Yeah, I was including that in my analysis - hence the impossibility of LaPlace's Daemon invading our subjective individual experience of free will. Of course, LaPlace's Daemon would also involve capturing a parallel/alternate universe of slightly larger size and making it a 100% efficient machine solely for measuring and calculating the state and movement of particles in this universe... not just overcoming Heisenberg.
But, that is the point. Free will denotes both freedom (i.e. autonomy) and will. Random chance is neither. Random deviations in electron placement in QM aren't "control", but merely a result of unknown cause which happens just as surely in inorganic and inanimate objects as in thinking beings. For free will to exist, there must be a way for humans to "control" the firing of neurons or the closing of synaptic pathways within the context of quantum particles and their inherent uncertainty. But what could initiate that "ability to control" but other deterministic or random factors? We can't choose the moment at which our budding CNS first works, and when it starts it is completely uninformed (and thus incapable of autonomy). We don't choose any of the inputs or stimuli (whatever goes on in the womb, what we see after birth, who and what we are exposed to chemically, environmentally, visually, our genetic and congenital predispositions) that shape that CNS (i.e. "us"), whether taken in the abstract or broken down into the individual chains of particulate reactions that form our "conscious analysis" of those stimuli. Thus, the framework within which we would somehow begin utilizing "free will" is entirely determined and unfree in its construction! And, how would those free will feedback loops be halted for us to make a second/third/fourth "decision" based on any other information (in the sense of any data point) set we have previously absorbed ... besides that which came about as the inevitable result of this mythical "first decision"?
But, to be clear, I believe that morality doesn't exist, whether through God or without God. The only thing that a mystical belief in a "soul" not bound to the physical laws of this universe would do is temporarily impose a disconnect between two different pre-existing sets of information (the brain and the soul) that would quickly be forced into alignment in the same way that the two sides of a locking torque converter quickly reach equal speed and then function thenceforth as one.
Note the following is my thought process on this for the first time. It's not refined, and it may not be logically sound.
If you think about it, what is free will? It's the ability (or appearance) to make decisions without outside constraints. Obviously complete determinism would be a huge constraint, but this is not the case.
When it comes down to it, decisions are made by your brain analyzing the data received from your senses, and responding. Obviously, because chance is an inherent part of the universe, there can never be two situations that are
exactly identical. Therefore, in each case, the brain will respond in a different way. But given the nature of the brain, similar sets of circumstances will produce similar outputs, like the CPU of a computer (or the hundreds of thousands of interconnected CPUs of a supercomputer).
This means that the decisions are mostly set. The brain responds to stimuli according to the way it has been organized, and each stimulus in turn modifies the organization of the brain. Like an iterative fractal, since each stimulus is subtly different, over time huge divergence between two minds will occur, no matter how much we may strive to keep them the same.
So what we have is a model of the brain, where our lives are led and decisions made through subtle imbalances in stoichiometries of chemical reactions and ion movements. The differences between brains means that when confronted with similar stimuli, two different brains may choose different results; this creates the illusion of choice.
This would mean, then, that there is no such thing as choice, and it may even be that everyone and everything in the universe is on a set path and cannot be changed(?) However, due to the Uncertainty Principle, it is impossible, both in practice and in principle, to know this path, and therefore it is impossible for us to use this knowledge in any meaningful way regarding the prediction of choice.
I have to admit that I find this hard to reconcile with what I can observe easily. If I want to spontaneously pick up my mouse, I can do so. If I want to knock my lamp onto the ground, I can do so. But does this mean that the doing was already pre-determined? That it could not have happened any other way?
