A deterministic world and free choice

A recent article in the NYTimes talks about free will, specifically the tension between the existence of our sense of responsibility for our actions and the fact that we are as people, shaped in who we are (and therefore in what decisions we make) by forces that are beyond our control, i.e., genetics and the environment of our development, and that this actually makes our actions (which are a product of who we are) not in our control.

Both of these stances are valid: we DO feel a responsibility for our actions, even in spite of believing that we as people are who we are because of factors beyond our control. However, I sensed from the beginning that the conclusion was flawed because both premises, although seeming to contradict each other, actually didn't because they spoke about different levels of existence that we tend to confuse. When a problem arises in which two facts about reality appear to contradict each other, I tend to think that there is actually a confusion of logical types. In other words, the confusion occurs because two things that are different, or exist on different levels are made to seem the same. In this way, my thinking is indebted to the work of Gregory Bateson.

The article equates the person who is the result of purely physical processes with the person who makes decisions-decides to do or not to do things. Is this actually the same person?

One commentator (Ivan) replied that the article confused inanimate matter with a conscious thinking human being. I think that Ivan is in the right direction with this. I would pose the question: Does the fact that a sequence of events follows the predictable laws of physics preclude it from occurring because of an intentional choice? While the answer is not a clear no, it's also not at all clear how it could be clearly yes.

I am inclined to think that physical processes may follow physical laws, and that our experience of an intentional domain just occurs in parallel to this. The one troubling conclusion of this is that it implies that although our decisions are intentional, the way that they emerge in our body is also always in keeping with the laws of physics.

Therefore, if we could see every process in our nervous system, and predict our subsequent actions, how would these processes be affected by this knowledge? Say for example that a friend came up and asked us to pick a color, and we looked at the state of our nervous system and found that the system was such that we would most certainly choose green. Once we knew this, we could try to stump the system and decide to choose brown instead. If both the laws of physics and our intentional decisions fully overlap with each other, then our change of choice to brown would have had to correspond to those neural changes that could be read and interpreted as implying that we would end up choosing brown.