Question
What is the freewill problem? And why is the free will problem (as far as I've read) considered a problem. What would be a good source to read up on this (to understand viewpoints that counter mine)?
Excerpts and My Reading
I've been investing time on this and I can't see what's going on here with the free will problem:
The classic problem of free will is to reconcile an element of freedom with the apparent determinism in a world of causes and effects, a world of events in a great causal chain.
I find the problem statement bizarre. Imagine someone saying we must reconcile "The Theory of Spontaneous Generation" with Francesco Redi's observation. There are other introductions like this
But are we really in charge of our actions? Is how we act truly up to us as things such as the past, the nature of the universe, even many of our own beliefs and feelings, are not? The problem of whether we are ever in control of how we act, and what this control involves, is what philosophers call the free will problem.
Firstly, let's recognize freewill is an effective tool in modelling human behavior (in economics). Now, even in the deterministic case, if I construct a boundary between your physical body (system 1) and the environment (system 2). You may evolve deterministically but the net time evolution must take into account your physical system and not just the environments.
We naturally think that action – what we ourselves do or refrain from doing – has a special moral significance. A vital part of ordinary morality centers on individual moral responsibility – on the idea that people can be accountable for how they live their lives. Now what we are immediately responsible for in our lives is our action.
Okay let's back up for a moment. Morals are essentially a computation of some sort. We perform these computations for evolutionary reasons. To oversimplify, imagine a society where murdering your neighbor was allowed. Would such a society sustain. No. Is the computation of asking how can we ensure system 1 (your physical body) does not harm other beings in system 2 a meaningful computation. Yes.
I seriously don't see why is this considered a problem.