Why do people fear that free will might not exist?

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Every time I bring this topic up to anyone, it seems like they are afraid of the logical conclusions from this idea. This idea seems quite a rational conclusion to me as people can blame mental illness for crimes but wont take the extra step to see the full conclusion to it. For example, people say psychopath exist and still believe in free will , but, the two statements do not agree as if one has free will one could just choose to not be a psychopath. This is a basic example that does not even attempt the ideas that can come out of quantum mechanics.

I believe almost unequivocally in free will.

What is will, and what are you trying to determine that it is not controlled by in order to make it "free"?

Dan Dennett thinks that, whatever the truth of the matter, it's probably a bad idea for philosophers and neuroscientists to tell lay people they don't have free will because that can encourage bad decision making and a tendency to take the path of least resistance. This rings true, and he would know, but it also suggests that our choices can be hammered out by the philosophers and neuroscientists that have our ear.

I cannot conceive of how free will might exist. at least not in this plane of existence.

Because they believe free will is proof of their devine creator. Remove free will and we are just a cog in the universe and they cannot handle that concept. It also removes the belief in Objective Morals, and they see that as a headlong rush into anarchy

this will be more generally about freedom with some of it on "free will".

to point it out first you cant be truly free.
you are always bound to other people in some way, if there are no others then by necessity you dont have freedom because you need to feed yourself and this takes all of your time(so no choices to be made).

next is the thing about your body, if you were born disabled in a way that makes it impossible to walk you dont have the freedom of walking(we do have ways to allow such a person to move around by themselves but it is NOT walking).
your body is restricting you, aswell as your "mind"(actually this is the brain thus part of the body but lets look at it somewhat seperat).

if your mind is restrained by some type of brain anomaly your freedom is restricted even more.
these restrictions may be possible to reduce or completly suppress by medication, but you are now forced to use this medication(this looses you another instance of freedom).

you have a certain amount of "freedom", you can make choices but you may not be able to have the same choices as other people.

i hope i am somewhat understandable in what i wrote

^^^
makes sense to me

To really get into why people freak out about it would be too complicated - for some people it's reenforcement of religion, for others I think their whole way of addressing life, in fact the whole way that our society addresses life and what needs to be done, would unravel if it were really taken seriously.

For all the different vantage points I've had on this I still can't really grasp the concept of free will when I look at what kinds of things were made of or how the nature of time operates.It's just as tough for me to grasp the idea that probabilities are real at all and not just lack of workable data - even if supposedly wave function collapse has some effect.

Another thing - I'm not even sure how a god or gods would impact this. The only suggestion that seems to complicate analysis is the idea that if a person dies and heads out to Devachan (Buddhist heaven between lives), astral and mental planes, etc. they're dealing with a timeless reality where they can swim through it in any particular order - I'd still see that as stored impulses working themselves out along a certain line of progression no matter how complex that progression is.

If there is no free will, then our concept of justice is severely flawed. If a person has no other choice than to commit a heinous crime, then he can not choose to not commit that crime, and is therefor not guilty by reason of circumstance. Thus, any crime could be said to have been committed because the person lacked the free will to choose another option.

In reality however, our justice system is based on the premise that people are free to choose whether to commit a crime or not. In some cases, there are even "degrees" of criminal intent.

Finally, those who object to the concept and fact of free will seem to be trying to abdicate responsibility and mitigate accountability for their actions. In other words, they want to clai that no matter what they do, they are helpless in doing otherwise, so that their screw-ups and resultant effects are not their fault.

"There is no Free Will" == "It's Not My Fault"

double post

I think what happens is the mind is more compartmentalized than we're aware of on in our daily lives. Kind of like how the body isn't just a single thing, but a gestalt of different parts with different purposes. If the mind is comparable to a computer, it would be like a cluster computer. Maybe our Ego is like the Master Node, but the jobs of intellect and emotions and farmed out to the other mind nodes.

For example, maybe a person can crave an unhealthy food they're trying to give up for their New Year's resolution. They can give in and have it, or decide they don't need it. Sometimes there could be an inner dialogue or argument over the matter. Now who is arguing here? If we really have Free Will, should we be able to declare our goals or New Year's resolutions and just pursue them without the real possibility of sabotaging ourselves?

Maybe I decide I play video games to much and want to sell my system, but then another part of me pops up in my mind to argue against it. Why would I argue with myself this way, or have one part of my mind argue with the other; sometimes successfully to?

Do we even come with built in mechanisms that subvert our supposedly Free Will?