Agnosticism in the Free Will Debate

My video on it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwQlZTQqq1o

I’d like to start off June with this short blog post on free will. I will come at it from two angles: pragmatic and empirical. When it comes to the pragmatic view, how exactly could humans having or not having free will affect our action. It will not change those that don’t care but nothing will do so that won’t work as an argument. What about prisons? If we have free will it should punish evil doers and if we do not have free will it should be a kind of hospital. I believe, without any inference to free will, that it ought to be a kind of hospital anyway, regardless of free will. So it doesn’t appear to change how I would act in any case. In fact, I mean that as an example that when people bring up cases why people should change their action based on their own belief in or against free will there is often good reasons to do or not do said action anyway.

Now not everything ought to be reduced to pragmatism. Some forms of truth are so fundamental and philosophic that its affect on action is not direct and/or doesn’t have an effect right away. Also, it may be that truth has value in itself. I’m not willing to say so one way or the other just yet. I’m not far enough along just yet. Given that, how exactly do you figure out if people have free will or not? What tests could you run? Are there any philosophic arguments for or against free will in such a way that the other side seems completely false? Ultimately, I’d say no. The pro-free will side says that we have free will because we can move our bodies and the anti-free will types simply say that you moved in such a way that you full fill your environment. Neither case fully proves either side. My moving my arm could be my doing or my natures doing, but how is anyone on earth to tell the difference? This is why agnosticism is the route to take with free will. Agnosticism for the reason it is always useful, because we simply can not know.