Sometimes the best articles I read are the ones I don’t have a good response to right away—and this one definitely falls into that category. Complex stuff!

On the free-will/autonomy question, I’ve basically resigned myself into a kind of pragmatic acceptance of ignorance. I’m not sure that we’ll ever be able to resolve the autnomy-determinism question completely, but pragmatically I think it’s good enough to understand (and remind ourselves) that A) It’s probably healthy to believe that we do have some degree of autonomy and free-will, and B) that we probably overstate the amount of autonomy we really have… by a ton!

It also feels to me that autonomy and determinism is a somewhat false dichotomy. For example, it’s hard to comprehend or imagine what free will would look like without any environmental or dispositional inputs. I’m not sure the term choice even makes sense without outside influences. In other words, I don’t think you can have an output (choice) without some inputs (environmental factors, dispositions, etc).

This seems like the kind of dilemma we need Zat Rana to weigh in on :)

Overall really good exploration of this topic, Maarten!