Lobstrosity

I imagine this has been done before, so I apologize in advance if I'm beating some sort of a dead horse here. In a few other threads I've seen several arguments that are founded upon the supposed importance of "Free Will" in the grand scheme of things. After all, without free will, what is the point of life, right? Well a few years ago I decided to set down on paper my logical conclusions regarding the whole free will vs natural determinism debate. Ideally, I'd like to hear how the rest of you operationally define "free will" (and I mean in severe detail, not just "oh, it's the freedom to think how you want") and how much importance you invest in the concept. Also, please feel free to shoot down all of my conclusions--I am putting them before you because I would like them to be under logical scrutiny.

-------------------------------------

When I was a child, my mother asked me what seemed to be an innocent question: “Do you believe everything that happens was predestined to happen? Do you believe in ‘fate’?” I thought about it briefly and then responded with a no. I was loath to even consider the idea that my seemingly free decisions were simply the actions of fate—that some proscribed future was in store for me that could in no way be altered by my current actions. My mother’s response was not to simply ask how I knew, but to ask how anyone could possibly ever know. It was then that I realized the difference between absolute determinism and free will was solely semantic. Many philosophers, theologians, and scientists spend countless hours debating the issue of fatalism versus free will, but their debate is akin to fighting over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It is not that a resolution is yet to be found but rather that a resolution does not exist. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that the notion of free will is itself meaningless given what we currently know of the world around us. In order to understand why this is, however, we must first not only understand the meanings of “free will” and “determinism”, but also their implications.

The notion of “free will” is a simple consequence of self-awareness. For aeons, man has wrestled with endless introspection—introspection that inevitably leads us to the most basic of questions: what makes me me? Why do I make the choices I make? Why do I behave as I do? The ultimate conclusion is that we possess a supreme, heightened, unfettered consciousness; our innermost thoughts are the product of no external mandate or edict; our will is completely free. In his book, Playing God: Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom, Ted Peters further defines this ideology: "What we experience as free will is traditionally assumed to be inherent in human nature. It comes as a birthright. It comes to expression as choice, as free choice, as the ability to choose before we act. It is the freedom of the individual human being as an agent who acts. Beyond determinism by external circumstances, each of us possesses an innate power to render value judgments, to make decisions, and to take actions that affect our external environment and our internal character" (Peters, 17). Free will is a seemingly intuitive facet of human existence and a foundation for many of our most closely held tenets.

Judeo-Christian theology is intimately intertwined with the notion of human free will. According to Karl Barth, “God in His own freedom bestows human freedom…. Human freedom is the gift of God in the free outpouring of His grace” (Barth, 75). Free will is seen as God’s most fundamental gift to man aside from life itself, for it is free will that gives us some sense of power and control over that which we encounter in this world. It can be argued that the presence of free will is what gives our lives true meaning. Human freedom serves to set us above all else in the mortal world, bringing the species Homo sapiens—God’s chosen species—out of the realm of the lowly, mindless beasts and into an existence from which we can strive to glimpse the mind of God.

Free will is far more significant than simply another one of God’s many gifts to humanity, however. Human freedom is in actuality an integral component of the Christian religion. The existence of human freedom is essential if Christianity is to be viable. It is for this reason that Christian theologians so often weigh in against arguments that detract in any way from human freedom in favor of some form of determinism—if free will is shown to be false, God cannot exist as Christians define him. The evidence for this profound assertion lies in simple logical analysis of theology. First and foremost, through a Christian view of the world, in the absence of free will all actions can be attributed to divine determinism. One exiting McDonalds could claim, “I did not just choose to eat that hamburger, God made me eat it.” It is possible to argue that a deterministic scheme of existence makes it impossible to praise people for their successes and blame them for their failures. If indeed we are under divine control, all sins we humans commit are in truth God’s sins. This oxymoron goes against all rational thought, for sins are defined as “any violation of God’s will” (Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary), and how can God violate his own will? A doctrine of free will allows us to avoid this paradox, however, by implying that man forges his own destiny through the choices he makes. It tells us that man is accountable for his actions. God is absolved of our sins since our free will makes us culpable. Further evidence for Christianity’s reliance on human freedom arises when one considers the “theodicy” paradox. Dr. Niclas Berggren details the theodicy argument:
1. If [the Christian] God exists, he is all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly good.
2. The existence of suffering is incompatible with the existence of God.
3. Suffering exists.
4. God does not exist.
"An all-knowing being will be aware of suffering; an all-powerful being will be able to prevent suffering; and a perfectly good being will desire to prevent suffering. If suffering exists, then God—who is characterized by the three attributes stated in point 1—does not exist" (Berggren). This challenge to Christian ideology is perhaps the best example of why complete divine determinism is wholly incompatible with Christianity—how could an all-powerful and all-knowing entity be considered perfectly “good” while still allowing suffering to exist in the world? The best, and perhaps only, explanation is known as the “free will defense.” It states that God allows suffering because it is a necessary consequence of free human will, and a society with free will is a greater good than a deterministic society with no suffering. This argument successfully fends off the theodicy attack, for who can say with authority which state of existence is truly the greater good?

