Previously, I set out two distinct phenomena which could be referred to as "free will". I here continue to contrast them, and attempt to show why one must be the case, while the other cannot be.
Phenomenological free will, I contend, is obvious, self-apparent, and completely, empirically true. It is very hard to find someone who will argue that they do not choose their own actions on a daily basis. It requires extremes of brain-altering drugs and abusive behavior to get someone to lose the sense that they are in control of their actions (note, however, that it is in fact possible to do so). The impression I get is that when most people hear someone argue that there is no such thing as free will, they think that the argument addresses phenomenological free will. And, of course, if this were the case, then arguing against free will would be lunacy. It's just that, as with the term "consciousness", no one bothers defining what they mean, so people end up talking at cross-purposes.
The very idea of metaphysical free will, on the other hand, suffers from incoherence in a non-magical universe. If there isn't a soul or spirit pushing and pulling the cords in our pineal glands, then where does this locus of decision reside? One cannot simply say "the brain", because the brain is a monstrously complicated system, segmented into an even more monstrously complicated collection of subsets, down to the connections between individual neurons, each portion of which considers input from sense organs, bodily nerves, and other portions of the brain. There is no "place" where a decision is made. The brain works as a whole system directing action, and conscious awareness of such decision-making is limited and after the fact.
At any level of description — physical, chemical, interneuronal, conscious — what happens in the brain is either completely random or theoretically predictable. Quantum effects do occasionally tip the scale and something weird happens, but unless you posit that that random weirdness is magically motivated, it can in no way be said to be willful. The interactions between neurons are far less random, and can be described and calculated fairly accurately, and interconnected systems of neurons can be isolated by structure and function. So, again, there is nowhere for this metaphysical decision maker to reside.
From a psychological perspective, the case is even more dire! You do what you are inclined to want to do. You take that action which the sum of your habits and motivations does in fact motivate you to take. If you chose to go running instead of eating that tub of ice cream, it's not because you are a free agent in a libertarian universe capable of making any logically possible action. Rather, your sense of guilt over not exercising recently, your motivation to look and feel better, and your desire to be healthier as you get older overcame your desire to eat delicious ice cream and feel aesthetic pleasure for a few minutes. You had these various motivations wrestling inside you, and your brain finally computed that the former motivations were more pressing than the latter, and sent the balance of these desires to conscious awareness so that you could write your "decision" to go running into your conscious narrative.
If you try to explain metaphysical free will from a psychological perspective, you get hopelessly muddled (I can't even formulate a coherent argument for such a thing in my mind), and the only fall-back I can see is on Descartian magic — souls and spirits and such.
Libertarianism (in the philosophical sense mentioned in the previous post) suffers from exactly the same problem as metaphysical free will. What would it even mean to say that the universe "could have gone a different way"? A quantum event could have had some other outcome than it did? Well, sure, in a counterfactual way. But since quantum events are truly random — that is, there is no way on principle to know which way they will come out — all you can possibly say is that it will take some value but you won't know what that value is until you actually measure it. So if there was in fact some metaphysical agent generating our wills in a libertarian universe, without magic powers its determination of a quantum outcome would happen simultaneously with its measurement of that outcome, so it would be beholden to that value no matter what. This is as bad as being beholden to a completely pre-determined outcome! It is worse, in fact, because in the quantum world you can't even make a prediction!
So, I dispose of libertarianism as hopeless. And I dispose of a metaphysical compatibilist view as meaningless at any level of analysis. Since this post is already almost twice as long as I expected it to be, I will hold off on my argument about phenomenological free will, and of my opinion on the nature of our will, until the next post.
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