Human beings have free will

Thanks to Con for the debate. I will have to drop his philosophical argument for the non-existence of free will mainly because I forgot that this would be the last round of debate and Con would not have a chance to respond to it. Conduct should go to Con for that and my earlier forfeit.Now on to the arguments which, of course, I will not concede to Con. :)The Law of CausationI will just note a seemingly insuperable difficulty with this line of thought:Prima facie, Con has a self-effacing/refuting position here Con replies implicitly rely - even if he is unaware of it - on a common argument for physicalism - the argument from causal closure. Which basically states that all physical effects have physical causes. [1] Con says that things like, for example, thoughts are non-physical but then, on the other hand, wants to argue that non-physical things cannot affect physical things. See the tension here? This would mean that thoughts don't affect physical things. This would mean that Con's thoughts don't ever cause his bodily behaviors or actions. This would mean that Con's thoughts (namely his view that free will doesn't exist and that determinism is true) didn't actually cause him to type up this debate on the existence of free will. This seems, to put it in the most mild terms possible, wildly counter-intuitive and implies that Con (or any of us for that matter) never does things because of his thoughts; that our behavior is never affected by our thoughts. This violates very common-sensical views on mental causation and would lead to a form of epiphenomenalism. [2] If Con is willing to bite the bullet and accept that our thoughts never cause our actions then he is free to do so - although that would be hard to accept considering the fact that that implies that Con would see the force of my arguments (i.e. think they are sound), and change his behavior accordingly (which is something his argument leads him to deny).The Arguments from NeuroscienceHonestly speaking, unless I am missing something very crucial (which is quite possible), I don't see how Con's counter-objections have much force. Objection 1First, Con dismisses Libet's concept of "free won't" as a "last minute reconciliation with moral responsibility". I think this may be unfair to Libet because, as far as I know, Libet was a convinced determinist; he thought his experiments provided a powerful reason to believe determinism. I think he was just recognizing that there is some crucial wiggle room when using his experiments as an argument for determinism.Second, I don't see how this counters my objection at all. I asked for a reason why those brain correlations should be interpreted as the decisions to act themselves instead of a considering/intention/urge to act. There doesn't seem to be a reason to prefer Con's interpretation as opposed to mine and mine is entirely consistent with some models of free will. Con arguing that this line of argument can be rebutted in the same fashion as "free will" doesn't answer my original point. Con is focusing on the wrong part of my critique.Objection 2Con's main point here to seems to be that if these brain events are interpreted as intentions/considerings/urges leading to decisions to act and not the decisions to act themselves then we shouldn't be able to predict with such accuracy which decision a person will pick. I will just ask one question: why should we expect that these decisions to act wouldn't be very predictable if there was such a thing as free will? If I give my 9 year old niece an option of between choosing to eat a happy meal from McDonalds or caviar, I can predict pretty accurately that that she will go with the happy meal 9 times out of 10. I'm not sure how that vitiates against free will.And a minor point that Con's argument seems to turn on: the notion that free will is "uninfluenced". Now, no free will theorist that I know of argues that the will has to be free from all kinds of influence in order to truly count as "free". They only argue that it has to be free from certain kinds of constraints. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states: "Philosophers who distinguish freedom of action and freedom of will do so because our success in carrying out our ends depends in part on factors wholly beyond our control. Furthermore, there are always external constraints on the range of options we can meaningfully try to undertake. As the presence or absence of these conditions and constraints are not (usually) our responsibility, it is plausible that the central loci of our responsibility are our choices, or “willings.”" [3]And wikipedia states: "Free will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long been debated in philosophy. Historically, the constraint of dominant concern has been the metaphysical constraint of determinism. The two main positions within that debate are metaphysical libertarianism, the claim that determinism is false and thus that free will exists (or is at least possible); and hard determinism, the claim that determinism is true and thus that free will does not exist. Both of these positions, which agree that causal determination is the relevant factor in the question of free will, are classed as incompatibilists. Those who deny that determinism is relevant are classified as compatibilists, and offer various alternative explanations of what constraints are relevant, such as physical constraints (e.g. chains or imprisonment), social constraints (e.g. threat of punishment or censure), or psychological constraints (e.g. compulsions or phobias)." [4] Now, what those certain acceptable constraints or influences are is surely a matter of intense dispute, but that there are acceptable influences and constraints isn't a matter of serious dispute.Argument from Rational DeliberationHere Con's reply is that people are mistaken about their perceptions - in this case their perception of them rationally deliberating. The problem is, simply, that my argument was much stronger than the claim that people need to perceive or believe that they are rationally deliberating in order to rationally come to conclusions - it's that there does need to be such a thing as free will in order for our rational deliberations to even make any sense. If we are wrong in our perception of rational deliberations as free then we are wrong in thinking that we ever rationally deliberate! This leads us to the conclusions that we never come to believe anything for rational reasons! That's - to echo what I said earlier - wildly counter-intuitive to say the least.Putting this all together I argue that there is no reason that has been put forward in this debate to think that free will doesn't exist and there has been at least one undefeated argument to believe that it does exist.Thanks to Con for the debate and the readers for reading!Sources[1] http://plato.stanford.edu...[2] http://plato.stanford.edu...[3] http://plato.stanford.edu...[4] http://en.wikipedia.org...