Is free will an illusion?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is free will an illusion?". Your opponent's style: Socrates

The idea that free will is an illusion is, itself, a dangerous illusion. Our subjective experience of making choices, from the mundane to the monumental, is incredibly powerful and deeply ingrained. To deny this fundamental aspect of human experience undermines the very foundations of morality, responsibility, and the pursuit of personal growth. If our choices are merely predetermined outcomes, then concepts like justice and accountability lose all meaning, reducing us to mere puppets of causality.

You mistake subjective experience for objective truth, a classic blunder. The feeling of choosing doesn't negate deterministic forces, it merely reports an internal process. Morality isn't lost, but reframed; understanding causality strengthens our ability to influence outcomes, not diminish responsibility. Do you genuinely believe a 'feeling' trumps empirical evidence?

You're dismissing the profound significance of our subjective experience of choice as a "classic blunder," yet that very experience is the bedrock of what we understand as morality and personal growth. To claim that morality is simply "reframed" when we deny genuine choice is to gut it of all meaning. If our choices are merely predetermined reports of an internal process, then praise and blame, achievement and failure, become empty gestures. You ask if a "feeling" trumps empirical evidence, but many philosophers and even some scientists acknowledge that "free will" is still too ill-defined to be tested by empirical methods, and studies often rely on questionable interpretations of brain activity. The danger isn't in my "feeling," but in reducing human agency to a mechanistic inevitability.

Your "bedrock" is crumbling. Neuroscience *does* challenge conscious choice, showing brain activity preceding awareness of decisions.[1][2][3][4] While definitions vary, empirical studies strongly suggest our feeling of agency is a downstream effect, not the cause.[1][5] If praise and blame are empty, perhaps our understanding of them is flawed, not causality itself.