the illusion of free will is as follows. someone can think of some questions and then can make a decision. thus it feels that they had a choice in their decided outcome. the way i think it works is a person already has an answer/decision before they have a question. the answer comes from genetics , past experiences, and chance (it could rain, a smell could jog your memory ect.) so when we think, all we are doing is putting up questions to the answers we already have (its like the brains way of sorting information.) the brain the chooses the question that best matches the answer. the following is my view on what it is humans (and other animals) are doing. WE ARE THE UNIVERSE, OBSERVING OURSELVES FROM WITHIN OURSELVES.
Free will is simply a form of fate.
free will is no cost probate
-Imp
FATE, having provided us with FREE WILL
holds us accountable for our actions, right?
Did I choose FREE WILL?
Have I chosen to have this choice-making ability?
I don’t remember deciding to have the capacity to decide!!
I remember more times wishing decisions away!!! (didnt work)
no free will there…
plus with all that shout going down about how
FREE WILL as our good friends here have suggested
may not even really be what it (check out this wild concept)
seems to be …
epistemochemically screeching, it could be misleading
to believe in that we could ever hope to even possibly
know
No not FATE, but the law of the land, and of course reality itself. Your will is restrained by these and other things too. It is not free, only free to risk the consequences, if you dare.
clearly we dont have free will (I agree with GalacticHeart) A persons brain is just like a computer data in → data out.
The data in is Genetics, Experiences (Inc. Chance Events)
The data out is Decesions leading to actions.
Nobody can argue that our experiences and genetics do not shape us, so really it is only the poor logician who believes in free will.
This is another example of why post-descartes it’s hard to except realize there is no “Counsciousness” that allows us to directly experience “Thoughts” and then we can escape this whole fallacy.
Well put, both to Chanbengchin and to Galactic Heart. 
However, I don’t fully understand how this conclusion (made by GalacticHeart) follows logically from his premises:
Someone here want to explain this to me? 
I agree that free will is actually an “illusion” in which we feel that we play an interactive role in our own fates/actions. However, we are not so helplessly attached to “the laws and fate” that we can be considered totally unaccountable for our actions.
Murders do choose to end or not to end the life of their victims…theives do chose whether or not they will steal objects of high cost, etc.
My point is: I don’t see how the laws of science, fate, or anything of the such play any role in things like murder, robbery, etc. In this sense, I think such as thing as “free will” does exsist to some extent.
Perhaps my examples are not totally relavent to the specific topic of “Free will” that this thread disccusses.
I’m kinda lost here…
sure, GalacticHeart is a solopsist
just keep in mind that without free-will there is no moral (or any other) responsibility…
I didn’t murder that bus full of children, it was in my genes, I couldn’t help it…
-Imp
Yuxia,
“really it is only the poor logician who believes in free will.”
Because you have not freely choosen to understand that there is no free will, there can be no distinction between you and the logician that believes in such freedom. The poor logician cannot exist as poor. In both cases it is just computer data in and computer data out. Don’t you think?
Dunamis
Of course there is moral accountability!
Pointing to the reason why you are violent and dangerous doesn’t change the fact that you are violent and dangerous. Of course there is a reason why, but society can’t deal with the reasons why (which are as numerous as the configurations that cause storm systems to emerge in weather patterns), they have to deal with you. And if you don’t draw a box around something, call it “you”, and take responsibility for it, someone else will have to take responsibility for it through restraint (prison/insane asylum).
We are what we are for a reason, but attempting to blame the reason doesn’t fix your behavior.
You miss the point? Without free will there is more necessety to critisize people who make the wrong choices they clearly have the wrong data or the wrong brain processes.
I.e. the wrong input and the wrong software.
Additionally the moral accountability argument doesnt hold up what so ever,
of course society must hold people accountable but can you really say that the fact that: bullys go on to bully or the abused often become the abuser arn’t good indicaters that there are causes of course we must hold people morally and socially accountable but to understand the reasons is to be able to prevent them and this idiosyncractic high horse known as free will that people believe in is just holding us back.
It’s all Descartes fault oh and christians 
Clever enough to realise what you were doing but why didn’t he stop? He chose to let ‘‘fate’’ take its toll?
So are you disagreeing with GalacticHeart? Just curious…
humans are condemmed to be free…
-Imp
Imp,
Not if they do not want to accept responsibility for their states.
Dunamis
We have both - free-will and the illusion of free-will.
