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IMHO, this paradox lies in the question, and not within the answer. To me, 'free will' doesn't even make sense as a scientific term. It is a concept that can't be defined in reality, something akin to "an apology". We can't prove or disprove the existence of something that is not physical. Free will is not a relationship of physical things, it is a human interpretation of these relationships, it depends upon humans to have meaning. It's a measure of a human context, that is all.
All that aside, this was interesting:
- A team of psychologists at MIT and the University of California at San Diego, who were puzzled by the suspiciously definitive results of many brain-scan studies on these topics, asked the authors of 55 such papers how they had analysed their data. The team reported in 2009 that over half the studies used faulty methods that were guaranteed to shift the results in favour of the correlations they had been looking for between mental activity and blips in parts of the brain. It’s worth bearing this in mind the next time you read about a brain-scan study which purportedly reveals how and why we do what we do.
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Yeah. Even if it were a thing, is there a difference bewteen the indescernible illusion of a thing and the thing? The perfect illusion is also a perfect replica, or just a very similar thing in-of-itself.
IMHO when it comes to abstraction and materialism, it seems like it often has to be one or the other. Extending too far from one camp always leads to absurdities, which just reveals how they are faulty concepts to begin with.
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Yeah, not sure I'd use absurdity as a litmus for veracity though :) I find quantum physics quite absurd (maybe that's just because I'm not a physicist). As an aside, my favorite part about the free will debate is that on one level, it is the very essence of an existential crisis that could shake you to the very core of your being (there is no 'you'!). On the other hand, you can just say "meh." and go about your day. Makes me smile.