Re: Freewill
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In terms of the common definition of free will, as some (usually supernatural) nondeterministic phenomenon, I think the answer "no" stands out as the most rational. There is certainly no evidence to the contrary, and that's about all I need. Of course, it's impossible to completely disprove free will, and given our current level of knowledge we can't even say that free will is necessarily implausible.
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Why be so generous with the metaphysicists? I demand evidence that consciousness can be even provisionally modeled as an idealized Will. (That is, a self-contained entity that deliberately chooses among discrete possibilities.)
Honestly I think it's more meaningful to debate whether a video game villain powered by a random number generator has free will.
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Good point. His choices are built into the system, but they arent made for him by any game designer. I think you'd have to hypothesize a real random number generator (which is a huge can of worms) but I suppose the free will advocates must do the same.
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