"there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams." is quite a strong argument against mental dualism and traditional ideas about free will.
But research also supports the plasticity of the brain/mind and we know that we can build/change habits and personality traits (apparently) through conscious effort. Perhaps "free will" should be defined more specifically as the ability to consciously shape the deterministic systems that are our minds?
Exactly, which is why this article is tripe. It basically boils down to, "the driver does not control the car, the steering wheel controls where the car goes, not the driver". That's true, but the driver controls the steering wheel, or at least has influence over it.
You are indeed conscious, and do indeed have thoughts. What the article discusses is that the overwhelming evidence seems to show your thoughts are generated by deterministic/proabilistic physical processes, and that in fact your conscious thoughts occur after your decisions are already made and often serve only as post-hoc justifications of what you already did.
Consciousness is just another component in the car. It doesn't determine or influence where the car is going. Perhaps the most valuable part of consciousness is it provides an effective way to use reflection which can communicate data about the internal state of the car to the other cars. (Often this data is objectively inaccurate, but still serves the interest of the car or the fleet.)
How can we be certain that consciousness does or does not have an effect on this car? Assuming it is appropriate to stretch Tarski's undefinability theorem and Gödel's incompleteness theorem to problems of consciousness, it would be impossible to prove which is true (without breaking your mind).
You do realize those aren't the same thing, right? In fact, they're basically opposites. Deterministic is "if/then", while probabilistic is "maybe". Something is either deterministic or probabilistic, and it matters which it is.
In your metaphor, consciousness is the learning system which is used to generate the model which drives the car. Our brains are semi-supervised learning, and our models get retrained when they drift far enough.
> You do realize those aren't the same thing, right? In fact, they're basically opposites. Deterministic is "if/then", while probabilistic is "maybe". Something is either deterministic or probabilistic, and it matters which it is.
I say "deterministic/probabilistic" because I am thinking about physical laws; i.e., what we know of physics and quantum mechanics. The intent is to exclude the idea that consciousness is somehow above the rules of cause and effect. It probably would be safer to just say "deterministic" to prevent all the magic-shoehorning people sometimes attempt with QM, but I was being pedantic.
> In your metaphor, consciousness is the learning system which is used to generate the model which drives the car. Our brains are semi-supervised learning, and our models get retrained when they drift far enough.
No, in my metaphor, consciousness is totally unrelated to learning, as the article suggested. In my metaphor consciousness is basically just part of the network stack.
I recommend you read the works of the scientist upon which my pseudonym is based (not the Unicode part, that's just a dig at HN for the type of characters they allow)
Briefly, you cannot fully describe a complex system using merely the axioms of a less complex system (or more simplistically, all metaphors are (subtlety but importantly) wrong).
This is especially true of quantum mechanics, but in general it's a good rule to keep in mind. It prevents comfortable but naïve assumptions like "physics is just Newton because that's what we can perceive", or assuming that cognition is just summing neurons together.
In every aspect of life, you can safely assume that It's More Complicated Than That.
Of course, there's Chaos theory. That deals entirely with deterministic processes so complex their outcomes can only be determined via probabilistic methods.
It is much simpler. We do not perceive time headon but only as it passes. In reality, everything is in the past, so logically speaking we have no control as far as 'free will' is concerned. It boils down to how aware one is in "the moment" and at that point there is mostly aquiescence.
A self-driving car is probably a better thing to compare to. And in that case, most people would probably argue that it's behavior would be deterministic, even if it could learn in some capacity.
Although, after making that point, is there really a difference between a self driving car and a car and a driver in your example? Probably not. They're both being driven by something, and the answer shouldn't change based on what the driver is.
The burden of proof is on you to show it is in fact supernatural. Were it not, literally anything could be claimed as truth.
At this point in time, the overwhelming majority of evidence indicates that consciousness is deterministic. If you disagree, you'll need to provide concrete proof to the contrary.
At this point in time, the overwhelming majority of
evidence indicates that consciousness is deterministic.
The burden of proof for the proving the lack free will would have a prerequisite of knowing all aspects of physics and universal forces, which would allow accurate predictions of the future from any given point in time.
Regardless if we're a brain in vat, can we not enjoy the ride?
