I'm listening to a lot of podcasts these days (commuting by bus takes up about ten hours of my week which would otherwise be unproductive). My favorite continues to be Point of Inquiry, and I'm making my way through the archives. One episode which was especially good was an interview with Susan Blackmore.
In the first half she talks about how she developed from true-blue believer in psychic phenomena into a skeptic. The second half concerned the nature of consciousness, including an idea which I had never seriously considered, that is: is freewill an illusion? She seems to think so. It's a pretty shocking notion and certainly hard to wrap your head around.
The argument goes something like this. If your thoughts are simply an iteration of the current state of your brain, then there really is no independent 'self' or purely mental entity. It just seems like there is. "The mind is what the brain does." This is a purely mechanistic view of consciousness. But of course your brain is aware of itself, and aware that it is aware of itself. To my mind, that feedback loop creates 'me', and I can accept that it is entirely virtual, but wholly dependent on the hardware.
So to get to the crux of the argument, how can 'you' really make an independent decision, if the next state of your brain is purely a matter of chemistry and physical law? If time jumped back five minutes, every thought you experienced (or decision 'you' thought 'you' made) would be exactly the same, wouldn't it? Some make the case for quantum-scale weirdness at the root of consciousness, but there doesn't seem to be good evidence for it, so the state of your brain would be entirely deterministic from one point in time to the next.
I'm not convinced, so will try to make a counter argument.
I've thought for a long time that there is some process of chaos involved. Of course my mind is a mess, but I mean chaos as in chaos theory, which describes processes that are extremely sensitive to initial conditions, such that two close states can diverge extremely rapidly.
The thought process may be like that. There is always some inherent noise, even in macro-scale systems, so if you were to go back in time, your thoughts would not unfold exactly the same as before.
I think the system as a whole (the hardware of your brain, and the software of your mind) can be said to have freewill, if this feedback loop can affect the next state.
