrelevant to certain questions.

It's not obvious that would be the case. That's why I wrote a whole paper about it. I want to do a better job of explaining it, but I already put my best effort into the explanations in the paper.

Being a writer, I am a little worried about being made irrelevant by the next version of ChatGPT. But a month ago, I actually tried to get the current version to of ChatGPT to generate the main idea of this free will paper. I couldn't get it to succeed without feeding it the answer. That made me feel a little better, but I'm still concerned about the future.

No, I think quantum effects do propagate up into the macro world. But that's just beside the point of what I argue in the paper.

Your guesses about what I mean haven't been great so far. I would explain what I mean, but that was the whole point of writing the paper. If you don't want to read it, don't. But it is the explanation of what I mean.

Quite right that it's mostly refuting arguments from the other side. But I think I do make a positive argument that my two criteria for free will are met; that I am the source of my actions and that I can do otherwise. If I'm right about being non-reductive in scale, then the whole person is the source of action. And if I'm right about temporal asymmetry and undecidability then the whole person can do otherwise.

But yes, this completely depends on picking the parameters for free will. I also sometimes feel that nearly all philosophy is pointless in a way because so many topics depend on prior agreement on concepts that may be inherently squishy, and are endlessly open to be undermined.

Molecules are the small parts of a person. Or cells are, or quarks are, etc. I never said that molecules are not the small parts of a person. I just used molecules one example of a type of small part that gives you a terrible sense of the properties of a whole person.

I won't take the time to wade through the rest of the the reading comprehension issues here.

But your last paragraph isn't based on a simple misreading. It's an interesting question whether your own decisions surprise you. In a sense they do. If you know what your decision will be before you make it, then you've actually already made your decision. But you don't make your decision before you make your decision. I don't see that as a problem, but it's interesting.

Predicting yourself isn't relevant to free will because being free means that you aren't controlled (or perfectly predicted) by anything else. You are you. So if you predict you, that's fine. You control you. And you can also be free without actually making any prediction of what you'll do.

So violations of your own expectation of yourself don't say much about free will one way or the other. But violations of Laplace's demon's expectations say a lot.

No, it's in the "Autumn 2022" issue of the journal, but that issue wasn't released until yesterday.

Yesterday

If we are "just" organic cells, then who's being misled by the realistic illusion? Can a cell experience an illusion? A cell can't experience anything at all. Only a non-reduced, complete functional pattern of billions of cells can experience something. So that complete pattern has very different properties and capacities than do "just cells."

That complete functional pattern of cells, when taken as a whole is called a person. So a person is not "just" cells. If we want to know whether a person has free will, it's a mistake to change the question to whether or not "just cells" have free will.

Two interesting concerns. I think I have answers for them.

AI can get pretty accurate, but never completely accurate in its predictions of what you'll do. And many of your actions that are amenable to prediction by AI are also somewhat predictable by other humans. Like I can predict pretty well that you'll have something for dinner this evening. I might be 99% percent sure of it. But I can't really know that you won't skip dinner. You could. So you have the ability to 'do otherwise' even in the case that you do end up eating dinner like I predict. I think the predictions made by AI will be like this.

Some group actions are more predictable than individual actions. But you are not a group. So your free will isn't diminished by this. Also, a group can be made unpredictable by individual action.

That's not really a critique of my idea at all. Free will requires unpredictability, but not all unpredictability is free will. Driving a car requires motion but not all motion is driving a car. Get it?
Here are a couple of relevant lines from my paper:

"This paper will not claim indeterminism as a source of free will."

"There are views in which determinism and predictability are both said to be eliminated in the context of human choice by quantum indeterminacy. But critics of these views point out that if the relevant cause of an action is an indeterminate quantum event, then the human agent can not determine what he does, and thus can not be the source of his own actions. I agree with the critics on this point. In contrast to quantum indeterminacy, undecidable dynamics are deterministic, and are a property of the human system taken as a whole, not a property of some little part of a human."