Assuming, however, that the concepts of free will and free action are linked to some genuine and meaningful psychological phenomena, then the social benefits of belief in free will have further implications. These dovetail with my view that the reality behind the idea of free will is a mechanism of action control that evolved to enable humans to create this new kind of social life, namely culture.
HOW TO CONCEPTUALIZE FREE WILL
If there is an alternative to the deterministic causal universe, it might understand freedom along the lines of self-organization. There is actually considerable basis for thinking of free will in the form of self-organization in dynamical systems theory.
Here is the argument, though this is quite preliminary and pieced together, and I would welcome input from readers of the blog. Determinism is the view that causality is locked in: the laws of nature determine everything with 100% certainty, and the future is as set in stone as the past.
Against that view, we can think of the basic form of reality as including multiple possibilities, randomness, chaos, and the like. (In fact, reality seems somewhat chaotic and random at the subatomic particle level, indicating that our reality has organized itself out of the chaos but is still not entirely free of it.)
In total chaos, patterns occur accidentally ever so often, by random chance. One such pattern was the Big Bang, which self-organized a universe with natural laws, as one of the possible patterns that could occur by chance amid the random chaos of basic reality.
Physical matter has causality, as its organization, but it still tends to slip back toward chaos. Hence the drift toward entropy, also the second law of thermodynamics, and so forth.
Life, however, is a further step in self-organization. Each living thing demarcates a precise boundary between itself and the surrounding environment. You can dig up a tree and it is clear exactly where its roots and and the dirt begins.
Living things do not tend toward entropy. Life pulls relentlessly away from entropy. As Nobel physicist Ernst Shroedinger wrote, life is based on negative entropy.
One pattern of causality among living things is evolution. Evolution pulls away from randomness and entropy, toward ever greater self-organization. Things evolve to become more complex.
Agency is another step in the progress of self-organization. To evolve from plants and animals meant adding the capacity to move around. With multiple possibilities, the animal needs some kind of primitive agency, to tell its legs where to go.
Agency, which is largely connected to having a brain to operate your body, escalates through further evolution.
Human free will would then be a further step of self-organization - sort of like Agency 2.0. It is thus the continuation of natural processes of the sort that are most central to dynamical systems.
I think it's a plausible view. I don't see any definitive empirical evidence for or against. It broadly fits the observable facts.
In the end, the entropic thrust of physical matter is likely to prove stronger than life, as it does in every individual case, and the universe will revert back to random chaos, like it was before the Big Bang. But in the mean time, we have free will, relatively speaking at least.
