Three possibilities come to mind:

Is there an evolutionary purpose?

Does it arise as a consequence of our mental activities, a sort of side effect of our thinking?

Is it given a priori (something we have to think in order to think at all)?

EDIT: Thanks for all the responses! Just one thing I saw come up a few times I’d like to address: a lot of people are asking ‘Why assume this?’ The answer is: it’s purely rhetorical! That said, I’m happy with a well thought-out ‘I dispute the premiss’ answer.

  • @[email protected]English
    6•5 months ago

    Even in that scenario, the “conscious choice” happened via some particular arrangement of neurons/chemical messengers/etc. Your argument is a “god of the gaps” argument- science doesn’t know everything about how the brain works, therefore some supernatural process called “free will” is the cause of the stuff science can’t explain yet.

    (No knock on you, you’re having a good faith debate :)

    • @[email protected]
      3•5 months ago

      god of the gaps

      supernatural

      Without those obvious pejoratives, that would’ve been a pretty good summation of at least that aspect of my position.

      With those obvious pejoratives, it was reduced to an unfortunate expression of bias.

      I believe that it’s not simply that science doesn’t yet fully understand how the brain works, but that it’s not even really equipped to deal with consciousness, which while clearly a manifestation of physical processes, is not itself physical.

      That and we’re in an era in which “science” (scare quotes because part of the problem IMO is a misunderstanding of what science can do and does) has largely moved to the forefront of the pursuit of understanding, but humanity is still to some significant degree stuck in a quasi-religious mindset, so all too many have merely shifted from a devout faith that their religion provides every answer to everything ever to a devout faith that “science” provides every answer to everything ever.

      The problem then comes when they run up against something for which science can’t provide an answer. And the common response then is to blithely insist that that thing must not and cannot exist at all, since the alternative is to face the fact that science potentially cannot provide every answer to everything ever. And that’s generally accompanied by an immediate assignment of whatever it is that’s in question to the other half of their wholly binaristic worldview - if it’s not amenable to science, it must and can only be religion/magic.

      Reality, IMO, is vaster than that.