Free Will

dlorde: Perhaps if you state this as a question or make more of a commentary, you can get a discussion going.
 
lionking said:
And?
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And it's just something amusing and possibly thought-provoking that I thought I'd drop into the forum. If it generates discussion, so much the better. Discussions about free will are too thin on the ground here.

And yes, I did think of calling it 'Free Willy' (the film, not...)
 
Elizabeth I said:
Well, he's not as bad off as that guy who keeps getting shot at - you know, "Fire at Will."

I always wonder what he did to make every army in the world mad at him.
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In our family, anytime we watch a movie and a character says "Fire at will," all of us shout out, "Which one's Will?" :p
 
First of all, it might help if you elaborated a little on what do you call Free Will.

I've seen too many people run into dada land based on pretty obvious assumptions. E.g., that free will would somehow mean acting randomly and against all experience or common sense. (E.g., ever since neurological research showed that taking a decision involves building a "for" or "against" signal against it over time and before taking an actual decision -- which frankly is what you'd expect from a neural net vote in the first place -- much garbage has been written to the effect of "see, that proves that free will doesn't exist!")

So what would you include under having or not having free will. Does it suffice if nobody else took that decision for you, or do you exclude subconscious/instinctive decisions? Do decisions taken based on prior experience count as free will, or somehow that makes the universe deterministic for you? Etc.

If we all talk about a different definition of it, that's going to be just a waste of time.
 
dlorde said:
We have no choice but to act as if we have free will.
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But, to actually answer that: false. There are enough people whose purpose in life seems to be to prove that they (and everyone else) don't have free will. E.g., Scott Adams of Dilbert fame kept hammering on that point last I read his blog. So acting as if we have free will is obviously not that unavoidable.
 
HansMustermann said:
First of all, it might help if you elaborated a little on what do you call Free Will.
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That's really what it is questioning, the meaning of free will (for the reader).

So what would you include under having or not having free will. Does it suffice if nobody else took that decision for you, or do you exclude subconscious/instinctive decisions? Do decisions taken based on prior experience count as free will, or somehow that makes the universe deterministic for you? Etc.
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One of the problems with defining free will is using terms like 'choice' and 'decision' and what it means for them to be 'free'.

I suppose it's the sort of statement you might see on an exam paper as an essay subject. No right or wrong answer, just a bunch of possibilities.
 
I consider myself quite the determinist(incompatibilist, hard determinism).

For me, it all comes down to one thing.

Can your brain(a physical thing), violate causality. If it cannot, then that means that given sufficient information on the variables(causes) that process in your mind to create a "choice"(effect), could be calculated beforehand, rendering free will an illusion.

I look at it like the roll of a D6. There is really only one possible result to any roll once the initial conditions of the roll have been set in place. We only think that there are six, because we cannot calculate all of these variables with any degree of accuracy.

I should also point out that I am a materialist(obviously).
 
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