I had to bend over and listen closely to hear him make his argument though, since he was doubled up on the ground as a result of my knee striking him so hard in the groin in reaction to his punch. From what I could make out through his whimpering it sounded like some sort of silly attempted reductio ad absurdum of a straw man version of compatibilism couched as a joke that wasn’t even amusing the first twelve times I heard it, so I lost interest pretty quickly. I put some ice on my black eye and it’s fine now though.

Absolute lack of free will would make us automatons, like a regular signal going through the same bleeps and blorps (though the analogy is that sentient beings automatically follow laws of physics, not that they repeat their actions).

Absolute free will would mean making decisions without basis on sensory input, it would be a random signal. However, I believe we do act randomly when newly born, and that that’s how we learn how to act with purpose. You cannot be a moral actor with this kind of free will (if it were permanent).

Meaningful free will is like a signal with a message. Unlike the other two kinds of messages, this kind is worth listening to. We choose our actions based on sensory input (including the influences of past perceptions), so it’s not random, but it’s not entirely regular either, if such free will exists. Oddly, this concept of morality seems to require a striving toward regularity, trying to become an automaton. (There may be an extra analogy possible here, involving zipping a file. To be moral, you must be as predictable as possible, or the most zippable.)

Maybe we think we have free will because we never get all the way from randomness to regularity.

…it says in it that identical twins as they are growing up often try to act as independently from each other as possible in order to be recognized by first their parents, and then their other siblings, and then their friends and acquaintances. It sounds like they artificially create a slight variation on how they really see themselves so they can each have their own identity.

Later when they become adults and get some spatial separation they naturally give up that self induced differentiating. The similarity in lifestyle, professions and political views between them often become profound at that time even if there is not much communication between them. If you think about this they really are behaving conceptually exactly like quarks in a nucleon. That is, there is asymptotic freedom when the twins are in close proximity. This would be the high energy state when the quarks are close together. In the low energy condition when there is almost complete spatial separation their actions then become highly correlated and similar.

It might seem like this is stretching analogy to the point of ridiculousness. I just happen to think that these patterns keep showing up at larger and larger scales because quantum interactions in biological systems are perhaps what makes the difference between inanimate (or animated objects) and what we define as life. What we define as life is just the arbitrary line we have come with for large objects that are defined largely by quantum principles and indeterminism rather than classical behavior.

Professor Robert Kane teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and received his PhD from Yale in 1964.

Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists September 1966:
http://people.uncw.edu/puente/sperry/sperrypapers/60s/125-1966.pdf
(This is a pdf of a photocopy.) The essay evolved into Sperry’s book Science and Moral Priority.

Sperry asked “Is it possible … in principle, to construct a complete objective explanatory model of brain function without including consciouness and mental phenomena in the causal sequence?”

Sperry said that his “mentalist” position was then in a tiny minority, but per Sean it seems to have gained since then.

While I believe in free will, we should take note that there are already machines that process information (with embedded feedback mechanisms), consider various alternatives, and then select a course of action (i.e. they “make choices”). Chess computers are an obvious example. Humans engage in the speculation of the counterfactual position that we “could have” made different choices in the past, whatever our actual choices were. So long as human choice selection algorithms were chaotic (i.e., incredibly sensitive to initial conditions) to explain the high degree of (seeming) variability in human decisions, I don’t see how we can definitively state that the counterfactual is true.

The impression that we have free will in making choices, could simply be a byproduct of our remembering that we were considering different possible choices, much as a chess computer considers various possible moves, even though e actually had as little ability to defy our biological programming as that chess computer would have had to defy its program.