It might if it's not deterministic or random.
It's one or the other, surely?
I mean that we are souls, not have them, and that being one is the end of the line. As to how that would work, who knows. That's the problem with those existential questions, they're very hard, if not impossible, to answer.
Right. I just don't see how "being a soul" is any more likely to answer the question than "being a physical object". What exactly is it about "souls" that make them different from ordinary matter, such that they can have free will, but physical objects can't?
You say, well that's the problem isn't it, it's impossible to know. But surely that's because we've just made a word up to cover up the gap in the knowledge, stuck a label on "the thing that answers the problem" even though we don't know what that thing is. We need to define our terms. If we can't define "free will" in terms of comprehensible processes, it doesn't mean anything at all.
"Free will" is actually two terms, "will" and "free". "Will" is the difficult one for me. I understand "free" by analogy to turing completeness. The opposite of freedom is constraint. A specialised system is constrained in what it can and can't do. A general purpose computer, however, is not. It can calculate anything calculable. Such a computer need not be made out of anything physically special - it could as well be made out of ball bearings running down tracks than out of silicon-based electronics. Or you could make a computer out of "souls" (in something like a reversal of the Chinese Room experiment, a live person could process inputs according to strict instructions and be indistinguishable from a computer). It's the process that matters, not the matter that processes.
