Nowhere357

If free will exists, then it CAUSES actions, so the conclusion as stated above does not follow. Which serves to dismiss the 'nonsense' comment.
How about "a person's decisions are a result of outside forces (including body/brain) and the application of free will."
As Neilium pointed out, "The nature of the person is the person", and your argument fails.
Our free will can be applied only to choices we are aware of. Free will does not require omnipotence. Again, your conclusions do not follow.

Double Dutchy's post: The two belong to different levels of interpretation and can't figure in an either or question.
'Is this the Mona Lisa or a pigment-coated cloth ?'
Brilliant.

Aethari

Now that's somewhat interesting. I had always concieved of free will as a merely descriptive property, I.E. "the person can choose between A & B, so they have free will." You seem to be saying that free will is more like "the person has free will, which causes them to choose between A & B." I'm not sure precisely what you mean, but it seems that if free will actually causes actions, we're stuck in a whole quagmire of problems. In fact, we're still bound by the same objections I raised earlier. If you say that free will causes us to choose between A, B, or C (or any other finite set of options), the objection still remains that our will truly isn't free, since we're bound not to choose anything beyond the given options. Even more interesting, it seems valid to point out that if free will is a causal force and not merely a descriptive term, we have to ask if free will is self-negating. After all, if free will causes you to do X, you can't freely choose ~X.

This doesn't make much sense to me, but I'll try to response. If a person's decisions are a result of outside forces, how can the "application" of free will change the decision from being forced? What does it even mean to "apply" free will?

How can you call this free? By this logic, an evil demon could deprive us of knowledge of all our other choices in a situation, and yet we would retain "free will" because we only know of choice X, which is precisely the choice the demon wants. Maybe it's just a fundamental disagreement, but I'm not sure how you can call a choice free if we're forced into it via by malicious knowledge-withholding.

~Aethari

Neilium

And that evil demon's name is Fox News.

-neil (who couldn't resist that zinger)

Neilium

hi,

I think now might be a good time to figure out what kind of free will we object to or embrace. Also, some make a distinction between free will and freedom of choice.

There's the Christian doctrine of free will: which, IIRC, is that the actions of humans are not subject to natural laws, thanks to our buddy God. I think I can say with some confidence that this isn't the free will we are arguing about.

So, what are we arguing about?

Aethari, you make some excellent points.

If we could run 100000 mph, think how different our perception of the world would be. We'd be very different animals. The distance between here and anywhere else on the globe would be inconsequential .Telephones, cars and airplanes would probably never have ben invented, but shoes that never wear out or cause blistes would be worthy of the Nobel Prize. Our minds would be very different than they are now in our current, slow-poke forms.

In other words, I'm having a hard time imagining an external force having an effect on us that doesn't become internal. If we don't perceive it or aren't shaped by it in some way, it can't affect us. (bad example A virus is, for all intents, invisible to me when it invades my body, but it will certainly make its prescence known when I get sick. If, before I feel any symptoms, it's destroyed by my antibodies or the lamb vindaloo I had last night, it's as if it never crossed my path.

I'll try my best, because I'm not all that clear myself: One of your objections to free will is that it's only true if our choices are limited. True free will, then, is the ability to choose options that we aren't aware of. This couldn't happen without some sort of agent that connects us to knowledge outside of ourselves.

Our choices are limited. If they weren't, there would be no choices at all. I'd argue that then the narrative fiction called the self couldn't possibly exist. I'd need a few beers first, though.

Peace,
Neil

Nowhere357

I well receive your points. Here I just want to say: Your little piece of creativity is very amusing! The blood would pool. Wouldn't your shirt rip off? Skin? Hell, we'd be shredded! How fast do nerve impulses travel? Imagine the collisions! Could we run, jump, and exceed excape velocity?

Nowhere357

Good post, Aerthari. I didn't understand your viewpoint, and this helped a lot.

