I believe that human brains harness quantum uncertainty and chaos theory to combine stateful information (such as preference for chocolate icecream) and recursive processes to make 'free' decisions which aren't random and fundamentally unknowable to outsiders without destroying the human (similar to a quantum system which can't be measured in more than one dimension without destroying it).
At what point did the brain transition from not "harnessing quantum uncertainty and chaos theory to combine stateful information and recursive processes" to doing so? Do fish brains? What about the jellyfish nervous system?
My problem with these types of explanations is that they are so egotistical. We probably all agree that a rock doesn't have free will. Is there no quantum uncertainty and chaos theory happening inside a rock? What about in a solar system?
A rock certainly isn't going to surprise us in any time scale relevant for us. The processes shaping it will be more from the outside than inside it's boundaries. Certainly chaos theory and quantum uncertainty are at play, but the stone is rather just like a single pendulum which swings rather very predictably and humans seem to be more like dual pendulums which are so chaotic that they escape simulation beyond minutes.
We have come far to scan the brain for the manifestation of conscious decision making, but nobody serious is claiming that we can predict human choices from say 20 minutes before a decision is made. In the same sense that we can predict the weather now 7-10 days but would never think it viable to go for 100 day weather forecasts.
This phenomenon is certainly on a sliding scale and we might simulate rather well jellyfish, fly, and increasingly bigger brains, but the fundamental uncertainty just means we won't be able to get the outcome correct enough the longer we look into the future.
Our inability to predict something on an arbitrary timescale isn't the threshold for free will, right? Otherwise, we'd say tornadoes and hurricanes exhibit free will.
I believe that with perfect information, humans are predictable, but that doesn't make the will any less free.
Just because someone could predict that you would make a decision doesn't mean you didn't make the decision, it just means you're internally consistent.
We know that the universe doesn't permit perfect information. You have to pick if you want to know the speed of a particle or its location once you approach the tiniest scales (and various other trade-offs based on the fundamental uncertainty). Thus you can't predict perfectly how a system will behave.
Neuronal processes in the brain seem to be build in a way to amplify such tiniest scale difference to generate divergent outcomes from very similar sensory and memory inputs.
But you still get to make them yourself, too. If free will is synonymous only with unpredictability, than you'd necessarily have to make some choices that you don't want to in order to demonstrate free will, and that doesn't really make sense to me.
I figure you have the choice. You could choose to do otherwise, but you don't. If someone offers to give me a million dollars absolutely free, or to not do so, just because I could be predicted to take the million dollars doesn't mean I don't have the choice to reject it. I'm not being coerced to take it. It's just a very predictable decision.
I think you’re presupposing the existence of free will. Here’s a question for you: what explanatory or predictive value does the concept of free will have?
The goal of the concept of free will is to explain that there is a possibility of an event to be 'caused' by a human (or another life form sufficiently able).
Without the concept of free will you would have to assume that the cause for the event is originating from something else (a calculation of sorts based on previous states of the universe is a commonly stated alternative).
Free will walks the line of being a physics-based process which is neither to easily deterministic such as stone being heated in the sun or too random such as a radioactive element emitting a radioactive decay at a random/statistical time but still localizes the cause for an event in some assemblage of atoms such as a living being.
Exactly, this is my thinking as well; I've mentioned the recursive concept in another comment before.
And I suspect the question of free will is not resolvable until the hard problem of consciousness is solved. The cells in our bodies may not have free will, but we might. The issue involves characterizing what exactly does or does not have free will, which is bound up with the question of consciousness.
I believe that human brains harness quantum uncertainty and chaos theory to combine stateful information (such as preference for chocolate icecream) and recursive processes to make 'free' decisions which aren't random and fundamentally unknowable to outsiders without destroying the human (similar to a quantum system which can't be measured in more than one dimension without destroying it).