The alternative to "deterministic" is not "supernatural". This is a false alternative that leaves out all of the other possibilities, including the option that "deterministic" is not an accurate description of causality in the first place.
It could go either way, but so far the biology and neuroscience point to quantum indeterminism effects having little to no role in the brain.
Still I do not see how indeterminism would actually enable free will. Would an automa without free will acquire it if a higher counter was added to its brain?
Burden of proof error, those claiming it is supernatural must prove it. "not supernatural" is the null hypothesis and is backed by mountains of evidence in the field of neuroscience.
"Burden of proof error, those claiming the NSA is spying on somebody must prove it. Not spying is the null hypothesis and backed by mountains of evidence"
The problem is that I wasn't making a claim either way. I only requested proof of a definitive statement made by OP.
> Burden of proof error, those claiming the NSA is spying on somebody must prove it.
Which would also be the correct burden of proof. Burden of proof isn't about who's making the claim, it's about whether the claim is positive or negative. You can't logically prove a negative, i.e. you can't prove the NSA isn't spying on you, you can only prove they are. It only takes one example to prove they are, but no number of checks of their equipment can prove they aren't because you might not have seen them all and they could be hiding some. The same applies to claims of anything, regardless of which side is making a claim, the claim itself can be looked to, and phrased in the positive and that's where the burden of proof lies. So whichever side is on the side of "X is true" suffers the burden of proof, never the side that says "X is false".
If I say God doesn't exist for example, the burden of proof still lies upon those who believe he does despite my poor stating of my side of the argument because God exists is still the positive claim and thus the only one that's provable.
> You can't logically prove a negative, i.e. you can't prove the NSA isn't spying on you, you can only prove they are.
That's simply not true. You can prove a negative, it just takes a lot more effort.
Imagine if computer scientists took the same approach:
"Hey everybody use our new crypto, there are absolutely no flaws in the design"
"Prove it"
"Nope, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that there is a flaw"
That type of "burden of proof" argument is not helpful or productive in real life, which is why algorithm/hardware designers go to great lengths to mathematically prove there are no flaws in their design. It's called Formal Verification. If you toss the burden of proof on your customers, you'll have no customers.
I can certainly challenge any claim that anyone makes, positive or negative, and I have no obligation to spend time and energy proving or disproving anything. It all comes down to who wants the other party to change more.
Outside of math, the only place where proofs exist, you're simply mistaken. In the real world, there's no such thing as proof, only evidence, and in the world of evidence only [1]positive and thus verifiable claims suffer the burden of proof. This isn't debatable, this is a fact that you either understand or you do not, it isn't a matter of opinion.
> I can certainly challenge any claim that anyone makes, positive or negative
Yes you can, but it doesn't make your challenge logical. If you challenge someone to prove a negative claim, you are logically wrong and are demanding the impossible. Yes, they may have made a negative claim, the correct response is to say the claim itself is invalid and rephrase it to a valid form and then determine where burden of proof lies.
If you say "Fish definitely don't have dreams", I'll say that can't ever be proven, there may be one mutant fish somewhere that does dream and you can't examine them all and thus the claim is simply logically invalid. So the claim should be rephrased as "fish dream" and whoever is on that side suffers the burden of proof. However, just because it hasn't been proved that fish dream doesn't mean it's true that they don't, what it does mean is lacking evidence that they do, the answer is unknown.
This whole argument is silly. Apparently the burden of proof is on whomever you want it to be on. The burden of proof is on you? Simply rephrase the argument and suddenly it's on the other person.
OP's original claim was "Consciousness is not supernatural." Here, I'll define supernatural as "beyond our understanding of the laws of nature". Thus, OP's claim rephrased is:
"Consciousness is within our current understanding of the laws of nature."
Now we have a positive claim, and the burden of proof is back on OP.
> Apparently the burden of proof is on whomever you want it to be on
No, I've been very clear how to deterministically determine it, you're not listening or responding to anything or any point made; You're having the same argument with several people yet are unable to admit you're wrong; so we're done, you don't know how to converse or the capacity to change your mind when shown your mistakes.
> No, I've been very clear how to deterministically determine it
Oh yes, you've been very clear indeed. "All" I have to do is prove that consciousness is supernatural in order to be right. And how do I do that? You've basically cornered me with an impossible task by shaping the semantics to be in your favor.
