I can't believe people still believe in free will and agency. I'm not aware of anything in biology or physics that suggests we have some magic spark in a mystical plane that gives us "free will". We just do stuff in response to stimulus. I would have thought this debate would die when neurologists started opening up people's brains and inducing massive personality shifts and various cognitive aberrations by poking people's brain meat with electrodes. It's just a false dichotomy left over from weird medieval religious nonsense.
God they're talking about choosing to act Killllll meeeeeee
I'm reading the intro to Infinite Thought btws feel free to check in here because I will be cataloging my distress relating to French people who spend too much time thinking and not enough time practicing with swords.
It's a long ass book but I guess I can try to paraphrase. However, it will lose a lot of the nuance and philosophical justification: the concept of free will Malabou is putting forward is that it's a dialectical process. The world presents you with environmental change as a thesis, your body's tendency toward homeostasis presents you with an antithesis, and through making a decision and taking action you apply synthesis.
A lot of neuroscientists talking about choice focus on the act of attention because it's more easily measurable than intention. If multiple stimuli enter an animal's brain simultaneously, this creates a very noisy (random or pseudorandom) situation in which the brain is forced to act as a modulator to the signals it's receiving. Usually what happens is that it isolates a specific stimulus to focus on, thus taking a bunch of branching action potentials and directing them down one pathway like a lightning strike after one of its multiple leaders makes contact with the ground. This is why you can understand the voice of the person speaking to you even when you're in a crowded room surrounded by loud talkers.
Which stimulus an animal focuses on can be based on many factors like habit, history, or randomness. If I sedate you and put you in a blank white room with identical cookies set equidistantly all around you, obviously you didn't choose to be in this blank room, but if you pick a cookie at random it will have technically been your choice, because isolating all other possible factors only leaves your brain to go for one at random. With no external stimuli standing out, you are left with just the signal generated by you.
But Catherine Malabou's thesis essentially includes another option: you can also break functional fixedness and destroy the white box and sue me for sedating you and putting you in a box. In this way we can connect theories of attention, choice, and neuroplasticity (in the way it's reacting to a new situation) with struggle and revolution. If you were simply a passive actor, then a third option might not have been conceivable.
Yes, there are many material factors of history affecting your decision, but ultimately you will reach a point where either a new synaptic connection will be made or a signal will be suppressed, and I'm not sure that's something that we can 100% consistently model even with a neuron-by-neuron brain simulator (many phds are still trying, but free choice and consciousness still elude them). Not even behaviorists could account for all the statistical noise in animal responses, only trendlines.
I also think that if our minds were totally susceptible to deterministic functions, we'd be more easily influenced by cybernetic regimens or such regimens would be better designed. Instead we're all here talking about communism even though it's not presently in our best interests.