Some people are “allergic” to conclusions.
Here is an unbelievably simple argument why “agency” (sometimes referred to as “free will”), as most people understand it, cannot possibly exist:
0. To have “agency” in any meaningful sense that preserves our intuitions means that the true source of your actions is you choosing your actions
1. Your actions are reactions to input from your environment generated by the brain
2. You did not choose how your environment is set up
3. You did not choose how your brain is set up
hence:
(★) You do not have “agency” (or “free will”) in the intuitive sense.
Note:
• It is not relevant if the influence is mostly genetic or mostly societal
• It is not relevant if the environment and/or the cognitive mechanisms that translate the sensory inputs from the environment to actions are law-like, random, chaotic or anything in between
• It is not relevant if your behavior is “unpredictable”
• It is not relevant if your behavior is very complicated
• It is not relevant if (some) humans (sometimes) also have the capacity to react to imagined environments or if you are able to imagine a different version of reality
• It is not relevant if you are able to reflect, learn, grow and change with time
• It is not relevant if you have (what you perceive as) reasons for your actions
• It is not relevant if there can be a feedback loop between your actions changing the environment in a way that further changes your actions
• It is not relevant if physics, neuroscience or other scientific disciplines are incomplete (that is, in your opinion)
• It is not relevant what interpretation of quantum physics is “correct”
• It is not even relevant if you believe in some kind of “dualism” because even if you had a “soul” (or whatever it is you believe in), you could just replace the word “brain” with the thing you think does the processing of input/selection of actions and the conclusion would remain the same
and so on.
The only relevant part is that what you perceive as your own “wants”, “wills”, “desires”, “urges”, “feelings”, “preferences”, “volition”, “reasons”, “ideas”, “opinions”, “beliefs”, “personality traits”, “skills”, etc. are also the result of an environment, the initial conditions of which you had no control over, and a physical brain, the wiring of which you have no control over.
The way most people conceptualize their own actions is as if there is a “they” separate from the environment, acting on it from some kind of an abstract “outside”, however, in reality, we are embedded in the environment. Those sensations that you call your “inner world” were formed throughout your life from external input and “feedback” from the environment; the only reason you prefer, say, tasty food to unbearable pain is because you have experienced eating food (the texture/flavor/color/smell/etc., of which you did not choose) using your organs such as tongue, palate, teeth, etc. (none of which you chose) and processed it using your gustatory cortex and other brain parts (which are made of billions upon billions of microscopic, naturally-occurring “nanobots” we call “neurons”), the wiring/function/behavior of which you did not choose, and because you have experienced unpleasant stimuli (the nature of which is, yet again, a result of the environment containing objects/shapes/phenomena you did not choose such as sharp edges, fire and falling on a hard floor) and your brain has a specialized system (the wiring/function/behavior of which you did not choose) that compares these two things and rewires itself to promote actions that seek the former, but avoid the latter.
At no point whatsoever has something beyond this interplay between the brain (meaning, a collection of “nanobots”, i.e. neurons, interacting according to complicated chemistry, some of which is law-like and some of which is stochastic) and the immediate environment entered the equation.
Even you imagining counterfactual, hypothetical scenarios is “just” the brain doing its thing.
The thing you call “possibilities” is, literally, all in your head. This has nothing to do with our “current” theories of physics, neuroscience, etc. because empirical science is all about finding mechanisms/regularities in nature and/or classifying phenomena based on relatedness, but no one will ever discover a “mysterious” mechanism that will let you behave not according to anything, not even randomly (not that humans are even random).
The point you need to understand is:
(★) Any explanation of how and why you “want”/“desire”/“prefer”/“choose”/etc. will, necessarily, contain low-level, bottom-up, “third person”, non-anthropocentric, mechanistic (even if partially stochastic) terms.
If you do not accept this part, I am sorry, but it seems like our disagreement is much deeper than merely whether “free will” exists. Apparently, we do not agree on what it even means to actually “explain” something. An explanation cannot contain those same entities, the nature of which it attempts to elucidate.
