Do humans have free will? It’s a timeless debate, but let’s start by defining it (something often missing from such discussions). If a human does not have free will then, if the human were placed in the exact same physical circumstance, they will always make the same choice, every single time. They are not free to make a different choice given the same phsyical environment.
At first blush, this seems all too simple. Of course we can make different choices—I might be in the same physical environment, but I might have learned something from last time and have a memory of the previous thing that took place, which would result in me making a totally different choice.
Aha! say the determinists—but your memories are completely and totally physical in nature too. They consist only of what’s stored in the physical properties of your brain. (That’s why, they point out, physical brain damage can cause humans to lose certain memories, or even the ability to remember new things at all.) So to do the test properly, you’d have to have a human with exactly the same memories and exactly the same physical brain-state as well as the exact same external physical environment. Would this human make the same decision every time in such a circumstance?
The determinists say inquivocally yes. There’s no evidence that the choices we make are derived from anything but the physical makeup of our brain. If there were something else making these decisions, it should be measurable or detectable in some way.
I maintain that the answer to the question is fundamentally unknowable. Even if the question is in principle answerable, the problem is that we only have at hand the body of all knowledge knowable to humans. But how do we as humans amass knowledge? All epistemological paradigms include some way of deciding which hypotheses to accept as theory or fact, and which hypotheses to abandon. In other words, the very act of amassing knowledge depends fundamentally on the idea that we can choose which hypotheses to accept and which to reject. If determinism is true, then we cannot choose which hypotheses to accept and which to reject—the ideas we hold as true are deterministically chosen based on our physical environment.
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