Free will probably exists in humans

Just to clear up any confusion, I do consider humor, intelligence, and compassion to be "real". However, they are labels in that the concepts describe particular patterns we observe in humans. A pattern only exists in the sense that it is recognized by an intelligent agent. Whether free will exists depends on your precise definition of it. My has given his: A decision is free if and only if there are no outside forces influencing the decision. I will argue, however, that this is a poor definition of free will on the grounds that it is self-contradictory. The common conception of free will does not forbid outside forces, in fact a big part of free will is the ability to overcome them. Obviously our decisions are based, wholly or in part, on our experience. This leads one to the conclusion that we are very complicated computers that take in data, process it, and spit it back out. Perhaps there is a little non-determinism in there, but again, randomness is not free will. A computer doesn't have free will because it will only do what an outside force (i.e. a programmer) tells it to do. If the programmer is lucky, that is. According to my opponent's definition, for a decision of a human being to be free it can't have been influenced by outside forces. If I put a gun to your head and tell you to vote for Comrade Josef, nobody will say that you voted for him out of your own free will. If Billy Mays says "BUY SOME OF THIS MOTHER F***ING GOD D*** OXI CLEAN" and you do just that, we can't say that decision was free because it was based on someone else's opinion. If you drop acid and then decide to test your theory that humans can fly if they just jump from a high enough place, that is not free either as it was based on external chemicals altering your brain. But "no outside forces" means "no outside forces", and this includes information gained from the senses. However, to even make a decision in the first place, never mind if its "free" or not, the agent must already have a conceptualization of the world. This means the agent has in its mind a system of mental objects, the qualities they possess, and their relationships between each other and between the senses. How is this framework built? By sensing, of course. It is not possible for an agent to form a worldview without a mechanism for viewing the world. Otherwise, all of these concepts would have to be put into the agent at its creation, which would require that forbidden "outside force". Without this mental framework, the agent's mind would be blank, and thus we wouldn't really be able to call it a rational agent in the first place. In summary, to be a rational agent, it must have been influenced by external forces. You can't define free will as the ability of a rational agent to make decisions that are not based on outside forces. This is similar to defining omnipotence as "The ability of a being to create a stone so heavy that it can not lift it". The phrase itself is contradictory, and if expanded it would include the requirement that something both be X and not X at the same time. I happen to believe that you can not say "X can not be Y" if you can not even conceive of a being who could. In this example, we can not conceive of a rational agent who can make decisions that are not based on outside forces. This is why I believe "free will" to be a pattern of human behavior, which is necessary because it is functionally impossible to model the behavior of humans without it.