You want proof that consciousness is supernatural? Just wait until you die and then you can marvel all day long at the fact that you can still think without a physical body. I'll reserve my "told you so" until then (~50 years?)
> "All" I have to do is prove that consciousness is supernatural in order to be right.
No all you have to do to be right is not demand impossible proofs of negative statements. The correct answer to a claim that "consciousness is not supernatural" is say it's an invalid claim as it's impossible to prove a negative statement except in maths. Done, simple as that. Negative claims are invalid and ought simply be rejected out of hand. Only falsifiable claims are valid claims, this is basic science, if it isn't falsifiable it's garbage.
> So whichever side is on the side of "X is true" suffers the burden of proof, never the side that says "X is false".
Fish definitely don't have dreams.
Dark Matter isn't real
There are no undiscovered artifacts left in the amazon jungles.
There are no sunken ships in the seas that we are not aware of.
By your logic nobody can contest any of the above claims without the burden of proof being on them. That's great. It means I can say anything negative I want as truth and then everybody else has to do the work to disprove me.
Please review the HN guidelines, which include this:
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3.
I appreciate the concern, and I'm sorry, but I can't control my actions. Everything I do is deterministic. It doesn't matter what the "HN guidelines" say, my current actions have already been prescribed millions of years ago. I was destined to call OP's statement bullcrap since the beginning of time. Like the article says, I have no free will.
Certainly! I'm not arguing for any supernatural quality of consciousness. Instead I'm suggesting that free will may be defined as our (apparent) ability to influence the cycle of stimulus-response. We are (or at least I am) conscious, which seems best explained as a product of this cycle occurring. Consciousness may have a top-down influence that can affect the deterministic chain of events. I suppose the answer lies in whether or not we are responsible (even in part) for physical changes in the brain. Which seems hard to prove...
Edit: impossible to prove if we consider this a self-referential first order logical system
As external observers, I think we could equate free will with nondeterminism or randomness. If a system can choose arbitrarily between more than one state with absolutely no outside influence, then by all appearances it has free will regarding that choice.
It's more difficult if we have to consider the internal, subjective state of the system. A radioactive particle probably doesn't experience anything we could identify with when it "chooses" to decay. And the experience we imagine to be free will could in fact be entirely deterministic, even if other aspects of the universe are nondeterministic. But if we can rule out any kind of nondeterminism in the universe, then we can rule out free will.
I kind of feel the exact opposite: free will could only be meaningful if it was completely deterministic.
I mean, think about it for a second. You have a choice between A and B, and you freely choose A. From your definition it seems that if I rewound time to that moment, you might choose B instead. But it's the same situation! If I freely choose to take a walk this morning because it's nice out, I goddamn mean to go out. No matter how many times you rewound time, I would want to go out every single time. It isn't random: there's a reason why I'm doing this, and reasons are never random.
If free will is nondeterministic or random, then I don't want to have free will.
The key difference is whether that reason is entirely internal to you or it's the result of external influence. If you always take a walk, an observer could infer that by some arcane law of physics, the sun forces you to take the walk - and they might not be far off.
What I mean by nondeterministic/random is there is nothing someone could know about you, the sun, and the rest of the universe that would let them predict with certainty whether you'll go for a walk or not.
The supernatural ability to rewind time seems like cheating, to be honest. But if that were possible and everything always went the same, then perhaps we could rule out free will (depending on the nature of this time reversal mechanism).
> there is nothing someone could know about you, the sun, and the rest of the universe that would let them predict with certainty whether you'll go for a walk or not.
Nothing someone could know about me? If someone knew everything there is to know about me, I sure hope they would be able to predict everything I will do. Free will doesn't mean freedom from my own nature.
The only way to be perfectly unpredictable is to act at random and without reason. If you act for a reason, then in principle, that reason could be known by someone else, and they could predict your actions. I think that's acceptable: I don't feel that in order for my choices to be free, my nature and my reasons must be unknowable to anyone but myself.
> But if that were possible and everything always went the same, then perhaps we could rule out free will
According to your definition, yes. Not according to mine. So I guess we made the OP's point ;)
If someone can predict everything you will do, they can manipulate events so you will do their bidding according to their predictions. That doesn't leave any room for free will. Of course if they're part of the same fully determined system, then they're also just doing what they were destined to do. You would feel like you're making your own decisions, and they would feel like they're manipulating you, but it's all illusion.
