Do we have free will?

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Or do we have cheap will or do we have expensive will?

Free will does not exist; however, there is the persistent illusion of free will. Neurologist concur.

Hmm. Do you choose to believe in determinism, having considered the matter and concluded thus? Or are you predetermined to believe in free will?

I think we have free will. Either I'm predetermined to think so and will think so until a moment of my predetermined not thinking so comes to be, or my will is actually free. It seems much the same to me.

Free will, if there were no other humans on this planet then you would have free will. as soon as there are more then one then new boundaries are made. the more humans there are the less freedoms you will find you have and the more in your space they will become.

Classical determinism has been proven to be false.

"Free will" probably works not in any way we can imagine (yet).

I think we can choose how to act in response to something, even though our choice of actions, the something and our responses are severely constrained. Too bad people rarely choose to choose. Consciousness needs to be developed and the fact that people can improve in this makes me think that "free will" (whatever that is) does exist. The very fact that self-awareness, and awareness of self-awareness defines consciousness allows us to choose between observed reactions. Now you say that there are per-determined algorithms on choosing choices. That is true, but .. huh it's not working that well.. Probably I just wan't to believe in it.

Tough to answer because the idea of free will is so nebulous and even asymmetric to determinism that many of the things people could mean by free will aren't even mutually exclusive to determinism in all cases.

For example in a perfect world you can make whatever choices you really want out of a certain set of available options that you're consciously aware of. Problem is - in a given moment when you were aware of options a), b), c) and d) and chose d) as best you did so partly because you had no concept of choices e) thru m). Also, given the same choice point in the same mood with the same weather on the same day and the same events leading up to it there's no alternate causal chain that one can come up with to suggest that if the experiment was retried 10x, 100x, 1,000,000,000x, that you'd have chosen d) 100% of the trials.

That's where people have to make a distinction between the notion of a free will that's somehow completely disjointed from causality versus a subjective freedom to chose the best option that you have available in the pool of resources or choices that you know yourself to have. Making an argument for the former seems like a losing battle because even without Newtownian mechanical determinism and regardless of how strange it might be to think of reality in relation to probability waves - that probability if it has an extensive macro effect still doesn't give whatever one would need to suggest an acausal free will (it gives statistical randomness maybe but it doesn't compute as libertarian choice) and the possibility and suggestion of level III multiverse, if it were correct, would mean you chose all choices in their probability wave, split off into different universes at the choice point, and that's as every bit as unfree as Newtonian mechanism with only exception being that it rides on a different set of mechanics.

You don't get free will to be born.

Good point
But you can not have it either, unless your born.

Last edited by AspergianMutantt on 19 Apr 2014, 8:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

If we truly had free will the only depressed people would be those that choose to be miserable

Not true.

yes there is some truth in that, but its still not true.
because its your own ego that is pacified in that statement.

A minute's introspection tells me that I have free will; I make dozens of little decisions every day, and there is no evidence that any if them is somehow inevitable or predestined.

However, I can't see into anybody else's mind, so maybe I'm the only one with free will and everybody else in the world is some kind of automaton. But this seems unlikely.

Depression doesn't get to me. Rage does. And for that reason I don't believe in free will. I have the will to want. But my system seems to have a mind of it's own.

When I introspect, I reach the opposite conclusion. I don't really have free will; my brain is just taking in stimuli, relating it to what was learned in the past, and then making a decision based on that information.

So you think of yourself as a robot or automaton? You're not responsible for any of your choices or actions, they're all merely the effects of external stimuli?

I believe in determinism, thus, no free-will.

The atomic/wave/quantum/quarks levels are magnificently ordered.

If one believes in "free will", then one must believe that randomness can happen. One must believe randomness can happen
despite the before mentioned discovered order to matter.

From the "Free Will" conference video that was posted a few times I saw three propositions offered that could still support the argument
of "free will":

1) a soul exists in humans that makes decisions
2) the level below quarks could be found to be indeterministic
3) probabilistic QM

I start at the other end, and agree with luanqibazao. I consider and reflect on my experience, and find I have free will. That there are things I did, when I could have not done them. How various sciences and philosophies want to make sense of that is up to them, if they can..

I think it is very hard to actually engage with the idea that everything one does - and I include conscious thought here - is predetermined. Indeed, surely, definitionally, it's impossible? Certainly, it is not 'thought' as experienced as a live, active, selecting and considering and pondering and deciding thing, but rather 'thought' as a series of predetermined notions that make themselves known to, well, themselves - or at best, to a conscious self that is something like a dog watching a card trick: it's just a bunch of suff happening, but at least it in some way registers that it is happening.

This is what I meant by saying that, either I am right to believe I have free will, which is great, or the whole shebang is predetermined and belief is impossible, as it suggests volition and active engagement. One does not believe in determinism, rather, the state of 'belief in determinism' occurs and makes itself known.