That is why comments like “there is not a scientific consensus against free will” (not that consensus is even relevant to whether something is true or not) make absolutely no sense; “science”, i.e. empirically testing hypotheses and trying to identify regularities and mechanisms in nature, cannot prove “cause-and-effect” exists because it relies on the presupposition that it does.
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Otherwise, experimentation becomes impossible.
The very idea that there can somehow be an explanation of how you have the “beliefs”/”urges”/”wishes”/etc. that you do and how external input is being translated in your specific, idiosyncratic neural connections to measurable actions on the environment without describing it as some kind of natural, replicable process is unscientific.
At any point in time, you either behave according to some rules or you behave according to no rules whatsoever (in other words, “randomly”, i.e. not obeying anything predetermined), but, logically, there is no third alternative.
Doing something because you follow rules, even if you perceive it as “having your reasons”, is not “agency” in the intuitive sense.
Doing something because you rolled dice and then followed what the dice indicate is not “agency” in the intuitive sense.
Doing something sometimes because you follow rules and sometimes because you rolled dice is not “agency” in the intuitive sense.
Ergo, no matter what is the “ultimate” explanation for why you do the things that you do, it cannot, logically, contain “agency” in the intuitive sense.
This argument is so simple, so obvious, so self-evident under even a tiny bit of scrutiny (just ask yourself, “how come I even want the things that I do?”) that some clever teenagers can grasp it, yet, many people will go out of their way to deny this.
They will say anything from nitpicking a specific framing, to bringing up irrelevant distinctions/sub-distinctions (“but the dice might be loaded”, as if a random process with possible outcomes which are not equiprobable is not still random and as if rolling a loaded die and following what it indicates is “agency” in the intuitive sense), to committing the so-called “God-of-the-gaps fallacy”, to abandoning logic altogether (declaring they are “free” because they have said so), to calling the argument “too simplistic” (as if there is such a thing as an authority on how complex explanations ought to be).
Most “compatibilists”, like the late Daniel Dennett, know very well that they cannot deny points 1–3 of the unbelievably simple argument because it would mean they will deny empirical science, basic logic and so-called “naturalism” so, instead, they attack point 0 by declaring that “it does not matter since the intuitive notion of ‘agency’/’free will’ is anyhow not that important for the things we want”, which, for example, is exactly what Dennett attempted doing in his book “Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting”.
Look, no matter what, you are going to live your life.
Your life will end up being whatever it is it ends up being.
It does not mean that “fatalism” is true, that is, that no matter what you do you will get the exact same outcome; it is very obvious that if I take a right when I leave the house I would get to a very different location than if I would have taken a left, but the point is that whatever it is I end up doing is “just” the interplay between an environment I did not choose and my brain’s chemistry which I also did not choose and that, hence, everything that I do, even when I plan for the future, hone a skill, reflect on life, recognize that I do not have “agency” in the intuitive sense, etc., is reactionary based either on some rules/regularities in nature, randomness/luck or some combination of these things.
You can redefine “agency” as many times as you want, it cannot change the fact that “agency” in the intuitive sense is meaningless because the source of all your actions is the interplay between two things (environment+brain) you had no control over.
Even if you disagree with everything I said so far, the causal chain is still:
..→you read my words (which you did not choose)→
→they are picked up by your senses (which you did not choose)→
→the information is being passed around in an intricate pattern in your brain (which you did not choose)→
→your brain translates this information processing to emotions, thoughts and actions that reject my argument (you did not choose how your brain does this or why the end result is those specific emotions/thoughts/actions it comes up with)→..
So how come people can deny the supernatural, accept logic and a scientific/mechanistic image of the universe, yet, reject the conclusion? Truth is:
(★) Those individuals do not want the conclusion to be true.
The real question is “why don’t they want this?” and though I do not believe it is my place to “psychologize” them, I do think the explanation is similar/has big overlaps with the one I have given in my essay about so-called “morality”.
I understand that it can be counterintuitive (like I said, it is the intuitive notion that does not make sense), but there is no guarantee anywhere that our intuitions map cleanly to reality. Either way, the interplay between my words and your brain will produce some kind of impression/opinion/reaction, the generation and nature of which you had no control over.