As you define 'free will', then I agree. However, IMO it shouldn't be defined that way. Let's loosely define it as: free will is whatever we're talking about, when we talk about how people seem to be able to make choices.

Also, I disagree with the statement "the person has free will, which causes them to choose between A & B" (your paraphrase of my position). I would say "...which allows them to choose...". My position, then, is that we seem to have free will, which allows us to make mental decisions, which in turn cause physical changes in the brain/body. Making decisions is an active quality. If in fact free will is passive, and we just 'watch' as the decisions are made by the brain, then 'free will' has no real meaning.

Hmmm. If free will ALLOWS you to choose, and the choices are x and ~x, there is no problem, and free will is not self-negating.

You know, we don't HAVE to choose. We can just choose to quit paying attention. For example, most of us have experienced driving on 'auto-pilot'.

Also, it's easy to choose between equally-weighted choices. The fun part is trying to choose something you can barely 'see', while other options are screaming for attention. Example: drug addiction. Easy to quit cigarettes, right? Just stop smoking! But what happens (when addicted) is that the idea 'I don't want a cigarette' becomes very small and hard to focus on, while your entire mental awareness becomes saturated with the desire for nicotine. Relax your 'will power' for a moment, and wham.

The outside forces causes the set of options we become aware of. In that sense, we have been 'forced'. But we are free to choose from among those options.

What does it mean to 'apply' free will? From the view of an individual, I think it means that we can affect the world. From the view of scientific proof, I think it is a falsifiable theory.

DRFseven

How are we free? We're bound to consider which option is the most compelling and choose it.

Aethari

Neilium-

On reflection, it looks like if materialism is true, all external forces will eventually include internal components (ones that effect our mind and outlook). However, if we reject materialism and posit a non-physical "soul", it would be possible to have purely external forces in the sense that they could change and act upon our physical body but not upon our non-physical "soul." I don't think the point is that critical, and this isn't a debate about materialism, so enough commentary on that.

Well, IMHO, true free will would be the ability to choose amoung all actions/decisions that could be possibly actualized. This could possibly demand that, as you said, we are able to choose options we are unaware of via on outside agent. That would be one way to go about resolving the problem. However, since I've already asserted omnipotence is a necessary prerequisite of true free will, coupling that with omniscience to resolve the problem of knowing-all-possible-options isn't too grandious a step.

Here I'm just confused by semantics due to the nature of the discussion: do you mean limited as in "there are a finite set of possible choices" or "we can only choose from a set that does not include all possible choices"?

Nowhere-

I'll go along, but this seems somewhat self-proving, if we take free will to be "when...people seem to be able to make choices." That's nitpicking, though...onto the rest of the post.

I agree with all of this. However, as I was arguing before, I don't feel that any definition of free will less powerful than my aforementioned 'true free will' isn't really even meaningful. I'll try to present my argument more clearly in a later post.

You dealt with my objection with the second sentence there: I was saying that, given my interpretation of your first post (which you cleared up in your response), if free will caused us to choose between A and B, we were deprived of the free will of choosing neither.

Well, that's almost an entirely different argument. I haven't addressed at all thusfar whether our actions are necessarily resultant from our environment and makeup, or not. Admittedly, I'm not terribly clear on where I stand with that: while a materialistic outlook would urge me to say that all our actions are just derivative of the universe's makeup and that we don't really make 'choices', I have a great deal of trouble accepting that everything which happens, happens necessarily from the "given conditions." For now, however, I'm going to stick with my argument that, limited choice or no choice at all, it doesn't really make a difference.

Thanks for the good responses.

~Aethari

John Page

How about this proposition:

"If we really had free will (i.e. our decision was made independently of any deterministic mechanism) and your poll was a statistically valid survey you should end up with the same curve as for radioactive decay/quantum activity."

Any takers?

Cheers, John

Nowhere357

I think this is circular. Why do you say 'we are bound to choose the most compelling'? If you are right, then clearly there is no free will. What evidence do you have?