We now know what free will means and what it implies, but where does it come from? What exactly gives us our freedom of thought? We now know that God is by necessity forbidden from intruding on the innermost recesses of humanity’s collective consciousness. This at first sounds like the start of another theological paradox, but it can be resolved if we allow that this limitation of God’s powers is self-imposed so His grand plan may be carried to fruition. This taboo implies that our analysis of human cognition must either (1) be conducted under an entirely secular framework that in no way forbids the ideology of natural determinism, or (2) define some new “second-order supernaturalism” that defies secular reasoning while deriving its power from humans themselves. The question then arises: is there any way to determine in which vein our analysis should progress? Though my answer may sound inherently biased to some, I would argue that scientific reasoning could provide us with some enlightenment. Condition 1 would tell us that consciousness is the product of observable, methodological interactions between discrete, physical components of the human brain, for this condition presupposes that supernatural effects cannot factor into the equation. Condition 2 would tell us quite the opposite—consciousness is an intangible, supernatural gift from God (akin to the “soul”) that now stands beyond God’s physical sphere of influence. A disturbing property of condition 2 is that its very definition of consciousness makes it both unverifiable and irrefutable. Fortunately for us, however, condition 1 does not pose such a problem. Thus let us delve into the implications of condition 1 to see whether they potentially hold water.

The evidence for a natural view of consciousness is quite strong. Neuroscience has progressed a great deal and has shed much light on the functioning of the human mind. The human brain is comprised of approximately 100 billion neurons, each responsible for passing electrical signals to its neighbors if provided the right stimulus by yet other neighboring neurons (Herrup). The net result, scientists claim, is what we call consciousness. Evidence for this comes from studies on brain damage, effects of hallucinogens, actual neuron manipulation, and comparisons with cross-species observations. In brain damage studies, observable damage to specific regions of the brain can be correlated highly with alterations in thought processes and behaviors of the injured party. A specific example of this is a study in which researchers noted that “damage to the left anterior region [of the human brain] is more likely to result in depressive symptomatology when compared with comparable right hemisphere damage” (Derlega, 114). Hallucinogens are defined as “drugs capable of inducing illusions, hallucinations, delusions, paranoid ideations, and other alterations of mood and thinking” (CancerWeb Online Medical Dictionary). Physically, their effects on the neurons of the brain can be observed. Thus, once again we have an example of physical changes in the brain resulting in a dramatically altered consciousness. In certain cases, neurosurgeons are actually able to physically experiment on the brains of live patients. Using probes to directly electrically stimulate regions of the brain, these neurosurgeons are able to produce repeatable alterations in the patients’ thoughts. Finally, virtually all multicellular organisms possess some kind of neuron assembly that is responsible for their observed behavior. As the behaviors of an organism are observed to grow more complex, it is found that its brain becomes increasingly similar to our own. So, we see that there is strong evidence that the abstract notions we refer to as cognition and consciousness are in fact concretely rooted in biology, chemistry, and physics. This evidence can also be used to argue against the existence of a supernatural basis for consciousness. For example, if consciousness were really a divine, intangible gift from God, why would sever damage to a group of perfectly tangible cells in the head in any way affect its ability to function? A similar question could be asked about hallucinogens and experiments on brain surgery patients. Why do physical factors influence something that is considered intangible? Even more profoundly, that physical factors do influence it necessarily means it must in fact be tangible, for we can clearly observe the affects of its interactions with the physical world. This contradicts our original assumption and weakens the argument further. At this point it is still possible to support the notion that some supernatural, self-determining force modulates the behavior we observe in our neurons, but the question becomes why. Why design fully functional, highly complex, wholly independent neurons if the true generator of thoughts was to be something else entirely? And would this imply that there is also some supernatural force that makes our hearts beat and our muscles contract? Or are we allowed to attribute those less-theologically-relevant processes to electrically stimulated contractions of cells? One final blow to the supernatural consciousness theory comes from the observations of animal brains. Very few theologians argue that animals possess free will, and so their limited cognitive faculties must clearly be solely attributed to physical brain structures. Since their brains are highly similar to ours in many fundamental ways, does this not imply strongly that our brain is also responsible for our cognitive faculties?

