Some thoughts on free will
Do humans have free will?
I think that is a nonsensical question asking about a nonsensical concept.
Let us examine a common kneejerk reaction that almost all of us had at some point when asked that question. If the universe is deterministic, then every event that has ever happened and will happen was predetermined at the beginning, and thus we cannot have free will. If the universe is probabilistic, then everything that has happened and will happen is random, thus we cannot "have" free will. Even if we avoid pondering the nature of the universe itself, our lives are basically shaped entirely by our environment - our parents, our friends, an endless stream of ads and content. Thus we cannot have free will. The kind of person we are is a result of either design or randomness, and what kind of person we are is going to determine what decisions we make. Thus, you guessed it, we cannot have free will.
See the problem? Not only does this kind of thinking carry unfavorable implications concerning reward and punishment, but it is also entirely irrelevant to our daily lives. After all, when was the last time you felt determinism making a decision for you? In fact, what does truly having free will even imply? The ability to make decisions independent of previous events and external context? That's not something that can conceivably exist, and so it's unsurprising that thinking about it leads to convergent and frankly rather unhelpful conclusions.
We should try a different perspective. I think a much more apt phrasing is whether we experience free will. That shifts the discussion from arguments on whether free will empirically exists, to something that is actually tangible and applicable to our daily lives. Actually, we should go a step further and let go of "free will" too. There is no point in using that term if its very existence is impossible by definition. Not to mention that it's a very overloaded term anyway. I much prefer the term "volition". With all our changes, the question now becomes: do we experience volition?
Even if it may seem like pointless semantics, that is a huge difference. With a simple change in phrasing, the determinism of the universe and volition now became compatible concepts that can be reasoned about separately, which makes the discussion simpler and more relevant. Rejoice! Now, whether we experience volition is not something I can answer for other people. I know for sure that when I go to the store, I can decide whether I buy the apple juice or the orange juice. I can decide what kind of games I make, I can decide whether to spend my time doomscrolling or meditating, and I can decide whether to pick up the random trash I see on the street on Saturday morning. Even if all of my decisions were predetermined at the beginning of the universe, it has no effect on my experience of volition. Imagine a computer program in a made-up programming language that goes like this:
if x is divisible by 2 say "x is even"
else say "x is odd"
Of course, the program is deterministic. Every single output for every single input of this program is predetermined at the time of writing the program. I can know for sure that if I input the number "2198128", the program will output "x is even". If I input "3", the program will output "x is odd". However, the program is still making a choice. If you were that program, you would look at x, and decide, by your own volition, whether to output "x is even" or "x is odd". You wouldn't know that you were programmed to be that way. This is exactly how humans operate, except that instead of one input x, we take in trillions of past and current inputs. There may be a universal architect or some other power that created the world such that when I'm presented with a certain trillion-dimensional matrix of inputs at this exact moment I will make such and such decision. Regardless, I still experience making the choice myself.
Somehow I feel that this kind of reframing is not really more satisfying to most people than the original empirical thought process. It feels kind of dirty. Like wrapping an ugly piece of code in a function call and putting it in a separate file so we don't have to look at it anymore. Still, I think there is something beautifully humble about this experience-centered approach.