I don't think that's relevant. It may be true that we do not have free will in prison, nor in that very contrived scenario you've cooked up, but that has no bearing on whether we have free will or not when we aren't imprisoned or manipulated.
It would seem to me that the act of choosing isn't but deciding which alternative is preferred. And so impossible to separate completely from prior conditions or influences. So the question would then become what does "determined" mean in your definition?
If a person's choice is mostly determined by the state of their brain at the moment of choosing, would that count as a "prior condition"?
It would mean the choice is mostly determined by their "self", but the definition you give isn't clear about whether that would count as free will or not.
An agent's ability to do and not do without external influence or coercion.
The other side of this though is if the agent believes he or she has the ability to do or not do, but actually doesn't, is it still free will? An example being you enter your office with the intention of working for five hours. Without realizing it, the door locks behind you from the outside, leaving you effectively trapped. Even if you never attempt to leave the room, are you staying at your own free will?
I agree that "An agent's ability to do and not to do without external influence or coercion." in the context of a social or political theory of free choice.
But in simple model, of just a world, where one only has configurations of atoms (or configurations of some substance or etc), there's nothing uniquely determining what's internal and what's external, what's an agent and what's not. So "free will" winds-up achingly ill-defined/under-determined here.
I think your definition is further relevant in that a lot of arguments confuse an ontological model and with a social/political model. And this could well be natural - as social beings, it seems like we tend to both model the world and see agents within it and so saying "in this model, you have choice but in this other model, you and choice don't exist" is highly counter-intuitive to an average human.
I think if you accept a materialistic ontology, you have no choice* but to accept that you have no real choices - instead, your choices are illusions - every action you take is purely a function the gears of the universe turning (cause/effect).
* some people "choose" to believe in Compatibilism, which I consider a cop out.
Most of the reasonable definitions I've heard of for what it would mean to have 'choice' can work with Compatibilism, so I don't consider it a cop out. What definition of free will and 'choice' are you using that causes the problem?
A algorithm can choose something (e.g. netflix will choose a particular film to recommend), and it doesn't cause anyone to worry about free will.
My favourite way of thinking about 'free will', is that it is what it feels like from the inside of an algorithm that is choosing.
The problem is not merely ontology, but the definition of free will itself. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a reasonably long page on compatibilism. "Reasons-Responsive Compatibilism" is an interesting take on the subject which is worth familiarizing yourself with, if you are interested in the subject.
I had this revelation when I was 10. Then about 6 months later I realized that the "grand equation" (didn't know about state machines at that age) was irrelevant as I would never be able to see/know all of it (at least in my lifetime).
Consequently, people have "effective" free will - because the knowledge space "to know all outcomes" is too vast to control/comprehend completely.
Even if every action is purely a function of the gears turning, you still have state. As soon as you have state (memories/mood/etc), you have some level of free will in the immediate sense.
Event X happens. How you react depends on your state of mind.
Same problem as with coding. As soon as outputs are not wholly dependent on inputs, and they can have side-effects, all bets are off. Anything could happen.
But your state is also deterministically a function of your prior experiences, per this model. If you consider the input the entire stream of events, rather than each individual event, the output stream will be deterministic even with state.
Internal state makes understanding the output more difficult: your output is now a function of the input plus the internal state. However, it does not make it freer: the same input paired with the same internal state will always produce the same output.
But if your actions still could change randomly with your personality, memories and everything else that defines you how would that allow for free will?
Say the universe is perfectly deterministic. You could look into the future by simulating everything perfectly but why would that prohibit free will? Most people wouldn't argue that an all knowing god would mean free will is impossible, why is this different?
> Most people wouldn't argue that an all knowing god would mean free will is impossible, why is this different?
I'd argue that an all-knowing God is something that can't really be reasoned about. It's the introduction of an infinite value into the discussion (or maybe more like a division by zero?). You end up with logically contradictory statements when describing the properties of such a being.
But isn't it essentially just taking away time as a factor which is pretty much what predicting via determinism would do?
Maybe the general definition of free will most people seem to go with just doesn't deal with weird edge cases because it basically developed to fit reality.