The evidence for a natural consciousness is overwhelming. Furthermore, free will is a clear product of the human consciousness. We can thus extrapolate to the assumption that the Christian notion of free will must be the consequence of natural physical processes. We have now returned to a point where determinism enters the scene and comes face to face with free will. When last we discussed these two viewpoints together, it was under a Christian framework, and free will was the victor by necessity. Now, however, we find ourselves under a secular framework. Perhaps this would be a good time to discuss in some depth exactly what is meant by the term “determinism.” First and foremost, determinism is not an antonym of “free will.” Rather, it is a doctrine that, when applied to faculties of the mind, necessarily implies the non-existence of Christian free will. It is for this reason that notions of determinism (frequently promoted by the scientific community) so often butt heads with those of human freedom (frequently promoted by theologians). Determinism has many different forms, but all share the view that “all events are inevitable consequences of antecedent sufficient causes” (Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary). Currently the scientific community rages over the “nature vs nurture” debate, one side arguing the strength of genetic determinism while the other argues the strength of environmental (or natural) determinism.

So then we are faced with the question: is our world deterministic? Is free will a fallacy perpetuated by a group of self-deluded egotists? The short answer is yes—from our current view of the necessary state of free will, the argument can be made that what we regard as human freedom is little more than an unfathomably complex deterministic system. From our current scientific stance, it is all but impossible to view the world as anything but purely deterministic. Philosopher John Searle defends this position with the statement: "As long as we accept the bottom-up conception of physical explanation, and it is a conception on which the past three hundred years of science are based, the psychological facts about ourselves, like any other higher level facts, are entirely causally explicable in terms of … elements at the fundamental micro-physical level. Our conception of physical reality simply does not allow for radical freedom" (Searle, 98 ). Objects behave according to a set of well-defined rules that have been observed to be consistent over time. Through three centuries of scientific exploration and experimentation, we have deciphered countless mysteries of the universe in which we live. What’s more, the experimentation that is generally accepted by the scientific community has for the most part proven to be verifiable, reliable, and valid. Often times the reliability and validity is made blatantly clear by the mass development of new technology that relies upon these discoveries. My point here is that if the world were not deterministic—that is to say, if the world behaved according to God’s random whims or according to some inanimate free will, if that is even possible—then science would be instantly invalidated as a practice. Experiments would be meaningless because under changing rules, they would have no reliability. Technology would be impossible because natural laws would change from day to day. Because we do not observe this happening, we can only conclude that it is either in actuality not happening or that God is only influencing natural laws we have yet to observe. The latter of these options strikes me as fundamentally flawed, for it is difficult to imagine why God would be “playing” with some obscure rules of the universe we humans don’t yet know about while leaving those rules we treat as infallible alone. This behavior does not seem to embody what one would expect from an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good being—rather it personally strikes me as more indicative of the behavior of a curious child or perhaps an inquisitive scientist. Thus we are left to conclude that either God is maintaining the laws of the universe as a constant, God set the laws of the universe aeons ago and has not touched them since, or God does not exist. With respect to the ultimate observable result, all three of these options are identical and result in a purely deterministic natural world. The only real question left to ponder then is whether this determinism extends to the human mind. Francis Crick argues forcefully that it indeed does: "The Astonishing Hypothesis is that “YOU,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” …. The scientific belief that is our minds—the behavior of our brains—can be explained by the interactions of nerve cells (and other cells) and the molecules associated with them" (Crick, 3, 7). I have already argued that the human consciousness is natural, so only one area of salvation remains: complexity. If the human brain were infinitely complex, free will could exist under the vale of natural determinism, for there is no mathematical way for one to predict the aggregate behavior of an infinitely complex assortment to an arbitrary stimulus. Unfortunately, the very notion of infinity is at odds with nature (the one notable exception to this is the black hole, which is characterized by a literal singularity in space-time. Current neuroscience research in no way hits at a singularity within the human brain, however). Thus, it seems clear that the Christian notion of “free will” cannot exist. Unfortunately, this is unacceptable in a Christian framework because of the “theodicy” problem. Surely flaws in my proposed arguments or points left unmade allow for some sort of out if desired desperately enough. One rebuke often made to my afore-mentioned logic is that human thought is simply too tenuous to be the product of physical interactions, that mental faculties can not be explained by the physical.

