Free will is the concept that refers to our ability, or lack of ability, to decide the course of our thoughts and actions unhindered by causal forces.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to find how free will could be possible given a scientific realist and scientific causal paradigm.
Even in quantum physics and other microscopic paragdigmantic frameworks, there is only probability and not causal freedom.
Free will implies that the mind is the causal source, not, rather, the world of particles and forces.
Regardless of the metaphysical situation, which we may never have access to, we believe that we have free will except when we equate ourselves with our science.
But, because the history of science is a history of the revision and undermining of scientific theory, why should we, according to inductive principles, think science has ever reached some final description?
We are, to our descendants, no more than Aristotelians, who, we will come to know, are completely wrong about the empirical nature of reality. And, they, too, in a thousand years, may well be just as wrong compared to their descendants.
The belief that humans know enough about the world to ever explain themselves in terms of scientific paradigms is nothing more than arrogance and assumption by those we have put up on pedestals because they understand what most of us do not.
I am here to tell you, definitively, that the brightest scientific minds in the world who do not also understand philosophy and the problems of induction and skepticism are no such geniuses but only charlatans who have dazzled us with the complications of mathematics and theory.
I am not saying that we have free will or that we do not.
I am saying that, without making metaphysical assumptions, we do not have the slightest clue about such things.
Perhaps the mind and the mental realm is accessed with cooperation of the brain and, then, the brain itself is only a conduit for mind. Perhaps there is a relationship between brain damage and mental capacity but this does not necessarily imply, in the least, that the mind exists in the brain itself.
While it can be useful to think this way, that we assume correllation is causation and indicative of metaphysical grounds, is nothing short of a failure to understand philosophy and the assumptions we make in order to be reductionists and scientific realists.
Even if they are right, there is no way, ever, to fundamentally prove such things in a scientific way.
Occam's razor does not cut deep when it comes to metaphysical possibilities.
Many people will say, "How can we possibly have free will if we know everything about how our brains and minds work?" and I say "How can you be so delusional to think we know anything about anything, really?"
In the popular Electronic Arts game series, The Sims, when we observe the characters saying things like "The particles here in Sim Land have given us a complete description of reality.
Now, for sure, we know what we are" we can not help but think how limited and assumptive the Sim scientists must be.
It would be a Sim philosopher who must exist to tell the other Sims, "We know nothing of reality but only how it appears to us and this is no necessary indication of anything. Play with science, do not make it your religion."
