Free Will?!

We have free will because we can make choices. That doesn't mean that our choices couldn't be predicted. Knowing all the variables in a closed system (including all variables pertaining to the decision maker), our decisions could certainly be predicted.

I like Mark Twain's statement about the contest between drives, i.e., that my "choice" is the victory of the strongest drive. Sounds better to me that presuming a dispassionate ego "choosing" between alternatives. I do not believe in either free will or determinism. Both are sophmoric models no longer addressed in philosophy (at least as far as I can tell). The only freedom I see is that of the Absolute Cosmos, and its freedom is expressed in all the countless "choices" made expressing contests between drives.

So, basically, you don't have free will because you always choose what you want to do most? :wink:

"free will" is an ethical construct; every action is a choice, with some being less difficult to predict, than others.

As mentioned above, no one's 'will' is entirely unfettered, the needs of the appetites, social dictates, personal proclivities, biases, and even fetishes, guide our choices.

But ethically each individual should be free to be 'victim' to his or her own demons!

[i may disagree with your choice, but i willingly assign the right to make it to you!]

One of the most difficult things I had to come to as a believer in free will is how less than free my will is.

I used to think it had be absolutely free for it to be free will. I now think if I have one choice in my lif that I can make, even if it is one where the parameters are forced upon me, I am free.

The depressing thing is if I used that one free choice up today when I ordered the #1 at Wendy's instead of the #2.

TF

I like to think of 'free will' as a a dance between what you want, and what others are 'willing' to give you. Society is fettered, and humans seem to have a propensity to become fettered, or worse, enslaved by their own ideas of what they 'should' or 'should not' do.

I agree with stuh on the point that despite our shackles, our 'free will' revolves around the fact that we have the ability to make choices, for better or worse. Given that society is indeed relatively predictable, the choices you make could lead to extreme success, or horrid failure. Still, the choice IS yours.

I feel the need to break into song:

Here I Am

(Lyle Lovett)

Hello
I'm the guy who sits next to you
And reads the newspaper over your shoulder
Wait
Don't turn the page
I'm not finished
Life is so uncertain

Here I am
Yes it's me
Take my hand
And you'll see
Here I am
Yes it's true
All I want
Girl is you

Given that true intellectual and emotional compatability
Are at the very least difficult
If not impossible to come by
We could always opt for the more temporal gratification
Of sheer physical attraction
That wouldn't make you a shallow person
Would it

Here I am
Yes it's me
Take my hand
And you'll see
Here I am
Yes it's true
All I want
Girl is you

If Ford is to Chevrolet
What Dodge is to Chrysler
What Corn Flakes are to Post Toasties
What the clear blue sky is to the deep blue sea
What Hank Williams is to Neil Armstrong
Can you doubt we were made for each other

Here I am
Yes it's me
Take my hand
And you'll see
Here I am
Yes it's true
All I want
Girl is you

Look
I understand too little too late
I realize there are things you say and do
You can never take back
But what would you be if you didn't even try
You have to try
So after a lot of thought
I'd like to reconsider
Please
If it's not too late
Make it a cheeseburger

Here I am
Yes it's me
Take my hand
And you'll see
Here I am
Yes it's true
All I want
Girl is you

Ah, this topic proved to be more interesting than what I first thought.

I agree with Stuh and with in part with JLN. We make our choices, but if we study a particular person for about a week we can predict what he/she will do in most situations. And we can do that because we know what are the person's strongest drives.

The thing that indecisive addresses is also true. The system is made so a person who rapes a girl gets punished. While I see nothing wrong with that the guy who raped the girl did it because he couldn't resist the urge to do something he loves to do, just like I sometimes write a letter to a friend. It his inability to contain that desire that we punish. But the guy has to live supressing his true self, hiding from the law or living behind bars.

I'm glad it's not in my likings commiting that sort of life-altering actions to other people.

bit of both
We may have 'free' will to choose from kerry, bush, nadar and 'none of the above'. But having to choose one among them is perhaps the destiny programmed for us.

I'm voting for my dad this election.

Saying that we can predict what a person will do in most situations is to acknowledge that perfect prediction is impossible. And if that's the case, then it's because either (1) everyone has free will, or (2) a person's actions are determined, but a person is so complex that it is not possible to make an accurate prediction in all cases.