These arguments just are not persuasive, however, especially when made by someone with very little true knowledge of science. Saying that our mental processes are too varied and subjective to be anything but a divine, intangible gift from God is just a facet of our hubris coupled with severe ignorance. Proclaiming such a thing is akin to claiming that a lightbulb radiates because of God’s divine influence. While this might be true in the Christian framework due to the convenient technicality that everything in the natural world can be attributed to God, there is a well understood mechanism that more specifically explains the process and allows us humans to mass produce the technology. If a man from a millenium ago were shown a glowing lightbulb, his conclusion would most certainly be that he was witness to God’s supreme power (or possibly he would conclude that it was the work of Satan and you were a witch that should be horrendously tortured and then put to death in the name of God). For lack of better understanding, it is a conclusion that suffices. For people who manufacture and use lightbulbs, however, this explanation is grossly unsatisfactory. The lightbulb illuminates because a potential difference maintained across a tungsten filament causes electrons to begin moving through the filament. The filament has a high impedance, and as such the electrons transfer much of their kinetic energy to the tungsten atoms in the filament. This heats them and causes them to radiate photons. Manufacturers need to know the intricacies of this process if they hope to successfully produce these devices. Purchasers need to, at the very least, know how to power them so that they will work. Who is to say that we will not one day understand the functioning of the brain to such a degree of precision? And if that day comes, will we still insist upon the need for divinely inspired cognition, or will we scoff at the foolishness of those who tried to simply write off that which they did not understand, just as today we might laugh at the dark-age reaction to a lightbulb.

So, if free will is a myth, why do so many of us proclaim to possess it? The argument has been made that a system comprised of an infinite number of interacting components could in theory exhibit non-deterministic behavior even when operating in a deterministic framework. Of course the “in theory” qualification comes into play because a system with an infinite number of components is actually a singularity that cannot necessarily be expected to exist. A better way to then state things is to say that in the limit as complexity moves towards infinity, behavior tends away from the deterministic. Let us try to understand this by comparing it to results from attempts to simulate intelligence. Computers can be seen as the epitome of absolute determinism. If one writes a computer program, it will run the same way time and time again. The computer is only capable of generating “psuedo-random” numbers, and as such, even a program designed to generate “random” output will behave the same way every time if given the same starting parameters. Because of this inherent inflexibility of computers, their use in tasks that require the ability to generalize has been highly limited. Recently, however, research into the field of artificial intelligence (specifically neural networks) has done a great deal to promote the idea that computers can begin to approach certain levels of human-like cognition. Today, a cluster of artificial neurons encoded in a computer can perform the relatively non-deterministic tasks of handwriting and speech recognition—something that was unheard of several years ago due to the high amount of variance in the inputs. The process seems to touch upon what we consider to be cognition, yet it is still wholly deterministic. The determinism is just masked by a system of great complexity. This can be accomplished with neural networks comprised of just hundreds of “neurons.” Imagine the diverse, complex behavior that could be produced by a network of 100 billion neurons, as is found in the human brain. It is this high degree of complexity that approximates from determinism what we view as free will.

