The way people talk about it makes it sound indistinguishable from “random will”. If you believe in the existence of a “self” in any form, be it the chemical signals and electrical impulses in your material brain, or a ghost existing outside of space and time controlling your body like a puppeteer, you must believe in one of you believe in that self having free will.

Say you were to run a scenario many times on the same person, perfectly resetting every single measurable thing including that person’s memory. If you observe them doing the same thing each time then they don’t have this quality of free will? But if you do different things each time are you really “yourself”? How are your choices changed in a way that preserves an idea of a “self” and isn’t just a dice roll? Doesn’t that put an idea of free will in contradiction with itself?

Edit: I found this article that says what I was trying to say in much gooder words

    • dat_math [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      can’t measure or observe something

      maybe we’re talking about different things, but here’s where I’m coming from: modern experimental neuroscience has developed and continues to churn out new ways of probing self-organizing patterns in neural activity that have meaning encoded in them

      I’m thinking of the ghost as neural signals themselves and not their representations in a brain, where I’m modeling a conscious being as the pairing of the representations of said patterns and the feedback loops that perpetuate them, which is physical in the sense that it’s implemented in a physical machine, but is non-physical in the same way that these words have meaning in your mind: they’re signals.

      sorry if I’m being ambiguous/imprecise