Did Neanderthals have it? Do dogs have it? Do chickens? Do trout? Do wasps? Do ladybugs? Do lice? Does a paramecium? Does an amoeba?

Where do you draw the line at what has free will?

Does it extend to non living things, like atoms? How about protons? Quarks?

Where is the line, and why is the line drawn where you think it is?

These days i was doing a lot with ai and i kept thinking if a non free consciousness is even possible since an ai can give a lot of output that even in its production seems conscious like, but the big problem is ai cant chose its thought or goals. Than i thought can we as humans chose pur thoughts and goals? I saw the other day the markov law who pretty much proved that something like a rigid, purely reactive chain of fixed probabilities cannot account for true, self-directed goal generation. But for me personally thats not really enough.

When we look closer, thoughts themselves are not what consciousness is, goals are. Thoughts just happen to us. We can’t fully control or predict which thought pops into our head next (that’s why current LLMs can fake consciousness so well through pure text generation). But goals are different. True consciousness seems to be the ability to independently set an objective, evaluate the “Now” against that objective, and then steer toward it. If you can’t choose your goals by yourself you actively can’t be a consciousness, and if you can choose your goals you are free in a way.

I think the way our body developed is that it used this random/free objective-setting mechanism and started clamping it through emotions and other harnesses, with the ability to change the clamping so it becomes useful for survival. The body doesn’t hard-code the goals. It continuously restricts (//late edit i dont mean restrictions in the sense that the body completely blocks certain goals, what I mean is that the body influences you through something like a moral or emotional compass and assigns different weights to possible decisions and makes some groups of decisions less heavy) the available range of choices the consciousness can make. If a chosen goal is too costly or harmful, the body shifts the boundaries until a goal appears that is still freely chosen inside the new frame, but compatible with the body. Inside that frame the consciousness still has genuine choice, and it decides whether and how much weight to give to past experiences only if they help the current goal.

Importantly, the body is not a perfect clamper. It is blind in many respects and produces plenty of false positives. Emotions and tension often clamp the wrong things, overreact, or clamp ranges that aren’t actually useful (or even harmful) for survival. The clamping is crude, noisy and frequently off-target, which leaves even more room for the core to set goals the body didn’t “intend.”

This way the body strongly constrains us, but the innermost act of setting the goal remains free and the body’s imperfect, blind clamping makes that freedom harder to fully suppress.

I used AI for some rephrasing (English isn’t my native language), but every thought is my own. Im really open for any critique im not a neural network or philosophy god so i might have missed out on some fundamental stuff which would prove me wrong really fast.

The manipulation argument (Mele ,2006),

Pereboom’s four-case argument (2001, 2014)

Van Inwagen’s consequence argument (1983)

Galen Strawson’s basic argument (1986, 1994)

Fischer’s no-forking-paths argument (1994)

Levy’s luck pincer (2011)

Ok... I need to make this 100 letters long so that it can be posted... I guess the mods want total elaborated posts that people may get bored reading and completely miss the point of what is being said.... that being said and out of the way .... Free will only exists while you are awake. Here is a plain example... you can choose not to breath... once you are no longer conscious you lose the free will, your subconscious (lack of free will) takes over and you get back to breathing.

It isn't that free will exists, it is just that it isnt 100% all the time choice...

Arguments tend to force a thinker to believe certain things. However any thinker can pick his own dogmatic beliefs based on any justification he can freely choose to use.