What does all this mean, however? Should we now be scared that we have lost that which makes us human? Does determinism absolve us of all personal responsibility? Is life now meaningless? All of these questions are incorrectly answered by proponents of the free will doctrine in the affirmative. Changing our semantics—and essentially this is all we have done, since we are now calling what was free will determinism—in no way affects the quality of life we lead from one day to the next. It can, however, taint our perceptions of this life. I would argue strenuously that (1) we have not lost our humanity, (2) we are not absolved of personal accountability, and (3) life still has meaning. The best argument for point 1 is as follows: if we never had free will to begin with then it was not free will that made us human. Of all species, man has come closest to achieving free will (whatever that really means) by having the most complex brain. Those who need to fuel their superiority complexes can take solace in this. What make us human are our advanced self-awareness and our species-specific genetic structure. Even without Christian free will we still maintain these traits.

Personal accountability is a touchy subject, for even our modern society absolves certain individuals who are deemed to be unable to control their actions. These individuals include minors, the criminally insane, and the mentally incompetent. Does this mean that in a deterministic society, everyone can escape punishment by blaming external causal factors? The answer is no, of course it doesn’t. To see why, let us first note that the common thread amongst the citizens we do absolve of blame is a diminished capacity for reason. A more rigorous definition, however, would by necessity include a definition of "diminished": these citizens have a capacity for reason that falls far below the normal human capacity for reason. There are thus three justifiable reasons why a “competent” man in a deterministic world should be punished for a crime: (I) he poses a danger to society, because whatever aspect of his brain led him to commit the crime could lead to his committing of another; (II) imprisoning him will act as a causal factor in itself that will serve to discourage (or prevent, if we want reduce humans to the level of mindless automatons) others from committing the same crime; and (III) decisions in the human mind are mitigated by so many hidden, internal neurons that the inevitable decision to commit the crime was almost certainly the fault of one of his neurons and not just some bad stimulus (and after all, isn’t that equally the same as saying it was his fault, since haven’t we equated the brain with the mind and the mind with the person?). Life is not so deterministic as to allow us to say a specific input will infallibly cause a human to perform a specific behavior. It is the input coupled with the internal structure and state of that person’s brain that results in the observed behavior. It is for this reason that we may not be so easily absolved of blame.

As for the question of whether life has meaning, the answer will depend on each person’s own subjective definition of “meaning.” If one requires the existence of an intelligent creator to find meaning in life, then he will find no meaning in my secular portrayal of the world. For most people, however, the lack of meaning in life arises from the seemingly depressing thought that everything one ever experiences in life and everything one ever does in life is due to some random assortment of initial conditions that lead from starting point A to inevitable ending point B. I would argue that this notion in actuality is absolutely the same as the one arising as a consequence of free will, in which the a person will once again start at point A, but this time, through free and conscious decisions, will traverse life to some random point C. These two scenarios sound like complete opposites, but due to the linearity of time they are actually indistinguishable. Assuming that time is indeed linear (this precludes all notions of traveling back in time or foreseeing the future while still in present day), what is the difference between the two scenarios mentioned? The obvious answer would be to say that they both had different life experiences and ended up in different places. Given that these were two different people, I would respond by saying “so what, that’s what would happen if both lived under free will.” The only way to resolve the difference between a world with free will and without is to have the same person live both lives. This, however, is a physical impossibility! Thus, there is no perceptible functional difference between a life lived under the idealized notion of free will and a life lived under determinism. This further implies that life can then be no less meaningless under a deterministic framework.

Thus it certainly seems that debate over whether humans enjoy the divine gift of free will or are cursed with rote determinism is in actuality a pointless one. Free will is nothing more than an idealized fiction of how humans are supposed to be. Determinism is simply a fancy word for a secular view of the natural world. Even the mere notion of free will is itself meaningless. Are free-will decisions completely random? The answer must be no, since completely random choices are by no means “free.” Thus we are left with the question of: if not, on what are they based? And if they’re based on something, aren’t we now on essentially equal footing with determinism? The semantics between determinism and free will may vary, but the physical implications and ramifications are the same. In this whole scientist versus theologian debate, the quibble is over mere terminology rather than true substance.


Barth, Karl. “The Gift of Freedom: Foundation of Evangelical Ethics.” The Humanity of
God. (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1968), p. 75

Berggren, Niclas. “Does the Free Will Defense Constitute a Sound Theodicy?”
http://hem.passagen.se/nicb/. (Stockholm, Sweden, 2001)

Crick, Francis. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), p. 3, 7.

Peters, Ted. Playing God? Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom. (New York:
Routledge, 1997), p. 17.

