I am not saying you’re wrong. There is indeed no “free will”. “Free will” implies that some things are not connected to each other, which is logically impossible (things that are not connected cannot co-exist.)
Our willing is a product of certain system of forces located inside our brains (which we are unaware of, for it is impossible for an observer to observe itself) in relation to some other system (or systems) of forces (which can be located outside of the brain as well as inside the brain.)
Yes. Nothing is free in this world, nor could it be. Moreover; nor should it be.
The idea of free will is completely absurd. How could any act of will be free? To be worthwhile is has to be motivated by ourselves, or intentions and limited by our capabilities, all of which are determined at any given moment by the lives we has led, starting with a act which was beyond our power to intend - that act of sex by our parents.
I think those that believe in free will lack imagination.
Ben, prove that there is or isn’t something restraining my will by showing that you can predict my behavior by reference to whatever proof you have.
I’ll let you guess which hand I’m about to hold up. Right or left. If you can guess right every time, then you’ve got proof. If you can’t, then there’s some percentage of the time at least where you don’t have proof, and thus any hard stance on way or the other would be one that doesn’t factor for every instance of behavior.
These are old, settled debates. There’s nothing new under the sun when it comes to where all the arguments fall when you’re talking about shit like free will.
By definition, unfree will cannot exist. The definition of the will entails freedom. Will means freewill.
If it is not free, it cannot be considered will, in the first place, but merely thoughts.
Willing means taking decisions by the conscious mind over the its own and subconscious mind’s thoughts.
Yes.
What would a will need to be free of?
The inherent contradiction of free will, is that those that promote the idea insist that the will has to be free of the self which generated it, which is absurd.
I think that you are not paying the full attention to what i am saying. It seems to me that you are confusing will with willful action. It is not necessary that every will/free will would result to action also. That may or may not happen. Will is purely an mental construct.
You just cannot will if you are not free, in the first place.
There cannot be any situation when you can will without being free.
I’d pretty much agree with this since one is free to will whatever he wants. A person can have a purpose, desire or determination about anything under the sun that he wants. But, much of what one wants is what he has been told, or taught, or has been indoctrinated into (society) and has been therefore conditioned to. If one goes against this ‘reality’ of state of affairs, his functioning will be taken away and he will be detached and his freedom controlled.( Not that his thoughts and knowledge are not already controlled by the present society.)
It is obvious that you do not appreciate what is being asked here. Ben is more than aware of your difficulty.
Whether you act on an idea or not; you will is not immune the cause and effect. So all wilful thoughts to not emerge from nowhere but are part of a long chain of events, from which they are not free.
As each action is the result of an antecedent reality, no act, be it imposed, or given by open choice, is free of the motivation of that moment in time, which in tern is determined by the moment before that to the ends of time.
You did not pay enough attention to what exactly i said.
All past events absorbed by the subconscious mind. Conscious mind forget about those but unconscious not. Slowly, over the time, those imbued thoughts tend to overflow from the subconscious mind and reach in the realm of the conscious zone and we assume that we are thinking.
You are right up to here. But, you are considering these overflowing thoughts as a will but they are not. The story does not end here but continues.
Now, as the conscious mind becomes aware of these owerflows and start evaluating those in the present context. Then, it makes a decision whether it should go with those previous inflows or not. This decision making is freewill. It is not necessarily dependent on previuos inputs, though it may be. But, in either way, it is a conscious decidion, not unconscious one. and, that is what makes it freewill.
What out mind thinks is not freewill, but what it thinks about its thinking. It is a second step.
Secondly, if that was true that each and everthing that we ever think and decide, is because of our past inputs, then we humans would not be able to evolve in such a way as we are now. This decision making evolves and changes with time.
LM,
I do not think that it can help in anyway. Nevertheless, i will certainly look into it. There is no harm in it.
When you look at “everything that we ever think,” what there is is only whatever knowledge you have accumulated up to that point in your life. Even when you want to look at thought itself, what is there is only whatever you know about thought. Otherwise you can’t look. There is no thought other than what there is in what you know.
What there is is only what you know, the explanations and classifications given by others. And out of those, if you are very intelligent and clever enough, you create your own. This is a result of connecting up events for certain purposes: a cause and effect relationship. It is only when there is no linking up of events that each is an independent event. And an independent event has no past experience or future concoction attached to it.
I’m not so sure that that is necessarily true. Someone might know someone so well - their ins and their outs, that they may be able to predict that person’s actions, based on that knowledge, for instance, of the party’s integrity and reason.
How does another’s ability to predict our behavior rob us of our own free will or the conscious free choice we make toward something?
Unless one is a puppeteer and is deliberately manipulating another, knows that other’s flaws and psychology, and by the use of auto suggestion…takes away one’s freedom to choose.
Its as simple as this; when the consciousness is not engaged, you are sleepwalking!
The consciousness is the aspect which is ‘engaged’ in ones reality. Without it we can clearly see what human beings would be i.e. as like sleepwalkers. The human form can do all the things it does with the consciousness engaged, but its missing something and is to that degree comparatively limited. Talk to someone who is sleepwalking and you’ll know what I mean.
All of us are puppets in the sense that nature is pulling the strings. Problems arise when we believe that we are acting. Functioning nature’s way, life is basic, situations are less complicated and solutions more straightforward. But we have superimposed on that the idea of a `person’ who is pulling those strings.
Is it possible to practically make a distinction between a free will and an “unfree will”(if it exists)?
On the assumption that there are no "unfree will"s, why should one use the term “free will”? [/i][/i]pharaoh
I consider my will to be free when I have recognized that there are patterns of behavior and thinking within me, some other things also which may have been pre-determined by my DNA and genes and am aware of all of this, yet still chose to plow through them or transcend them, and make a conscious choice or action. I don’t think that free will is in and of itself perfect but it can be made freer and more perfect based on self-awareness, intention and the will to act accordingly and by JUST DOING THAT.
Ultimately, I feel that we ourselves are the ones who tangle up our own wills to the point which we feel we are emprisoned within our own minds and actions or we are the ones who recognize that although not perfectly so, we have the “will” or the inner force which pushes us toward personal freedom. Anything else is just plain laziness and entrophy.
As for the second, If we do not see ourselves as having the capacity to exericise our will freely, we won’t be self-determined, autonomous people.
I also think, and I may be wrong, that free will and unfree will is just another perspective. One can see their self as having a will which is free while, for instance, being in a nazi concentration camp. They may not be able to leave that camp and their life is determined for the most part by others but at the same time, they can still see their self as being free within their own mind. They “exercise” their personal will and freedom by not allowing anyone, no matter what, to rob them of their spiritual freedom which is a part of their free will and how they choose to act as human beings, no matter what.
Aside from all of that, in my book, the expression, kind of being an oxymoron, I think that unfree will exists when we do not act on what we know to be real and right. We become sort of frozen in time…there is no real will in that.
in my book, the expression, kind of being an oxymoron, I think that unfree will exists when we do not act on what we know to be real and right. We become sort of frozen in time…there is no real will in that.