On the other hand, to say that we can make reasonably accurate predictions because we know "the person's strongest drives" doesn't actually mean anything in terms of free will. To illustrate, let's take an example that JLNobody used (in a post that, sadly, was lost in the last server crash): I am lying in bed half-asleep. I can either get up or I can continue sleeping. If I understood JLN correctly, my decision is dictated by my stronger drive -- the drive to get up or the drive to sleep. But how do we know which drive is stronger? Well, apparently we know by viewing the result: if I get up, then my drive to get up was stonger; if I sleep, then my drive to sleep was stronger. This, however, leads us to an empty tautology: I get up because I got up, and I sleep because I slept.

As I have explained elsewhere, we can, at best, accurately retrodict events, but we cannot accurately predict them. To explain events by retrodicting on the basis of human "drives," however, does nothing but involve us in a tautology. Meanwhile, if we cannot predict human actions, then we must either acknowledge that humans have free will or that humans are so complex that we can never know enough to know what they will do beforehand. And if the latter is true, then it is difficult to see how, in practical terms, that belief is any different from a belief in perfect free will.


There have been many attempts to justify a system of morality in the absence of free will. This, I must say, is not one of the best.

We cannot say that a person rapes because he has no free will while simultaneously asserting that we are justified in punishing him because he "couldn't resist the urge" to rape. If he had absolutely no free will, then any notion of "resisting an urge" is nonsensical, since such "resistance" would depend upon free will. If a person is truly determined in his actions, then any kind of legal system must be based upon punishing people for doing what they do, rather than failing to do what they should have done. The former is a deterministic standard, the latter is a free will standard.

I don't see anything wrong for punishing a rapist for not resisting the urge to rape. I also don't see how you can perport to punish the rapist at all if he has no free will in the matter. With a determinist mindset, the only laws are that of nature, and human beings shouldn't be trying to legislate what is allowed to happen or not, because it is all predetermined.

Just a small proviso ... no one can accurately predict an individual's actions on a consistent basis, but rather accurate forecasts of mass behavior based on strong historical trends extapolated into the near term future can be made. Personally I reject the deterministic model. If things are determined, as they must be for prophecy, then nothing we think, say or do has any meaning. A monster has no culpability, and no reason to trying to become less monstrous. If we all accepted the deterministic model, we would still be fighting our Chimp cousins for jungle territory. Even if everything is predetermined, we must act as if we had complete Free Will. Without that law and the usages of civil society would dissolve and chaos would indeed be predestined.

I think that the problem of free will depends on the idea we have of causality. If all events in universe are produced by causal relations, then free will is impossible. This is the model of Newton and Laplace cosmology. And if all mental events are produced by neuronal synapsis, causaly predictable, then free will is also impossible.
I think that free will, defined as the possibility of free intelectual choice between alternatives, does not exist.
But since I also believe that causality is nothing more than a tendency and events can only be predictable in terms of their possibility and statistical probability, I think we are able to make decisions when we face well defined alternatives - that we cannot control.
I'll use the case of the rapist to clarifly my point of view: the rapist has the need of raping, I have not. He is not free to decide if he desires to rape or not. He can think that it is wrong to rape but, in spite of that, he still wants to rape.
His choice exists in another level: although he feels the urge to rape he can repress that desire. For instance, he can seek for medical assistance.
Choices are answers we give to particular situations, since we are entities that exist in constant interaction with other entities. At this level I believe that we can choose between different (and concrete) alternatives - but even here the choice is not allways possible.
Of course, that doesn't mean that moral is impossible. Moral is another thing.

My will cost me $50...and I have very few assets. Nancy's cost $50 also...and she is loaded.

But nearly as I can tell...the chance of a free will (at least here in the north east) is damn near zero.

Why?


What exactly is a "decision" in a deterministic universe?


How do you determine if someone is a rapist before he has committed a rape?


If he can repress his desire, then doesn't that mean he has free will?


What is the meaning of "choice" in a deterministic universe?

Predicting a human action is more or less like predicting the climate. There are just too many variables. And as Stuh said, if we knew them all, we could predict the outcome. But that's impossible. Even if we retrodict the action we wouldn't be able to know which variables affected the action. So at simple view it looks like we have free will but we are really dictated by with what we desire the most.

I'm saying that, for practical measures, free will exists because it's impossible to always predict the outcome. But we do follow certain patterns so we might be right most of the times. But on a global view, we only follow our strongest drive, so a strong case might be saying that there is no free will.

Now... I'm just confused.

There ain't no such animal as "free will." We are the products of our genes and environment.

C.I. He's back! Glad to see you out of the penalty box, be cool.

Yes, sir! Will try.