Keith Russell

Greetings:

Most people seem to view 'free will' as meaning a faculty or ability that exists independent of the person who has it.

That is not what I mean when I use the term 'free will'.

For me, free will is the ability to know (via introspection) that, in a situation where I have the choice of several options, should I choose one of them, I could have chosen differently.

Keith.

Laurentius

When I started to really learn English I was able to understand stuff but had I had a multiple choice test I would have made a lot of wrong choices.
But I decided that I should study it more seriously, and here I am, probably being able to sometimes make better choices than a native speaker.
Therefore, when I started writing this very text under your eyes I could have chosen to write it differently if I had not had studied English so well before.
The self shapes one's personality as well to the extent that it is reasonable to say that one is endowed with free will.

Self influence results in free will.

. genetic material +
. personal experiences/environment +
. self influence
. _________________
(equals) ego

(ironically edited to correct one grammar mistake
Yet, another piece of evidence in favor of free will!)

[ September 28, 2002: Message edited by: Laurentius ]</p>

xeren

But the decision to influence yourself in order to give yourself free will, where did that come from?

If you say from a past "free will" decision you made, then where did that decision come from?

It leads to a long regress, eventually to a point where your decision to alter something about yourself did not come from a mind state created by you, but wholly by environmental and genetic factors.

Here's a very good link to a paper on free will:
<a href="http://world.std.com/~twc/strawson.htm" target="_blank">Luck and Free Will</a>

If what i just wrote didn't make any sense, read the statements listed numbers 1-9, it shows why you could not be ultimately responsible for what you do.

-xeren

Calvan

Mr. Sammi

Would you or any other person help to understand what the following statement means?

Mr. Sammi writes: “One has no free will if the impending effect always affects us.”

Thanks in advance, Calvan.

Laurentius

Building your demonstration on the infinite regression argument will never be convincing since it can very well be used to show how moths could never have been catepillars. Logically one cannot explain birth, change and death without breaking the principle of identity.

The fact is that in the development of humans there is a moment when one's own personality is fully developed and the self can be held (at least partially) responsible for its own decisions.
Decisions that are considered to have been influenced by one's embedded free will.

AVE

xeren

What? I'm not trying to create some sort of Zeno's Runner paradox here in free will. I said it leads to a LONG regress, not an infinite one.

Of course, people should be held responsible for their actions, but having responsibility is not the same as having free will. since you didn't quite understand what i was try to say, i'll quote it directly from the essay i posted a link to earlier(sorry folks):

"(1) When you act, you do what you do, in the situation in which you find yourself, because of the way you are.

(2) But then to be truly or ultimately morally responsible for what you do, you must be truly or ultimately responsible for the way you are, at least in certain crucial mental respects. (Obviously you don’t have to be responsible for your height, age, sex, and so on.)

(3) But you can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all, so you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do.

(4) For to be ultimately responsible for the way you are, you must have somehow intentionally brought it about that you are the way you are.

And the problem is then this.

(5) Suppose you have somehow intentionally brought it about that you are the way you now are, in certain mental respects: suppose you have brought it about that you have a certain mental nature Z, in such a way that you can be said to be ultimately responsible for Z.

(6) For this to be true you must already have had a certain mental nature Y, in the light of which you brought it about that you now have Z. If you didn’t already have a mental nature then you didn’t have any intentions or preferences, and can’t be responsible for the way you now are, even if you have changed.)

(7) But then for it to be true that you are ultimately responsible for how you now are, you must be ultimately responsible for having had that nature, Y, in the light of which you brought it about that you now have Z.

(8) So you must have brought it about that you had Y.

(9) But then you must have existed already with a prior nature, X, in the light of which you brought it about that you had Y, in the light of which you brought it about that you now have Z.

And so on. Here one is setting off on a potentially infinite regress. In order for one to be truly or ultimately responsible for how one is in such a way that one can be truly responsible for what one does, something impossible has to be true: there has to be, and cannot be, a starting point in the series of acts of bringing it about that one has a certain nature; a starting point that constitutes an act of ultimate self-origination."

Again, sorry for the long post

-xeren

Clutch

xeren, what leads you to believe that the concept of responsibility supports your claim? Ie, that in order to be genuinely responsible for an action, you must have chosen your nature in virtue of which you intended to perform the action?

I think I grasp the concept of responsibility quite competently, but I don't find anything like this idea written explicitly into its content. Indeed, it seems obvious that responsibility is a vague concept, in the technical sense of vagueness: it incurs Sorites reasoning in penumbral cases. This is familiar to anyone who has ever chafed while waiting to be judged sufficiently responsible to drink, vote, drive, or what have you. (If I'm responsible at 19, why not 19 minus a day...?)

The crucial question when asking whether someone is genuinely responsible, in light of concerns about the provenance of their actual preferences, seems to be whether someone else is in control. So there is a real question about whether Jehovah's Witnesses in their early teens, say, can be considered responsible when expressing their (perfectly genuine) desires not to be given life-saving medical treatment. Experience of the world and of varying viewpoints, one tends to believe, has not yet had a sufficient effect on their preference structure to lessen the directness of influence that parents and the JW community have over, say, a 10 year-old's desires. When the naysayer is 40 we typically no longer feel this way. A 40 year-old does not choose her preferences -- at least, not all of them -- but then, neither does anyone else, in any obvious sense. And that seems to be all that the concept of responsibility requires, as it occurs in the wild.

Your argument, then, demands that you extract far more stringent conditions from the notion of responsibility than any normal use of the concept invests it with.

xeren

I'm sorry clutch, i've been using the world "responsibility" somewhat sloppily. Basically what i'm trying to say is that:

1) no one is truly responsible for what they do, because no one is the originator of their own mental state, each person is just the result of random events affecting their lives in ways they couldn't control starting the day they were born. (yes i realize this gets even Hitler off the hook)

2) but in the context of a society, people should still be held responsible for their actions because that is the best way to deter people from doing things that this society deems to be wrong.

[ September 28, 2002: Message edited by: xeren ]</p>

Clutch

xeren,
I understood that this was your argument. My previous post asked you: what supports this inference? As it stands it is a non-sequitur.

It does not seem to square with the concept of responsibility, as revealed in the uses to which we put it.

xeren

How is it non sequitur? It follows directly from the premises that i posted a few posts ago(the ones nubered 1-9).

I think i am talking about free will, and you are arguing about responsibility, and i honestly don't know where you are trying to go with it.

I'm probably missing something in your arguments, and i don't know how to get across to you what i'm try to get at.

But here's one more try, again not in my own words from that essay on free will:

(A) One is the way one is, initially, as a result of heredity and early experience. (B) These are clearly things for which one cannot be held to be in any way responsible (this might not be true if there were reincarnation, but this would just shift the problem backwards). (C) One cannot at any later stage of one’s life hope to accede to ultimate responsibility for the way one is by trying to change the way one already is as a result of heredity and experience. For one may well try to change oneself, but (D) both the particular way in which one is moved to try to change oneself, and the degree of one’s success in one’s attempt at change, will be determined by how one already is as a result of heredity and experience. And (E) any further changes that one can bring about only after one has brought about certain initial changes will in turn be determined, via the initial changes, by heredity and previous experience. (F) This may not be the whole story, for it may be that some changes in the way one is are traceable to the influence of indeterministic or random factors. But (G) it is absurd to suppose that indeterministic or random factors, for which one is ex hypothesi in no way responsible, can in themselves contribute to one’s being truly or ultimately responsible for how one is.