I've noticed that when first confronted with the idea of the human mind as a product only of a physical brain operating under deterministic physical laws, people can easily leap to fatalistic conclusions, as if determinism ought to make humans helpless puppets or mindless robots if it were true.

Of course nobody actually believes this about humans, because the evidence against it is everywhere, in our culture, our technology, our personal lives, and even in our own minds.

So to the extent that compatibilism helps people to resolve that apparent paradox it is valuable. I think I agree with most claims and arguments made by compatibilism.

I still have to take issue with the claim that human freedom merits the label "free will", or that it makes sense to say we have <i>real</i> options or <i>real</i> choices of the kind that free will implies. I think we obviously make choices all the time. Despite how much this has been discussed, it still seems there is much confusion about the meaning of choice, and there is still need to clarify what it would mean to have *real* choice and "free will".

I agree there is something worth calling human freedom. Humans can respond intelligently to the environment and advance their own interests. We can envision new possibilities and then figure out how to implement them. We can lead satisfying lives and pursue happiness. Clearly this is freedom, freedom from the drudgery and monotony of being enslaved by the need to respond with mindless reflex to external stimulus.

But what is the source of this freedom? Is it really the will? To me it seems the source of our freedom is not our will, but has two primary sources that should be credited instead of our will.

First is our intelligence, by which I mean the complexity of our thinking, our memory and ability to accumulate knowledge, our abstract reasoning, our ability to use language, metaphor, recursion, analogy, association, etc. This gives us great flexibility to interact with our environment in ways that are good for us.

Second is our ability to learn. Even if our choices are determined and not free, our choices are very intelligent and take a great deal of information into account, so they are choices that are mostly good for us. But importantly we can take the results of our choices and learn from them, feeding them back into future choices to make them even better. So while I can't will myself to play the piano if I have never learned how, using my intelligence and ability to learn I can through a lengthy sequence of refined choices, through trial and error and analysis, gradually acquire that skill over time.

One might say that learning the piano requires discipline that only comes from the will. But if we carefully examine how our thoughts proceed in our own minds, it seems the will is more of an executive that focuses attention and guides the application of mental resources, but acts not on its own, but as a servent to larger goals, to our desires, our wants and needs, to our passions. Our will is often weak, failing to regulate our diet in the way we think is most healthy, failing to quit smoking or other addictions, failing to impose the self-discipline we think is needed to achieve important goals.

We can decide to strengthen our will, and like learning the piano we can over time with practice improve our will power. But this isn't easy, and we can often fail to achieve goals like this. Here too it is our intelligence making the abstract choice to strengthen the will, and our ability to learn that enables us to gradually build the habits of mind that can help our will overcome natural tendencies of sloth, addiction, or pursuit of pleasure. The will is more like a muscle obeying the imperatives of our needs and desires, and dependent on our intelligence and learning ability to accomplish anything.

The idea that our will is free, or that our freedom derives from our will, is part of a narrative adopted long ago. It seems on the surface like it must be true, but it doesn't seem to stand up to careful scrutiny. It really seems the term "free will" is inaccurate and misleading, while the term "human freedom" is more apt.

Regarding *real* choice, we need to distinguish between the choice we have when options are before us, and the choice we have made after we have selected one of the options. This latter case is obviously real and happens all the time, and nobody in their right mind would deny that we "make choices" in this way. The confusion comes in when we consider the former case: when options are before us, do we have a "real" choice?

What I think is meant by "real choice" is that given a range of options, we have a sort of frictionless or effortless freedom to select any of the options before us, with that freedom applying equally to every choice. Perhaps that is too strong. Perhaps to be a "real choice" it need not apply equally, but at a minimum include every option. But for simplicity lets assume a specie of "real choice" that applies equally to every option.

In a case like this, where we don't have enough knowledge to predict the outcome of the act of choosing, we can assign probabilities. So we can say that if the choice is real, in this case we have equal probability of choosing any of the options. At this point we can notice an interesting analogy to quantum mechanics, where the various options are like possible quantum states, and the choice before us like a wave function representing a superposition of those states. Note that no attempt is being made to say quantum mechanics plays a role in our choices. Nor is the intent to say that indeterminacy or randomness amounts to freedom. It's just a curious similarity, an analogy that might be clarifying for those who know a little about quantum mechanics. Following the analogy, making the choice is like measuring to determine the actual state. To say we have a real choice, or that we have free will, is like saying true indeterminacy applies to this system prior to the choice, that is, nothing can allow us to discover that a particular option is pre-determined prior to "measuring" or making of the choice. Not only do we not know and can't predict what the choice will be, but in fact the system itself does not contain any physical state that determines what the choice will be. To me this seems what "real choice" or "free will" would have to be: some aspect or element of human consciousness that could independently will this indeterminacy into a determined state. To say our choice is determined, to say that we don't have free will, to say we don't have a "real" choice, is like saying that locality and realism are preserved, that in this system there are hidden variables that, if we knew them, would allow us to know and predict in advance what the choice will be. This would make it not a "free" or "real" choice, but rather a selection of one apparent option that had been pre-determined by the physical state of the entire system.

Admittedly this notion of "free will" or "real choice" is influenced by dualism and contra-causal free will, but while we agree that this doesn't really exist, we should also be able to agree that in our subjective observation of our own mental experience it seems we are making choices this way. And this is why I think most people incorrectly feel that "free will" means this kind of radically free choice, the kind that it feels like we have subjectively. In fact some people, who believe they are representing compatibilism, argue as if they think some room exists in the gap between physical determinism at the neuron level and subjective mental experience that could enable this kind of "real choice".

Note that this example implies that there is a "moment of choice", an instant prior to which the result of the choice is not determined (or knowable), and after which the the result is determined or can be known. This seems impossible, because we are viewing one subsystem of the brain, and proposing that it is being perturbed instantaneously and non-deterministically by another sub-system of the brain, or else we are assuming dualism. If we expand the "moment of choice" to a larger more complex composite process of choice, during any time interval in which we can regard the mind/body as a closed system without external influence, it seems the same objections to calling it "free will" can be made. As the process of choosing becomes more complex, what happens is that the difficulty of predicting the outcome increases, the number of factors taken into account increases, the degrees of freedom for the system to deterministically arrive at a result that is to its own benefit increases. But the degree to which we can consider this process an isolated act of will decreases. The more complex the process, the more we expand the scope of what is included in 'the choice", the more involvement of disparate parts of the system, memories, emotions, learned behaviors, abstraction and reasoning, prediction of consequences, fear, worry, uncertainty, etc., the less it resembles something that can fairly be called "a controlled act of will". So we have degrees of freedom, but not really "free will" in the sense that something focused and willful controls the decision. What we have is human freedom introduced by the extraordinary flexibility and intelligence of a very complicated system to react to its environment in manifold finely nuanced ways. And we have a subjective mind telling itself it is willing the result. But we can't really identify the part of the process of choosing that can be called "will".

So if the mind really is entirely physical and deterministic, and neural networks and biochemistry represent the relevant physics, then in the sense just described it really is true that we don't have "real" choices, that in choosing, our will is not free, that the choices we make are the only ones we can make, and we could not choose otherwise.

These hypothetical facts are glossed over or ignored by compatibilism, as if they were unimportant. To me these facts seem important, seem likely to be true, and they tell us that at any given moment a human being does not have the freedom we like to think we have, but over time we have an effective kind of freedom that comes from our intelligence and learning ability. This human freedom is not derived from a part of our mind commonly identified as the will.