Examining dilemmas: The free will problem

Issues with developing a hierarchy of intuitions can probably be pulled into sharper focus by examining dilemmas. I will use as my example the free will problem, purely because it was suggested to me by my supervisor. He said that Kant had written that our intuitions could inevitably pull us in two different directions, such as that our actions were caused and free.

We need experience to form reliable intuitions, and all our experience surely tells us that our actions are free. What experience tells us that our actions are caused? We could imagine science one day discovering the causes for our actions, but this will hardly happen anytime soon, if it ever does. Maybe free will is simply an illusion based on the fact that we do not know the causes for our own actions, but this is unfalsifiable to begin with. As Paul Davies notes, emergent properties can appear in systems as they increase in complexity. Barring complications presented by quantum theory, physics can be entirely deterministic, but psychology cannot have to be simply because a mind inhabits a brain made of matter. In other words, it's not just the building blocks that count, it's also how they're put together.

How, therefore, can our actions not be free? This surely must be a paradigmatic assumption, and indeed the assumption that we do not have free will is impossible to practise consistently, because of our propensity to make moral judgements.

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