Kent Stevens

This is getting into an argument about semantics or what certain words mean. Free will traditionally has been a theologoical word that is way of god washing his hands of all the evil that he supposedly brought into the world. Instead of God making Hitler to kill millions of people it is free will that absolves God of Hitler's genocide. We would label God as evil apart for the weak excuse of free will. Free will traditionally means that people have a soul that acts independently of the rest of God's creation.

Now we can have another meaning of free will that just means that someone who wills something freely. However, when someone has a gun to their head they would no longer be acting freely. Does this mean that they have lost their free will when they are being compelled to do something that they don't want to do? Does this demonstrate unfree will? Free will is not normally thought of as something that can be lost while we are all familiar with freedom being taken away.

For a while I did try to redefine certain religious terms. I tried to redefine God as reverence for the universe. I tried to redefine spirituality as a feeling of awe at the universe. I tried to redefine religion as just acting in an ethical way. I tried to redefine free will as the will of someone acting freely.

But in the end I decided to ditch all these confusing redefinitions of words. It confuses myself and others to say that I believe in God, spirituality, and free will. It is weak to say that I am in any way religious.

There is also a semantic argument going on about words associated with agents mean. When the word choice should and should not be applied. I stretch the word choice to refer to other complicated machines. I note the similarities of processes such as tossing coins to people making decisions. So in part I have redefined what words like choice mean.

With this Materialism/Agent Duality I am saying that people can view certain things as material objects and as an agent. So you can see people as entities that choose, think, and feel as well as a configuration of chemicals that changes over time. If you want to you also think of certain devices such as traffic lights choosing when to change colours. Alternatively you can think materially about traffic lights and view them as not choosing anything. I acknowledge that by allowing this duality of viewpoint I allow semantic ambiguity. But I consider what certain devices do as not being especially different from certain human activities.

xoc

This is a caricature. You cannot behave in any consistent way or make any expectations of people without implicitly assuming their ability to chose(the filthy "free will" term). You implicitly assume the existence of the "I" (yourself) in your statements, even though this must be assumed and is beyond the reaches of rational debate. For even the "I think therefore I am" assumes the "I" first (that which thinks) so it is close to a tautology in essence. Not everything can be deduced, we need to make assumptions and presuppostions(or assert definitions). before we can start making deductions. Free will comes to our consciousness from the earliest stages and does not leave even after we deny it's existence, this should be enough to accept it, practically if not metaphysically(ultimately).

The will is "indeterminate" because it cannot be proven to act one way or the other a priori. If we cannot determine what we "must" decide beforehand, how can anyone claim that in fact "we must do what we do" before the fact, this is not provable rationally or empirically. We can only ever know the will as determinate after it is fulfilled, for now we know what decision was made and in it's nature as a past event it takes on a definite form. The transformation from indefinite to definite is the process of future turning into past, this is central to our consciousness and is a circle of reasoning we cannot possibly escape.
Well it follows certain alogrithms of logic, it's possible choices and tendencies are pre-programmed to a greater extent. Biological organisms can grow, brains form new links/patterns of behaviour etc. and are closer tied into unpredictability(freedom) by their growing complexity. Computers are not capable of making truly random decisions, of being truly arbitrary. Humans may not be capable of this either, but I'd at least claim they are closer to being arbitrary than machines; any person in the world, no matter how dull and predictable, has the ability/tendency at some point to pull a complete 180 and shock everyone he knows with their change of view or actions. If this is determinate, then on what exactly, because how do we evaluate how emotions vs. intellect vs. enculturation vs. biology etc. etc. gets the upper hand, it is our permissive will that allows these things to affect us to the degree they do in the first place. We behave in the way we believe we should or we believe we must; if our beliefs change, our actions change. But what determines our beliefs? THis is always more than something merely self-determined, but never beyond the self either, there is an interconnectedness with man and the world.
A clock is not free because it is only free to tick, it cannot "chose" to cease ticking. I can raise my arm or lower it at will, there is no outer force compelling me but I do so arbitrarily just to prove my own power of volition. If I am influenced to do so by this thread, it is still a far cry from direct and absolute causation(per Newtonian mechanics). The chaotic, unpredictive state of the brain is the essence of it's freedom, my freedom.

Kent Stevens

I prefer not to use the religious term free will. However, this part is mostly semantics as I do not have any objection to the term "ability to choose".

The way that you use "indeterminate" here is similar by what I mean when I use the terms "future uncertainty" or "future unpredictability".

Computers can generate random numbers that satisfy all the statistical tests. It is humans that have difficulty generating random numbers. You could design a computer that makes choices based on random quantum events. You could make a computer program that shocks everyone with its sudden changes to a moving dot on a computer screen. Quantum events are random and arbitrary but we would not want to make decisions in a quantum world way.

A clock does not choose or have volition. However, you can use the word free to describe most systems. For example you can talk of free electrons and free radicals. A clock hands can be moved by an external force if it is an analogue clock. In a similar way someone is not free if their arms are being forcibly moved by an external entity.

Nowhere357

Then our disagreement is resolved, other than the fact that "free will" is also a secular term, and this is supported by the dictionary.

I've enjoyed your posts, and you explain your position well.

Kent Stevens

Free will is a concept that has been jaded by its use in a religious context. But perhaps there are terms of similar meaning that can apply to a large number of different systems and not just humans. Instead of free will someone could talk about the degrees of freedom or the range of behaviour of a system. This "degree of freedom" phrase being a statistical term that relates to variability. You could also talk of the degree of future unpredictability.

People have large degree of freedom to what we do. For we have the greatest range of behaviour of anything that lives. While most living things focus on survival and reproduction we indulge in a number of pasttimes that appear to be useless in achieving this goal.

We have a greater degree of freedom or variability than does a chimpanzee. An animal has a greater degree of freedom than a plant. A plant in turn has a greater degree of freedom than does a bacteria.

In term of inanimate systems the weather and the stockmarket would have a large degree of freedom to them both.