Naively, (ordinaristically), when I make just about any action, it feels like I am making that action. I want to say that the ordinaristic is reality, and so there we have an understanding of "free will". I, myself, choose to do something, and I know this intuitively. Anything any ontologistic person says to the contrary is in some sense false.
Not all actions that I perform feel like they are of me. Speaking for myself, I would say that there is a distribution where far on the left tail there are a few outlier moments that do not feel like me at all, which are some kind of possession, and a few outlier moments far on the right, where I 100% make a choice, in a moment of pure decision. Most of life is somewhere in the center part, where I am more, or less, automatic and more, or less, voluntary. It's easy for me to bracket off the far left experiences, and then I want to say that all the rest are me.
But a psychologist (whether a scientist working with instruments and data, or an empath working with ordinaristic observations and intuitions) could predict my behavior, and predict the free decision before I (who am inherently conscious) experienced it. In this podcast, Lisa Feldman Barrett (or Sean Carroll? -- one of the two) mentions that heart rate goes up before you stand up. The brain works ahead of the moment. Suppose the rate went up before I consciously decided to stand up. Then we would have evidence that I didn't make the decision.
From another angle, suppose that I have made my choice to pursue my ultimate value. There are many things of worth to choose from, but I have chosen (have been called by, and have answered) heirloom tomatoes. (I turned down ziggurats and frequentist statistics, among many other competitors for the position in my heart, or in the seat of my ambition). Now my whole life is governed by the search for, and consumption of, heirloom tomatoes. Because I have fully committed to heirloom tomatoes, every decision that I could ever make has been made for me. It would seem that I have no free will.
However, in every moment, I continue to affirm heirloom tomatoes. Mangos appear on the kitchen counter, but I turn aside from them to eat the heirloom tomato that is my ration of glory for the day. I continually affirm that I have my value of heirloom tomatoes, and that is a kind of choice. Sometimes that choice is tested more intensely. Maybe the price of heirloom tomatoes has gone up by 100% and I see that I will have to cut back in some other part of my life. Maybe someone enters my life and I (seemingly) fall in love, and my new love wants me to appreciate her instead of heirloom tomatoes. If I continue to live my life like a machine, seeking heirloom tomatoes, then in that moment where I wrestle between my lover and my tomatoes, whom shall I serve? -- I have chosen heirloom tomatoes. An outside observer might be able to predict me perfectly, based on the simple formula "1) Utility equals finding and consuming heirloom tomatoes; 2) Maximize utility." But in order for me to have been so predictable, I had to make perhaps an arbitrarily large number of decisions (every day, putting my shoes on in the best way so that I can go out and make money to buy heirloom tomatoes), decisions which were somewhat automatic through habit, and which were easy to make; as well as a few decisions of intense concentration, as I chose which way to go, as I fought the intensity of the pull of frequentist statistics, ziggurats, and romantic love.
Let's return to the psychologist who can accurately predict my free willed decisions before I am aware of them (and thus before I can make them). I would guess that what may be going on is that the decision as to what I will do, say, or think, is indeed made for me before it enters my consciousness. But whether or not that decision is mine has to do with whether I consciously affirm it. So my behaviors that are out on the left tail of the distribution of intentionality aren't me at all -- I've been possessed. But if my preferences were different, they would have been me. Granted that many behaviors flow in and out of my body and consciousness, I do have reflective moments where I can choose (moments that are further to the right of the distribution), where I can choose to shape what my preferences are. So if I store up now, in a moment a year from now I will freely choose a certain thing, affirm it as my own in a split second, even if the decision was one that my body was making before I knew what was going on, and it was one that followed perfectly from the machinery of my life's events, like a juggernaut plowing into a giant pool of water. My affirmation that something was of me, or my disaffirmation, can affect the decisions and actions I make in the future.
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