When we have free-will, our very freedom to act and the choices we make makes our life fated for the future. Now because we MUST go through what is fated for us, so if fate decree that we must make a certain choice then we will be fated to make that choice otherwise we’ll be making that choice out of free-will. Get it? I don’t think God could be that harsh to only give us the illusion of free-will. He gives us both - free-will and the illusion of it too.
the illusion of free will is the strongest when one has a large ego. one feels as though he can “choose” between right (inner self) and wrong (ego self)… life is like an ultra complex, pinball game. the person being the pinball, and the world being the pinball machiene. once the pinball (human) is flicked in a certain direction it will reflect off what ever it hits. the pinball will bounce in a given direction every time(no matter what the pinball is thinking along the way). the direction is due to the physical make up of the pinball, and the physical make up of whatever it hits(aswell as the make up of everthing around it). a murderer is like a pinball that through chance got bounced into a horrible part of the game and is stuck there bouncing back and forth… (next point) if played for long enough the pinball will collect dirt and grime along the way (ego!). thus causing it to roll (slightly out of tune) into parts of the game that it would have otherwise not have rolled into.(the good news) by chance it would be possible for the pinball to get bounced into somthing that could cleanse it of all its grime(ego) causing it to bounce of its environment in a direction that co-encides with its natural make up(the way it used to bounce befor it got dirty). in the end the pinball should not feel responsible for the score of the game. it was all due to factors out of its control (flippers, pinball course, its own make up). the direction it bounced was all caused by factors compleatly out of the pinballs controll. the pinball shouldnt feel responsible for a “game over”. likewise the pinball shouldnt take credit for a high score. if a pinball is lucky enough to be part of a high score it shouldnt take credit for the score. but it most definately has the rite to fully enjoy its miraculous ride.
note: if any one reading this has acsess to a time travel device, i would sugest you travel back in tim and read the following before you read the above^^^…o.k… WHY YOU SHOULDNT FEeL GUILTY ABOUT NOT FEELING GUILTY…because…everthing you do or think is a result of genetics(you cant feel guilty about instincts!they are 100percent programed by nature) or a result of ego(you shouldnt feel bad about ego(its 1oo percent programed by society(you didnt decide what culture you were born into!)…if society was strange enough you could have been raised to feel guilty about drinking tap water (i think)…guilt is not a natural human emotion. i doesnt help survival…bears dont commit suicide…no animal should be burdoned with the responsibility of judging itself…when you loose your ego and guilt, it isnt like anarchy instead the guilt is replaced by a natural sense of duty to do good…humans are good…egos bad…i havent bounced int the part of the pinball machiene where one learns grammer and sentence structure…bare with me…peace.
TEST:
Okay imagine you are in a situation in your life lets call it T1
at T1 you have a decision to make lets say you want to decide whether to have a chiken or a tuna sandwhich for lunch lets call this D1 and when you made up your mind you decided on tuna.
So at T1, D1 = Tuna.
Now imagine you are back at T1 knowing exactly the same things, in exactly the same physical states, no future memories, no different genetics. For all intents and purposes you are re-living this moment.
Do you really think at T1, D1 = Chicken?
That’s what free will says - totally illogical
I experience my acts of choosing, and the deliberation of choosing directly, like I do my mental states. Saying there’s no such thing as free-will would be like saying there’s no such thing as me. Your argument would have to be completely deductive- if there’s any inductive side to it, than the evidence of my own experience will trump it every time.
SO what’s a compelely deductive argument for determinism or fatalism? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.
The argument that humans are like pinballs in a machine goes against how we [i]take ourselves [/i]to be, and as far as I can tell, it's based on the assumption of reductionist materialism: We see matter like rocks and stars and such behaving in completely predictable pinball-like ways, and since the assumption is that humans are totally the results of the same process that formed stars, the same rule must apply to us, [i]even if it doesn't seem that way[/i].
The problems with this argument are the following:
A.) It’s based on reductionist materialism. Taking this far-from-universal belief as an assumption weakens the argument, of course.
b.) It needs an argument to show that free will can’t develop from non-free materials. The intuition that it doesn’t seem like matter could produce freedom butts up against the intuition that we are making free choices: one of these intuitions must be wrong.
A reason must be given to prefer one over the other. There are two good reasons to trust the intuition of free will over the intuition that matter can’t produce free will. The first is that free choice is observed interally (it’s among our mental states), something we have direct access to. The second, more powerful reason, is that saying matter cannot produce free will is making a statement about impossibility- it’s claiming a necessary truth. It would be irrational to take a proposition to be not only true, but necessarily true, on intuition alone, when the intuitive backing for the counter-claim is just as strong.