I don’t belive we have free will but we have free choice. We can choice what to do but are limted by the laws of science and biology. God (defined as the creater and deism ) just made us but couldn’t give or take things like free will. Or God wants to see who good enough for heaven by are actions.
How about this. We all know that events are determined and that the indeterminacy principle has nothing to do with causalty. Duh! How can someone experience the present and the future at the same time? No shit the particle cannot be known to be “here” and at time “x” simultanesouly…but that is no argument against its determinacy, but rather its identity in a relation to another point, a perspective. There is no induction fallacy in knowing “things cause things to happen,” but there is in believing “this caused that to happen here.”
There is no longer a metaphyscial possibility for freewill. It just ain’t happening. We can examine the ethical implications and the pathos of the will and what might or might not be expressions of something “free.” Sartre and Nietzsche both have ideas which I make comparisons with regarding this issue.
When Sartre says that he was never more free than when under the German occupation, he is speaking about the very pathological nature of the “freewill” as it is explained in Nietzsche’s conception of the first use of “freewill” as a politcal device through which moral systems of reward and punishment were manifested. The type of freewill suggested by Nietzsche that is here is that of the reactionary kind; what Sartre demonstrates as resentment toward an opposition and the capacity to resist as such. From the outset, the only thing distinguishing the freewill of the noble ones over the freewill of the oppressed to resist, is the sentiment of the action. The conscience of having been “opposed” and with bad tidings. The true moralist does not wait this long; he has no concern for what is owed or what is owed. This moralist in resentment demonstrates a decadence of pathos, but not of action; his actions are determined anyway.
Freewill is the ability to resist, which when inverted and removed of its resentment, is equal to the power of the noble moralists. The pathos, if it is to be clean, must not expect recompense and must act without concern for politcal agendas.
Rome was the first organized town of vagrants, scoundrels, exiles, gangsters, criminals, and anyone else that was kicked out of somewhere else. In Rome, nobody owed anybody anything until they set up contracts.
Hey, it isn’t my fault we became civilized. Don’t get mad at me.
Freewill does not exist. But a good strong pathos does not make moral decisions based on granted rights from other powers…it makes decisions that are ideals which do not rest on the approval of another. To express freewill as a form of resignation is not nihilistic because existence is not creative no more than it is destructive. The Buddha coulda had a clean conscience had he stole a cookie from the cookie jar.
Come on, who woulda known? Become the cookie monsters that you are!
Obey the waterfall, for it makes no mistakes. But to love it! To love it, that is the greatest of all.
Shame on the Buddha. Boring bastard.
Why wouldn’t you want to do what is right and true?
I think we are left to it because we insist on the right to ask questions like; ‘why can’t i do what i want every day? why do i have such tooth decay?’
That and, the message is already loud enough; the people who don’t believe it are the ones who don’t want to and, the ones who believe them are the ones who want to. And all of these ones without a thought to why they want what they want.
It is as meaningful for a person to chase after their lusts as it is for a rock to fall; be more significant than a rock.
If I have free will then I choose how to act independent of god. I have a kind of supernatural power through my choices, and am totally accountable towards god for what I choose to do. So god is like a major god judging a minor god that has only this small supernatural power of free will. But if free will is supernatural who is really controlling it ? How do I know I am controlling it ? How do I know what are automatic choices, simple instinct or my unconscious ?
If the practical problem in the end is morality and accountability, then you can simply decide to lead a good enough life with standard morals that most humans know very well. There is no need for a god watching what you do. And if we are made in god’s image we also have within ourselves and know most moral values and behaviors. God is redundant.
jeffl,
Is there such a creature as a human who is morally perfect? If we aren’t morally perfect on earth, why would we be in heaven? We could only be perfect in heaven if God took away our freewill and thus our capacity to err. So either God has cruelly fooled us and we can have free will without suffering or there is no freewill in heaven. But then, if free will is of no great importance in heaven then why do we need it here…?
It does seem possible, some might say even probable that freewill is only an illusion, in which case the question of good, bad and Heaven would be redundant.
Could “Free will†be an illusion? We think we have free will - so we take action and believe we took that action by our supposed will to choose (choice). But where is free will when the results derived from our choices are contrary to what we chose? Why can’t every action be predestined (or perhaps determined) even as our actions are performed under the illusion of “choice†(free will)? passion
What about regret? Is that just an illusion too? Obviously I’m a proponent of free will … albeit I don’t believe there would be any means of exercising it without determinism. So in that sense it also makes me a compatibilist.
Hi Iacchus. Thank you for the comments. You said, What about regret? Is that just an illusion too?
In a sense yes. Regret may just be the predestined (or determined) result of a previous regrettable action. The intial action itself, which was the later cause of regret, was also predestined (or determined) along with the previous ones that lead up to even that! So, perhaps it is so that no events (including a person feeling “regret” and all of the events leading up to the “regret”) are precipitated by “free will” or choice - it just feels that way - and that is where the illusion may exist. Thanks again Iacchus. 
passion
Of course we have free will. I just ‘saw’ myself choosing to respond to this thread, on a moment or two ago. No argument for determinism has ever been stronger than the simple perception of choice. That’s why this word ‘illusion’ needs to be tossed around- because we all percieved ourselves making choices all the time. Well? That’s good enough for me.
I could never quite grasp why people pray for God to destroy all evil, or everyone who disobeys Him…to destroy all evil you also destroy peoples free will to disagree and disobey. If there is no evil…you cannot choose to do it right?
Do you know a lot of people who pray for that? I can’t remember ever having heard it, myself.