Searle, John R. Minds, Brains, and Science: The 1984 Reith Lectures. (London: Brittish
Broadcasting Corporation, 1984), p. 98.

Williams, R.W. and Herrup, K. “Ann. Review Neuroscience, 11:423-435, 1988

Old Man

Your post is awfully long, and really too long. But from a brief scan, it seems that the meat of what you are saying may lie in the above quote.

Your argument then, is simply that because animals don't possess free will (say theologians), then neither do humans, and so determinism and free will are the same.

Firstly, I don't accept that animals are not accountable in some sense. With animals, it is a largely sensory perception, which is perceived to give them small amounts of reasoning ability.

Human's are distinguished from animals by power of reason in a non-sensory way (the spiritual man) as well as from sense (the natural man).

Free-will embraces the notion of acting from reason, apart from sense. Although sense perception may be deterministic, it cannot said that one's reasoning apart from sense is deterministic, or that the option to adhere/not adhere to the conclusions of one's own reasoning apart from sense is deterministic.

For instance, gratuitous acts of love to strangers cannot really be said to fall within the ambit of sensory perception, but some people act this way because they choose to follow a belief or cognition which derives from non-sensory reasoning.

VivaHedone

Free will is impossible, due to the basic law of causality - everything must have a cause. Our actions are caused by our decisions. Our decisions are caused by the way are brain processes sensory input.

What gives us the illusion of free will is that we can hear and understand our thoughts. We cannot, though, control them. This is what differentiates us from animals. Animals clearly have some ability for logical thought, but they cannot hear or understand their thoughts.

Old Man

The bible claims that men are made in the image of God. That gives them, in a limited sense, the ability to be causal originators.

VivaHedone

The logical impossibility of free will is, then, further proof of the bible's inaccuracy.

Old Man

Free will may be logically impossible for the natural man, and actually the bible goes quite a long way to admit that:


Hbr 11:6 But without faith [it is] impossible to please [him]: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and [that] he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.


But, it stresses that the spiritual man, who believes, does have freedom of choice, apart from the choices that spring from mere sensory perceptions.

Tercel

This conclusion doesn't actually follow from any of the previous. If the system is a dualistic one, like Christians are supposing, then they predict these results too. eg if you hit a radio with a hammer the quality of the noise is degraded, or if you electronically stimulate part of a radio it might make noise. But that doesn't prove there is no non-solid part to the radio and no such thing as hypothetical immaterial "radio waves". Similarly because you can do things to the physical brain which screw with people's minds doesn't provide support for the conclusion that there is no such thing as a hypothetical immaterial "soul".

Who says they're wholly independent??
An intangible "soul" would need some sort of interface if it was to connect to the tangible world.. Presumably on a dualistic view the physical brain is responsible for processing sensory data, passing it on to the "soul" via some (presumably quantum level) format, storing memories etc, getting action/decision data back from the soul via some format, converting it to macro-level events and implementing those requests.

The logic here seems to be incoherent.
Animal brains need to do very similar things to the human physical brain under a dualistic view. Hence it is hardly suprising that they are similar under such a view.

I have yet to see any whatsoever.

Jayjay

I didn't read the article, so this may have been covered by it already: I think that free will is impossible not because of physical evidence, but rather because the concept itself is contradictory. Even if there was a "soul" somewhere out there that remote controls our bodies, it would still necessarily be subject to some rules. These rules are necessarily either deterministic or probabilistic, just like our real world, so it turns out that the appeal to supernatural does nothing to remove the fundamental problems associated with free will.

Tercel

Jayjay,
There's a 3rd possibility:
Something could be externally determined, or not.
If it is not then it could be internally determined, or not.
If not then it is neither externally nor internally determined and is acausal - determined randomly according to some probability distribution.

We are familiar with the first -cogs turning, the earth going round the sun, electrical circuits operating etc all according to natural law- and the 3rd -quantum mechanics. However there seems to be no good reason to rule out the 2nd a priori and free will would fit happily into that category.

Jayjay

If your distinction is external/internal, then free will becomes an irrelevant term... just like it is irrelevant to the content of a movie whether I am watching it on tv (transmitted from external source) or from vhs or dvd (internal source). Besides, since we are always "inside" our own minds regardless of whether they're made of brain cells or magical energies or souls, there can be no "external" source of free will from our personal point of view.