Good distinction on definitions of free will - I'd love to see
that expanded upon.
However the deterministic view *does* absolve responsibility for
actions if, for no other reason, humans are not rational
deterministic decision-making machines.
That's one possible *model* of humans but it's a model; humans
are more complex than that model. We do the wrong thing and we
think it's right. We know what's right and we do something else
instead.
Are all of these determined by our "internal wiring"?
It would, if all we were is internal wiring.
Where does the "push" for decision making come from. Reason? No.
Emotion.
Show me a computer model that accurately does the weighing of
emotional content and outputs same decision making.
On a gross psychological level, it's possible. Basic things like
stimulus/avoidance response and such I've modelled in just a few
lines of simple code with basic neural net weighings.
But what of our ability to hold simultaneously contradicting
positions?
It's likely we can map it out *after the fact" but can it be
used to predict the emotion--> reason connection effectively?
Also, "feels like a choice" vs "feels like it's determined"
would most certainly play a role in any decision making
processes. Also, consider this: no two humans are in the same
state, if one is to think of us as state machines.
It's just not possible. Too much variation.
Even IF we were deterministic machines, it's almost a useless
piece of information because two different people in two
different states utilizing two different perspectives,
histories, biases, etc, to use for predicting anything.
Maybe if computers were powerful enough. Maybe. Even then, they
couldn't predict the output of a human unless it was running
parallel with the human the entire time.
It looks like free will. it acts like free will. There's no way
to predict its output with accuracy. For all pragmatic purposes,
it's free will.
