I'm a physicist by profession and I'm sick of hearing all this stuff about how "science shows we don't have free will"

What the laws of physics do is they can deterministically predict the future of a set of particles whose positions and velocities are precisely known for all time into the future.

But the laws of physics also clearly tell us in the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle that the position and velocity of a particle fundamentally cannot be measured but more than this is not defined https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

This caveat completely turns determinism on it's head and implies that it is free will that is supported by science and not determinism.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough that the position of electrons is fundamentally undefined, look at the structure of the p2 orbital http://cis.payap.ac.th/?p=3613

The p2 orbital of the hydrogen atom is composed of an upper probability cloud where there is a high probability of finding an electron, a lower probability cloud where there is the same probability of finding the same electron seperated by an infinite plane of zero probability of finding the electron.

If the electrons position was defined then how does it get from the upper probability cloud to the lower probability cloud without passing through the plane in the middle???

Furthermore if there electron really was in one or the other dumbell it would affect the chemical properties of the hydrogen atom in a manner that isn't observed.

So the position and velocity of particles is fundamentally undefined this turns determinism on its head.

Determinists will argue that this is only the quantum realm and not macroscopic reality. By making such a claim they display their ignorance of chaos theory and the butterfly effect.

This was discovered by Lorenz when he ran seemingly identical computer simulations twice. Look at the graph shown here. http://www.stsci.edu/~lbradley/seminar/butterfly.html

It turned out that in one case the last digit was rounded down and in the other the last digit was rounded up, from an initial perturbation of one part in a million, initially the graphs seemed to track each other but as time progressed the trajectories diverged.

So while the uncertainty principle only leaves scope for uncertainty on the atomic scale the butterfly effect means that initial conditions that differ on the atomic scale can lead to wildly different macroscopic long term behaviour.

Then there is the libet experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet

Where subjects were instructed to tell libet the time that they were conscious of making a decision to move their finger. Libet found that the time subjects reported being aware of deciding to move their finger was 300ms after the actual decision was measured by monitoring brain activity.

Yet even this is not inconsistent with free will if the act of noting the time is made sequentially after the free decision to move your hand.

If the subjects engage in the following sequence 1) Decide to move hand 2) Note time 3) Move hand

Then ofcourse people are going to note the time after they've freely decided to move their hand, they're hardly going to do that before they've decided! This experiment does not constitute a refutation of free will.

Furthermore bursts of neuronal noise are fundamental to learning and flashes of insight. http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=2683

Science constantly tries to find patterns in the world but most psychology experiments are based on statistics from large samples. Anytime a sample behaves in a statistically significant manner that is different from the control the psychologists say "right we found something else about how the brain works" and they have. But only statistically, most samples still have a spread within them and there's plenty of room for free will in that spread.

But some scientists only see the pattern and forget the noise (and as a researcher I can tell you most data is extremely noisy)

It's this ignoring the noise that is biased, illogical and causes people to have far more faith in determinism than is warranted by the facts.

I have elaborate on these thoughts as well as morality and politics in this book I wrote.

https://www.amazon.ca/Philosophical-Method-John-McCone/dp/1367673720

Furthermore a lot of free will skeptics assert that even if the universe is random we should believe that our decisions are "caused by a randomness completely outside our control" unless there is any reason to believe otherwise and since there is no evidence that our actions are not caused by a randomness outside our control believing in free will is unscientific.

1) This position is fallacious

2) This position asserts an understanding of the underlying source of all random events in the universe. An oxymoron, by definition a random event is an event whose cause is unknown (radioactive decay being the most famous but any kind of wave function collapse has an undetermined result that cannot be predicted prior to it's occurrence)

3) The very experience of free will serves as scientific evidence in support of its existence, perhaps not conclusive evidence but evidence that should not be dismissed in favour of bald assertions that cannot be backed up that all random occurrences including those in our brain, are beyond our control to influence.

Firstly let me say that the basis of all science is experience. The act of measurement is inseparably linked to the experience of taking a measurement. In a way science is the attempt to come up with the most consistent explanation for our experiences.

If you assume all experiences are an illusion until proven real, you have to throw more than free will out the window, you have to through general relativity, quantum mechanics, biology, chemistry absolutely all science out the window, because the basis of all science is recorded experience and if everything you experience is false (say because you are in the matrix and are in a VR suit from birth) then your experience of reading and being taught science is also false, even your experience of taking measurements in a lab demonstration could be a false illusion.

So the foundation of science is the default assumption that our experiences have weight unless they are inconsistent with other more consistent experiences that we have.

We experience free will, the sense of making decisions that we don't feel are predetermined, the sense that there were other possibilities open to us that we genuinely could have chosen but did not as a result of a decision making process that we ourselves willfully engaged in and are responsible for.

The confusion among free will skeptics, is the belief that the only scientific valid evidence arises from sense data. That that which we do not see, hear, touch, smell or taste has no scientific validity.

Let me explain the fallacy.

It's true that the only valid evidence of events taking place outside of our mind comes through the senses. In otherwords only the senses provide valid scientific evidence of events that take place outside of our mind.

But inner experience and feelings unrelated to senses do provide scientifically valid evidence of the workings of the mind itself. Don't believe me? Then consider psychology, in many psychological experiments that most people would agree are good science, psychologists will had out questionaires to subjects asking them various aspects of their feelings and subjective experience. The subjective answers that subjects give in these questionaires are taken as valid scientific evidence even if they are based on feelings of the subjects rather than recorded things they measured through our senses.

If we don't believe our mental experience of free will and personal agency in spite of the fact that there is nothing in science to contradict it, then why should we believe our sensory experience of the world or indeed that anything that science has discovered has any basis in reality (as opposed to making a default assumption of being inside the matrix)?