There’s no empiric test or observable property that tells you whether someone or something has free will.
Given a naturalistic model of free will, it is possible in principle to tell whether something has free will. It is generally difficult in practice, since testing naturalistic theory of FW tends to involve investigating whether a) there is real quantum (or other) indeterminism, and (b) exactly how the brain works.
In general, you can;’t generalise about the testability of things like consciousness and free will, when there are a lot of different theories and definitions of both.
In general, you can;’t generalise about the testability of things like consciousness and free will, when there are a lot of different theories and definitions of both.
I agree: in fact, you usually can’t generalize about any property of thing X for different, contradictory or unrelated, definitions of “X”. Here, like in the subthread about consciousness, I wasn’t trying to generalize.
I was using the definition used in the comment I was replying to, which—implicitly but clearly—talks about a deterministic universe and a supernatural free will. I should have made that explicit.
Given a naturalistic model of free will, it is possible in principle to tell whether something has free will. It is generally difficult in practice, since testing naturalistic theory of FW tends to involve investigating whether a) there is real quantum (or other) indeterminism, and (b) exactly how the brain works.
In general, you can;’t generalise about the testability of things like consciousness and free will, when there are a lot of different theories and definitions of both.
I agree: in fact, you usually can’t generalize about any property of thing X for different, contradictory or unrelated, definitions of “X”. Here, like in the subthread about consciousness, I wasn’t trying to generalize.
I was using the definition used in the comment I was replying to, which—implicitly but clearly—talks about a deterministic universe and a supernatural free will. I should have made that explicit.