I get depressed .....

I don't particularly care about compatibilist nor other categories that people use slightly differently and others try to distort for purpose, nor of course what you try to casually dismiss because you wanna.  What normal people think and have thought is both that cause and effect is universal we are part of it and we make choices and act according to our free will.  Trying to pigeonhole it into distorted categories or just making up absurdities is the cynical attempt to reshape it for purpose.  And feel free to eat your libertarian shirt all you want, all the searching is for evidence against free will, as all actual evidence has supported it and the only real line against it at this time is the highly contested, debated, tumultuous philosophical kind.

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And if society wants the fairest possible state of affairs, that would mean no humans and no society.

I have always argued that all is cause and effect, that we're right there in it part and parcel, and free will is us making decisions via us and acting on them.  I haven't changed in this regard one iota.  Libet's interpretation does not make sense to me nor is it consensus but is in fact highly disputed among "secular scientists and philosophers".  I'm not interested in categories vs. just describing positions because people botch them both inadvertently and cynically attempt to use them to dismiss and avoid actually justifying positions and implications.

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If true, then it is cute, cuddly, fuzzy and multicultural because Muslims are (mostly) brown. That takes precedence over any moral concern.

In terms of compatibilist free will, there could never be any evidence that doesn't support it, because all those philosophers done is to observe an aspect of reality and then redefine the term "free will" to refer to something that actually happens as opposed to something that is logically incoherent. So it's a bit like if some people wanted to use the term 'unicorn' to refer to a Shetland pony, there would be no way of proving them wrong when they asserted that "unicorns are real", because in accordance with the way that they use the term "unicorn", the thing that they are referring to using that term is a real thing.

But there's no evidence whatsoever for any broader or more meaningful definition of free will. There's no evidence which would reject the assertions made by Libet's experiment, even if the experiment itself was procedurally flawed in some way. 

I don;t care about compatibilist free will; both the fact that cause and effect is universal and we make choices and act upon them has been evidenced and is evidenced with every moment we remain conscious.  The obvious standard has to be overturned via extraordinary contradicting evidence.  If Unicorns started walking the street then after thorough examination we'd have every reason to say "unicorns are real".

Even if.  And "broader and more meaningful".   Libet's interpretation is as or more criticized as are the procedural flaws.

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On that note, you've also called me "deranged", which is the mental illness equivalent of "n*****"

No, Libet's conclusions are flawed no matter how applied and whether or not they would affect, if sound, any particular posed paradigm of free will.  Just because you do some decision making ahead of time as you're getting ready to act and rely on systems to help you accomplish does not yield that you're not making the choices.

Normal people think of free will as choosing and doing.  Nobody (reasonable) has every thought we consciously micromanaged every reflex or trained response.  "The product of determinism" is a loaded phrase that has implications that can be explored.  If by that you mean everything is cause and effect, I've never thought nor asserted otherwise.  If you then use that to try to pose that we're organic robots not really making choices, then I say you've got a whole lot of work to do as the science comes nowhere near it, regardless of your oversimplistic billiard-ball dippy bird applications.

And you're an utter liar.  You just make up whatever you like for sh!ts and feels.   Driven by your desperate apocalypse faith of the Great Objective (mass killing),

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And they shouldn't be expected to pay the price of everyone else's joy. Especially if nobody would be deprived of that joy in a universe with no sentient life.

I'm just watching a Jerry Coyne lecture on free will right now, and wanted to post another 2 studies which support what I'm saying:

www.pnas.org/content/110/15/6217.abstract

journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0053053

Interesting to see if you can poke any holes in the methodology or conclusions of these.

cupcakes

If you have the time (and intellectual honesty):



You don't have to go very far in to see that the evidence is overwhelming. I'm 25 minutes in and overwhelming evidence has been presented, as well as quotes from physicists and philosophers stating that they think that free will is a "fiction worth maintaining" (Paul Davies 2004).

The conclusion is that our choices can be observed before we are aware of what we have chosen. The reaction from others in relevant fields is that "anyone who still believes in free will must be extremely obtuse or absolutely terrified of the implications of not having free will" (Every rational secular scientist)

I can copy the conclusion from the second link:

"Conclusion



Neuroscience cannot straightforwardly accommodate a concept of “conscious free will”, independent of brain activity [42]. However, the belief that humans have free will is fundamental to human society [43]. This belief has profound top-down effects on cognition [44] and even on brain activity itself [45]. The dualistic view that decisions to inhibit reflect a special “conscious veto” or “free won’t” mechanism [46] is scientifically unwarranted. Instead, conscious decisions to check and delay our actions may themselves be consequences of specific brain mechanisms linked to action preparation and action monitoring [19]. Recent neuroscientific studies have strongly questioned the concept of free will, but have had difficulty addressing the alternative concept of free won’t, largely because of the absence of behavioural markers of inhibition. Our results suggest that an important aspect of “free” decisions to inhibit can be explained without recourse to an endogenous, ”uncaused” process: the cause of our “free decisions” may at least in part, be simply the background stochastic fluctuations of cortical excitability. Our results suggest that free won’t may be no more free than free will."

What's highly contested is when choices are actually made in what degrees, how they're pre-loaded by us in prep, as well as the accuracy of measuring our awareness.

And yes, I know you feel free to state utter crap as fact.

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Not at all, because it's better for me to suffer than for a greater number of people to suffer.