I would disagree that we're better off. Well, maybe some people would be. But personally, that information has actually had the ironic effect of making me more effective at using my 'free will'. It's easier to try and be something other than what you are if you believe you think you have more control than you actually do, and that's a potentially huge waste of energy.
I don't think disbelieving free will requires nihilism. It's not that there's unfreedom of the will, it's that the idea and its converse never made any real sense.
Doesn't the observation that people who believe in free will act differently than people who don't demonstrate that free will exists? I'm perfectly willing to accept that we have less free will than we think we do, and that there's a physical basis for our mental processes. But why should that mean we have no free will at all?
Not a good analogy. I'll put it another way: People who believe they can make decisions for themselves act differently than people who don't. Are the former not exercising some level of control over their actions? The belief itself is neither here nor there. It's the fact that it makes a difference that I think argues for the ability to control one's impulses to some degree. Is that not free will?
I think it's actually a pretty good analogy. The vast majority of people I know, regardless of whether they believe in free will or not, cannot help but act as if they do. I'm one of them. I think there's little correlation between belief and action in this particular issue, even more so than when it comes to belief in demons.
But perhaps I'm not getting exactly what you're trying to say?
It demonstrates that different internal mental states influence actions in predictable ways. I don't think that it kills the concept of free will, but I don't think that it provides evidence for it, either.
What we've learned through neuroscience is definitely invaluable, but it's not like this is a new idea even in the philosophic community. It's telling that the article opens by quoting Kant, who, as Nietzsche said:
> Kant's joke - Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the common man, that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in support of the popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people.
The idea of free will is a "popular prejudice" that has been supported almost entirely by this type of philosopher. There is a quick way to identify them: the appeal to intuition as the supreme arbiter of truth. Most of western civilization believed in free will (in part for reasons of theology), therefore the belief in free will was inculcated in the populace, therefore philosophers found their intuition ultimately verified the existence of free will and used their incredible intellects to rationalize what that confused idea even was and how it worked in the face of obvious paradoxes.
Many philosophers, for thousands of years, did not accept these arguments. I quote Nietzsche because he is eminently quotable:
> Of these "inward facts" that seem to demonstrate causality, the primary and most persuasive one is that of the will as cause. The idea of consciousness ("spirit") or, later, that of the ego [I] (the "subject") as a cause are only afterbirths: first the causality of the will was firmly accepted as proved, as a fact, and these other concepts followed from it. But we have reservations about these concepts. Today we no longer believe any of this is true.
Nietzsche was in some ways more of a psychologist than a philosopher and is worth reading on those grounds alone. In fact, according to Nietzsche, philosophy is mostly interesting as a reflection of the philosopher's health and therefore his psychology.
I think The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and A Genealogy of Morality are very readable and thought-provoking without going into esoteric ism or experimental style like Thus Spake Zarathustra. I prefer the Kaufman translations, but I understand there are many new, possibly better translations available now. Translation can make-or-break Nietzsche - he was one of the best German prose writers and makes use of a lot of wordplay and neologisms.
The first quote was from Gay Science - I grabbed the second of Wikipedia, but I was sure it, or something to the same effect, was also in Gay Science. I don't have a searchable copy of my favorite translation, unfortunately, but Nietzsche talks a lot of psychology in Gay Science.
"Free will" is just a phrase that people made up to rationalize their desire for retribution, punishment, and forcible conversion.
People who steal more when it is suggested that there is none probably suffer from the same condition that people who feel that people who don't share their religion are inherently unethical suffer from: axiomatic ethical principles, rather than ethical principles that they derive from axioms.
edit: The most interesting positive thing I've ever read on the existence of a thing that we call "free will" is How Brains Make Up Their Minds[1] by Walter J. Freeman[2], a person who I think has gotten closest to the mechanics of how "consciousness" is automated. I don't mean to say that it's convincing, because for me it wasn't; but the number of contortions that it takes for him to make his point in the face of all of his physical theory is astounding, and possibly the best case that could be made.
And he died last month, which I didn't know. How sad.
I strongly belive the universe is for all intent and purposes casual [1], I reject dualism and accept that free will objectively doesn't exist (in fact I don't even think you can rigourously define it without invoking supernatural entities).
