so... free will?
 

Oh free will. It seems to me a pretty absurd concept, what exactly does it mean for your will to be free? Some might say it's the ability to choose, you're not free to choose the situation you find yourself in but you are free to choose how to respond. But how do you choose how to respond? You have to rely on something, after all, how can a decision be purely arbitrary? You can flip a coin, but then you're just relying on physics. Playing eenie meenie miney moe in your head amounts to essentially the same thing. How most of us make our decisions is by relying on past experience or 'reason,' which is really just our past experiences in disguise. Of course, we weren't free to determine either of those things so relying on them doesn't exactly give us freedom either, we're essentially enslaved by them. We can do the opposite, and do something irrational, but then we're relying on something else, a dissatisfaction stemming from our previous decisions, or maybe just life in general. Did we generate this feeling, or did it slowly creep on us? Who the hell ever generates their own feelings? Certainly not I. So now we're a slave to our whims. Every decision is based on something, and traced backwards eventually that causal chain is completely beyond our control. So how could we possibly be free? Only if causality is a myth, and everything is purely arbitrary. But in that case our freedom means nothing, it is the freedom of a will that doesn't actually exist. After all, if there is no causal link between the person I am now and the person I will be in ten minutes then that I is just a meticulously crafted illusion.

Now, if it is said that only God possesses free will, and the rest of our fates are predetermined, then God's will must be purely arbitrary. God would be, as it were, the original nihilist. And the rest of us are his pawns in a game that is only meaningful from our ant perspective.

The only reason nihilism does not swallow everything is that none of us are free; even nihilists are still slaves to their urges and desires. But can we do the Buddhist turnabout and say that if everything is a slave to everything else, everything must also be the master to everything else? It certainly is tempting, but what does saying 'everything is absolutely free and absolutely determined' get us? We get a sort of double vision where the selflessness of Jesus and Nietzsche's will to power are superimposed. What does a morality based on schizophrenia look like? I'm not sure, but I'm willing to try it out.

umm this thread already exists but not in this forum so fuck it. feel free to repeat what you said last time (i know you cant help it)

I'll write up a my thoughts on this once I finish checking the boards. However something I've always found interesting is how in Judeo-Christian teachings they teach us that god's greatest gift to humanity is free will (which is the theist's explanation for why atheists exist) but they also teach that god has a plan for every single human on earth and that god mapped this plan out before he "knit you" in the womb. I've always found these two concepts in combination with each other incredible.

I guess this argument really all depends how you'd define free. I'd consider freedom basically my ability to do whatever I want. However, I base "what I want" on knowledge and my own experiences. For instance there is nothing stopping me from exiting my house via a second story window but I choose instead to exit through a door because my understanding of reality shows that leaving by second story window would cause me great harm (I use this same argument whenever anyone says knowledge is an illusion as well oddly enough.) However if you'd define free as something purely arbitrary than I guess we're all slaves to our own mind because all humans work on some system of logic/rationality they've developed in their lifetimes (example: how I exit buildings.)

I will probably post a response on it tomorrow, but for a preview I am a weak incompatibilist for free will. I share Robert Kane's view in his book The Significance of Free Will. I am actually writing a report on this now for school.

Whether or not there is free will is irrelevant.

I think the human impulse suggests not everything is pre-determined from our past experiences

Aren't our brains basically computers though? A very complicated computer made of mush but one nonetheless. We have a physical vice which receives an input and processes it, and produces an output. How we do things then is probably based off of two main factors: Social environment determines the input and genetics makes up the brain hardware.

Does that mean we have no free will or is this just behaviorism? I don't know...

The computer analogy i thought was embedded in the Cognitive approach, which was a direct reaction to Behaviourism... either way there are several different perspectives for the development and workings of the human brain. I personally see myself as an Objectivist, wherein reality exists independant from consciousness, we are in contact with reality through sensory perception, our consciousness is, in essence, objective knowledge gained from this perception and formed through concept formation. This is a philosophical notion, i suppose if you were looking at it from a psychological perspective, it would fall under the Cognitive approach.

In relation to the point of this thread, having mulled it over, i've decided an act of impulse is, ultimately, a result of the circumstances... its our senses reacting to the existents surrounding us... what this entails in the question of free will i do not know, i'll have to reflect on this more when ive had a chance to think about it.

what does the universe look like when no-one is looking at it?