The Delusion of Free Will

What a fascinating and thought-provoking thread.

reply to post by AlienView

If you want to enslave yourself to a fear of life be my guest but ALL functioning life must have an element of free will to continue.

Plants.

And then again if there is no free will there is no crime. no one is guilty on anything. They are simply doing what they had to do - it is pre-determined. Murderers, child molesters, thieves, etc. have done nothing wrong because there is no right or wrong, everything is pre-determined.

It is only pre-determined if an entity actually has access to all the variables and uses them to compute an outcome. The existence of random variables ensure this will remain impossible no matter how good technology gets.

Even if free-will is fact, people committing crimes do so because given their circumstances and available information, they are making the decision which they believe will give them the greatest happiness or least unhappiness of the available choices. Revenge as punishment is so primitive. Fear of punishment when someone decides to commit a crime does is not usually given much weighting when they make their decision, therefore punishment is arguably immoral. The emphasis on crime should be rehabilitation and prevention, not "justice". It's sick.

If you want to believe in no free will than we must stop supporting so-called democracies and search for the ideal absolute police state where people can be protected from such radical ideas as free will.

Not sure I follow the reasoning here but am interested to hear why you feel this way.

reply to post by disasternaut

what do you say of the man who has been a devout member of a certain religion all their life and then they make the choice to change? that choice is an example of freewill

That man probably acquired access to better information and his healthy reasoning brain therefore utilized the information and changed its beliefs. I had a Christian world-view for the first 20 years of my life which changed when I came across something interesting which made me want to find out what all this is about. I didn't will for that change. It happened to me. I had no choice but to go with the change.

if we had no freewill we would all make the exact same choices every time without question.

I would argue that this is exactly what would happen in a hypothetical scenario. Humans are highly habitual creatures. No two decisions are ever exactly the same though. There are always slightly different variables so it cannot be tested.

reply to post by Paintshisshieldred

You are correct, genetics aren't a choice, neither is breathing air is it? Nor is breathing underwater. It kinda seems that the more you break it down, we don't have that many choices do we?

Well said. One of the things that fascinated me when finding out what all this is about was that even if we do have free-will, we have a lot, lot less than most people assume we do. We are a reaction to our environment. Our bodies (and therefore brains) are a reaction to our environment as a result of evolution. Therefore we are our environment (the universe).

I think the problem of free-will can be answered when you investigate exactly who it is that does or does not have free-will. Then you realise that you are doing all of it.

The relationship of art and creativity to free-will also makes for interesting pondering.

Human free will is like a multiple choice test, in that it is limited choices (You can move North, South, East, West, but not vertically unless you can fly). However, Humans also have a moral choice when it comes to morality and spirituality, they can choose to believe in a higher unseen Reality or they can not. There is choice in that regard. Humans also have the choice to refuse to participate in the multiple choice test. And life refuses to be simplified into simply 4 choices, life is infinite, a person can literally do an infinite number of things on any given day. So while the free will is not absolute it still exists, just because a person is not God does not mean they have no free will, they have more free will than animals and even more than humans who believe only in predetermined materialism.

I am undecided where I stand on this subject. I feel like I can make my own choices, but for a predetermined outcome (if that makes sense) So it was interesting to read everyones back and forth on the subject. But then it hit me while watching the news and thinking of what someone else posted. Once you realize you have the free will to make a choice things change. If I didnt have free will I would always pick the option that my mind logicly chooses (from previous experience ...etc) But if I know I have free will I can choose the "wrong" choice.

Here is my example. My wife is a huge animal lover. If an animal is hurt she is their advocate. Ok so here it goes. I look at her and say, do you belive in free will or determinism she is unsure so I explain the difference...She says she leans more towards determinism. I said in that perspective I can walk over and KILL your guinea pig, and you cant hold it against me because it was pre determined that I will do the action. She says no it doesnt work like that. Then I read her the beginning paragraph of this post and I said "So now I know that if I injure or kill your guinea pig that would be a "wrong" choice however since I know I have the option to do what ever I want in this body I could walk over there and do it....I just CHOOSE not to.