I thought I’d reply to volchok’s post on another (locked) thread, but others can respond if they get the urge.
" Now we’re getting somewhere. You’re already acknowledging that certain kinds of free will are not worth wanting. That’s certainly progress.
Anyway, the problem here is with the way you phrase things.
As I’ve said many times, you knowing something may, in fact, affect your will. If you know that smoking is bad for you, you might stop smoking. If you know that being exposed to the sun for copious amounts of time is unhealthy, you might apply sunscreen when you go to the beach. If you know that your girlfriend has a history of cheating you might break up with her. All this things are perfectly possible. They happen everyday. I have never disputed this. This is also typically known as “freedom to act”. Again, freedom to act, not free will. I think that the concept of freedom to act is also deeply flawed and the very best it means that you’re not being coerced by others but that’s a discussion for another day.
So, beliefs and knowledge affect your actions, sure. But that has jack shit to do with free will.
After all where is the freedom, in doing what one wants, when one’s wants are the product of prior causes, which one cannot inspect and therefor could not choose? ",volchok.
As volchok says here, we can certainly change our wills if we have good cause to.So volchok calls this ability to change our will “freedom to act”, but because such freedom to act is caused by a will that is itself caused he believes that the action is not based on a free will.
Is it possible for our will to be free ? First of all we have to decide what we mean free from. Volchok recognises this with his “certain types of free will are not worth having”.Do I want my will to be free from external input? No, of course not, I want my will as a tool to navigate this existence so it needs to respond to causes…I don’t want to be flailing around like a lunatic do I ?
Then we come to the crux of the matter, if my will is a kind of program do I actually have the ability to change the program of my will, so for instance, is it possible for me to learn to want something that I do not like (at present).I think we all know the answer to that, education can certainly change our in built opinions.I accept that my view of reality may be wrong, therefore I am open to being educated toward truth, therefore my will is free .
So, I don’t want freedom from reality, I want freedom from stupidity, freedom from wrong judgements. I want to be free to do the right thing based on my aims, and my aims…I want them to be right too…I accept that because my view of reality my be faulty, then so my aims may be faulty.Being open to knowledge is as free as any sane mind wants to be.
Also volchok linked to a Sam Harris lecture.Straight off the bat Harris assumes a material world when it is clear to me that reality need not be dependent upon a mind free world, but setting that aside, Harris then says that thoughts just emerge into consciousness.He says that science can see the thought develop before we are conscious of it, that therefore we are not the conscious author of our own thoughts. So what! We are the conscious cause of whether we act on the thought that emerges. He seems to miss the fact that the conscious mind doesn’t act on all subconscious inputs (we all know this from personal experience), that the conscious mind tends to ignore the bulk of shit that floats up from our subconscious.