Still I have no problem to accept free will as a subjective experience, the same way I accept love, fear, hope, despair, and other states of mind, including consciousness. They are just the way our mind work, byproducts in a way. That doesn't mean that in principle one couldn't imagine mind without them, but it would be alien to us an we would probably not even recognise as intelligence.
I guess that makes me a compatibilist.
[1] modulo quantum indeterminism which seems to have surprisingly little effect to the macro world.
This article presents determinism as certain. That's not the case.
In terms of fundamental physics we know probabilities are determined, but the exact outcomes are not. There's strong evidence that this isn't a matter of us being ignorant of some hidden deterministic state (Bell's inequality experiments) but rather is fundamental to how our universe works, though it's not a totally settled debate. Whether this gives an escape hatch where our brains are capable of free will is way too complex a question for me to think it'll be settled empirically any time soon, but I personally suspect it's true in a faint way. We're mostly reactive, but have some way to influence those reactions over time.
It seems a false dichotomy in the article that either we have "free will" or we are driven completely deterministically. No chaos? No probabilistic? No subtlety....
The problem goes even deeper than this. It's not merely a false dichotomy but a false continuum. The implication is that minds are machines, and that as machines they may be, at one extreme, deterministic (like a software program that doesn't use `rand()`) or, at the other extreme, non-deterministic (like a software program that does), or, somewhere in the middle, "chaotic" (like a software program that doesn't use randomization but is sufficiently complex to produce results that seem magical).
But surely we believe in "free will" not because we observe it in a lab but because we experience it directly. Pick up a menu at a restaurant. Sure there is mechanistic cause and effect going on in your selection—memories, sights, smells—but there is also the direct experience of choosing. Whatever free will is, it has to do with this experience of bringing a cause into the universe essential ex nihilo, from within yourself.
Science is always compelled to dismiss these individual and personal experiences and perceptions, and as science rightly so. But as people we can take them into account. And so we should. To dismiss the sense of "I" that makes us, in fact, people is to cast away perhaps the most important part of our world. We retain a sense of choice, of free will, not because it's a compelling illusion but because it is in fact in large part what we are and what we recognize others to be. Be careful with that word "illusion": you can call something an illusion, but you then have to account for where the illusion came from and why it functions so powerfully. I'd say that free will is not an illusion so much as a thing that science deals badly with and is therefore tempted to dismiss. Well, dismiss free will from the laboratory, sure, but don't pretend we aren't free-willing things or you'll be left with nothing but a lab, populated by not-quite-people.
> but there is also the direct experience of choosing. Whatever free will is, it has to do with this experience of bringing a cause into the universe essential ex nihilo, from within yourself.
Is this sort of what is meant with 'qualia'? I could never quite wrap my head around what that concept means, in what context, and what its value is.
Yes I think that's more or less it. You can describe the entire mechanism of how an eye, optic nerve, and brain system sees the color green. In an ideal world you could explain that mechanism in absolutely detail, down to the molecule, down to the particle. Yet even if you did you would have said nothing about the most important thing about seeing the color green, which is the actual experience of doing so. That experience is what they call qualia. You can have the experience without actually seeing anything—you can dream it or imagine it, for example—which suggests that the experiencing is more fundamental, maybe more "real" in some sense, than the mechanism. Yet modern people, particularly of a scientific bent, have a dangerous tendency to emphasize the mechanism over the experience, even to the extent of denying the experience, and with it, the "person" part of people.
The reductionist falacy. It is ignoring the fact that the constituent systrms, while built on the operations of subsystems, evolved specifically to overcome the behavior of those sub systems.
I must be missing something. If coming to doubt the existence of free will causes people to behave less responsibly, doesn't that demonstrate that those people do indeed have free will?
Why the animosity toward free will, I wonder? I can see why it's not helpful to neuroscientists. It's not a neuron, after all. It's not a material thing, and so the material sciences don't reckon with it. But why does that make anybody want to dismiss it from reality generally? Is there an assumption that if it can't be studied in the lab, it can't exist? Boy I hope they're teaching scientists better than that these days.
But research also supports the plasticity of the brain/mind and we know that we can build/change habits and personality traits (apparently) through conscious effort. Perhaps "free will" should be defined more specifically as the ability to consciously shape the deterministic systems that are our minds?