The Buddhists noticed a very long time ago that if you examine your own thinking in enough detail; nothing about it actually looks particularly free. I consider this to be maybe the strongest argument against free will in many respects, because once you've seen that you don't have free will firsthand you can't really un-see it.
The second strongest argument would just be the lack of anyone's ability to actually describe a conception of free will which can be coherently distinguished from one's actions being determined purely by a combination of prior cause and random chance.
Notably both of these arguments would be completely unaltered even in a world where you knew a God, souls and the supernatural existed. So they aren't really naturalistic or materialistic arguments.
It's hard to debate free will because it's so inherently introspective. When I "examine my own thinking in enough detail," it just confirms ever more profoundly my initial conviction, that my own freedom is utterly indubitable, more so than anything else, and far, far more so than the highly conjectural and extrapolative truths of the natural sciences. I can't prove that *you* have free will. But that I have it is so clear, and so foundational, that if you deny me that you may as well give up any notion of proving anything else to me, because you will have demanded a self-doubt so thorough and profound that none of my senses or impressions or feelings could ever be trusted again.
The other problem if, if there is no free will, ten where does anything come from? If there is free will then someone, God or angels or people or some combination, could have chosen to make the world as it is, and that's why it's there. But without free will everything becomes completely arbitrary.
Did you go through the exercise in the video? I don't really expect you're going to understand why people think their thinking doesn't look free without really considering things in the ways he does in the video. He's a pretty good public speaker and it's exactly the kind of sort of introspective subjective topic I'm not going to be able to do justice as well as he can. You sort of have to slow down and focus on your thoughts in a somewhat meditative way, so listening to the exercise will always be better than trying to read about it.
I think you unfortunately may not have heard what I consider to be by far Sam Harris's best argument against free will: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCofmZlC72g
The Buddhists noticed a very long time ago that if you examine your own thinking in enough detail; nothing about it actually looks particularly free. I consider this to be maybe the strongest argument against free will in many respects, because once you've seen that you don't have free will firsthand you can't really un-see it.
The second strongest argument would just be the lack of anyone's ability to actually describe a conception of free will which can be coherently distinguished from one's actions being determined purely by a combination of prior cause and random chance.
Notably both of these arguments would be completely unaltered even in a world where you knew a God, souls and the supernatural existed. So they aren't really naturalistic or materialistic arguments.
It's hard to debate free will because it's so inherently introspective. When I "examine my own thinking in enough detail," it just confirms ever more profoundly my initial conviction, that my own freedom is utterly indubitable, more so than anything else, and far, far more so than the highly conjectural and extrapolative truths of the natural sciences. I can't prove that *you* have free will. But that I have it is so clear, and so foundational, that if you deny me that you may as well give up any notion of proving anything else to me, because you will have demanded a self-doubt so thorough and profound that none of my senses or impressions or feelings could ever be trusted again.
The other problem if, if there is no free will, ten where does anything come from? If there is free will then someone, God or angels or people or some combination, could have chosen to make the world as it is, and that's why it's there. But without free will everything becomes completely arbitrary.
Hard to bridge this.
Did you go through the exercise in the video? I don't really expect you're going to understand why people think their thinking doesn't look free without really considering things in the ways he does in the video. He's a pretty good public speaker and it's exactly the kind of sort of introspective subjective topic I'm not going to be able to do justice as well as he can. You sort of have to slow down and focus on your thoughts in a somewhat meditative way, so listening to the exercise will always be better than trying to read about it.