Do they pray for evil and evil people to be allowed to live and be saved?
Perhaps i missed that somehow…
Detrop…where ya at dawg…
Help a brother out will ya?
Have you heard from Dunamis lately?
i rather miss him and his big words sometimes…LOL
So, if we are just an illusion to ourselves, does that mean that the world we see around us is just an illusion? Sounds to me like this is the only choice you’re presenting us with.
David R:
Doesn’t exactly answer my question- it was a mere curiousity. Do you really know a lot of people who pray for ‘the destruction of all evil’, or the destruction of everyone who disobeys God? In my personal experience, people are busy praying for sick relatives, financial security, and wisdom in difficult moral situations.
Whether or not you believe free will to be an illusion depends on your philosophical stance.
I’m much more inclined to take a logical positive stance on the construction of the mind. The mind is merely the collection of previously acquired mental perceptions that we have accumulated since we became “conscious” at some point in the womb. Indicators of this are the fact that infants still in the womb can register what is occuring outside of the womb and these perceptions affect choices in later life. This is why people grow up to “become like one’s parents”. One’s personality is an accumulation of everything one has experienced since birth. You’re an athiest/Christian/Muslim/whatever due to 1) religious/irreligious upbringing or 2) pro-/anti- religious experiences. I’ve found that a lot of people only believe what they believe due to the emotional attachment they place on it. One can be a Christian because of the emotional attachment one places on the title due to past experiences, not due to reasoned argument. This comes all the way down to someone refusing to be a Christian because when they were 13 they decided to be “different” and learn all they could about “some cool crazy chap called Nietzche”. Don’t tell me you don’t know people like that.
So this basically boils down to some kind of psychological determinism, that our personalities were in a sense predetermined due to the familial and social situations that we were born into or that we move through later in life.
I think this extends to free will, in so far as it is entirely illusory. I find there is a massive amount of evidence for the existence of a “subconscious”, a level of mental processes unavailable to conscious thought that register sensory perceptions and store them for use at a later date. I think this is the basis for what we call “free will”. This can be as simple as someone refusing to vote for a political party due to a latent anger concerning the actions of a previous leader, possibly over twenty years ago, that has lodged itself into the subconscious and affects relevant decisions now. It is all about associations: the memories that someone attributes to current situations which then affect the choices they make.
Due to my logical positivist leanings, I find it hard accepting something that can’t be properly defined, and the idea of free choice is one of them. Either it doesn’t exist and can be explained as being illusory, or it is impossible to to define in itself and can only be explained through its effects. The latter is like saying “free will exists because clearly I can choose to eat a sandwich or not”. That does not stand, because you are only explaining the effects of “free will” and not “free will” itself. Thus, I can’t accept “free will” as existing in any sense other than an illusory one.
TheAngryElvis
I like your invocation of the subconscious to attack free will, it’s something to think about. I set up an argument against solipsism in much the same way.
I think the above stands just fine as an argument for the acceptance of free will- I'm not at all a logical positivist, though, so I don't think something needs to be rigorously defined in order to be believed. We have a 'good enough' definition of free will to at least enter into the discussion. If we start talking about determinism vs. free will, we both know the kinds of sittuation in question- those situations where it seems we must pause, think things through, and ultimately select one action from a range of options. To say that these situations are an 'illusion' is to say that something about them is false- an apparence only- and we both know what that something is. For an outline, think about your breathing. Once you think about it, you have to consciously will yourself to breathe for a few minutes, until you stop thinking about it again, and the process resumes it's being automatic. Whether or not we can 'define' free will, we can easily point to examples of it, and the discussion is about whether the percieved difference in those two kinds of breathing (for example) is a real difference, or perception only.
If free will exists, then our perception of it may be a sort of faculty, and none of our faculties is definable in terms of the others- we cannot give a rigorous accounting of vision referencing only the other four senses, for example.
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If somebody broke their leg and it wasn’t set properly, does that mean they would probably limp? Yes. However, does that mean they are no longer free to walk (and/or limp) down to the store? Perhaps free will is most evident when things are in a state of balance or equilibrium … in other words functioning properly.
This analogy seems questionable, because surely this relies on the idea that it is possible for someone to make a conscious choice not to breath and suffocate themselves on a whim?
Again, an improper analogy for what I’m saying. They are obviously still ABLE to walk to the store however badly injured they are. Hell, he could drag himself along by his teeth. I am talking about what induces this chap to move to the store. Or what induces him to believe whatever it is that he believes, what induces him to make life-changing decisions and, the most obvious, what induces him to hold opinions about certain things. The power of associations between a proposition and a previous experience is incredible - this is how I believe free will to be illusory. How many people on this forum hold their views due to the associations they subconsciously carry with them? I was once a Christian and I can now no longer call myself that. Did this happen because of the things I associated with being a Christian - say, certain painful experiences associated with it? Does the prospect of athiesm seem more attractive to me subconsciously, and so I have moved away from Christianity because of this? How many idiot teenagers do you know who believe what they believe because it’s cool or controversial? Loads. I could be one of them.
I don’t see how: all I’m giving is examples of situations a person can point to for alleged cases of free will, and compare it to it’s absence. Breathing seems to be a perfect case of a situation in which we can see ourselves choosing to do it sometimes, and see it happening on it’s own other times. A person can choose not to breathe until they pass out, and then it stops becoming voluntary.
The purpose of my example was not to say “Here is proof of free will,” but just to show that we can talk about and (dis)believe in free will without rigorously defining it, so long as we have these shared experiences.