No, you have to be the ultimate source of your decisions. If anything else in your past, such as the initial condition of your brain, fully determined your decision, then clearly you did not.
Words like “you” are far more problematic than words like “consciousness” that you eschew.
After all, even a young infant shows unmistakable signs of awareness, while the “I” self-concept doesn’t arise until the middle of the toddler stage. The problem with free will is that there is no actual “you” entity to have it. The “you” is simply a conceptual place-holder built up from ideas of an individual body and its sensations.
No, you have to be the ultimate source of your decisions. If anything else in your past, such as the initial condition of your brain, fully determined your decision, then clearly you did not.
Words like “you” are far more problematic than words like “consciousness” that you eschew.
After all, even a young infant shows unmistakable signs of awareness, while the “I” self-concept doesn’t arise until the middle of the toddler stage. The problem with free will is that there is no actual “you” entity to have it. The “you” is simply a conceptual place-holder built up from ideas of an individual body and its sensations.