Do we have free will?

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And well, as I think the poll is ok, it could have used another option, "Uncertain", or something like that.

Yes, that was roughly what I meant. I was mainly rejecting an argument from the authority of the masses rather than simply insulting people for the sake of insulting them. I still hold that free will is a silly concept because there is no conceivable basis for it. Where does free will come from? I struggled against this for a long time, because I very much wanted to believe in free will, but I couldn't rationalize it against reality.

I *should* have done that! You are right! Sorry!!

free will......is a hard one. there's so many forces around us that we can't control and directly and indirectly change our actions but still the choices within those scenarios are ours to make. it's hard to say...i'd have to say conditional free will.

Free will cannot exist because it requires some unphysical "unmoved mover" that causes things without being caused. Causality and free will are incompatible.

IMO the "flow of time" is an illusion of perception. All events past, present, and future equally exist in 4-Dimensional Spacetime. what "will" happen and "will" be already is and what "has" happened and "has" been still is.

Free will implies that choices can be made with no motivation. Any motivation is derived from past experience or biological drives. Anybody making a choice must either respond to these forces which indicates a predetermined outcome or ignore their pressures which means that the choice is random and likely to be disastrous. Why would anybody want free will?

Because it's a feel-good concept so that people feel as though "I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul." As you said, either people are responding to some external force or they must be acting in a random manner. How does free will make choices? There is no basis for a decision if you say that people can break free of the constraints of their genetics and environment to "make their own decisions."

yep

I think that it continues to be believed in because it has been promoted in Western society for over 1400 years now, in fact western society is practically based on it.

And to most people their motivations for choosing and doing things are so hazy, unidentified, unexamined, they do not realise how every thought follows from another thought which arises from a physical event ( chemistry, neurological, hormonal, environmental, etc) and so on.

Belief in free will is almost inevitable in most people in the west who do not try over years to work out why they do stuff, and/or are brought up not to question free-will or much in general. People "feel" their "will" as an independent entity the same way people used to "feel"/hear their "unconscious" influences speaking to them as if they were the voices of ancestors, gods or spirits.

I think that in the West it can/could be actually scary to think it doesn't exist, because our social/cultural conditioning suggests/tells us loudly and repeatedly, that life without it would be a kind of horror story. We would be like werewolves, vampires, zombies, ( even bodysnatched or alien-invaded) , helpless in the grip of drives and impulses, etc, of "instructions" alien to our "actual" human nature.

As if our body ( and/or the world) is a monster out to get us. We have to resist it. As if we only exist "by virtue" of resisting. The result of duality. Feelings of alienation/separation from the universe. ( Gluten, to get onto one of my hobby horses! And off again quickly. )

In the East, I believe, the attitude is/used to be ( until they started eating lots of gluten too!) somewhat different.

PS: AG, about the poll. I still haven't voted because I don't understand what the impersonal and personal forces are in the two cases of no free will. Sorry; I'm obviously being obtuse here.

I think free-will is an ill-defined and somewhat incoherent idea. Somehow our language has artificially combined two separate ideas into a single word “free-will”. One is the notion that we all experience making choices. The other is the notion that our choices have a physically uncaused element to them.

If we take the first idea as the definition of free-will then we obviously have it. The question is whether the first necessitates the second. I think that assumption may be a fallacy.

EXACTLY. You can see this in the assertion that if there is no free will there can be no responsibility (a notion that obviously stems from Judeo-Christian notions). This can also be seen the the concept of "philosophers' zombies."

Which makes it non-fallacious?

Um, how many philisophical arguments can you think of that are most probably fallacious?
Too many to count, of course!
Remember, Philosophy is the search for truth, not the truth itself.
Once an actual truth is found, it's called Fact, Science, or other similar terms.

The problem of free will and responsibility is interesting and important. There is an inherent assumption in the supposition of free will that each of us is equally equipped to make our decisions and therefore if we make decisions that are dangerous or antisocial we do so from a viewpoint that is absolutely informed and have bad intent with a full understanding of consequences. In reality each one of us operates from a background of individual history which may indicate no bad intention but merely ignorance or incapability to decide properly. The foundation of the legal system for dealing with criminal behavior seems to accept the free will assumption and therefore bases treatment of criminals on that basis. Objections to dealing with criminals on the basis that they have defective judgment systems is frequently put in terms of letting a malefactor off the hook of personal responsibility if it is accepted that they had judgment problems. This viewpoint seems only to be acceptable if an individual is immature or obviously mentally defective and frequently is denied even under those circumstances. A so-called "normal" person is not granted the possibility of having defective judgment. But responsibility is a false standard. Any individual, immature or otherwise, can behave badly and obviously something there has to be fixed before he or she can be restored to normal society. Responsibility is a false quality. But unfortunately, although the justice system is quite adept at capturing criminals, it is most frequently both inefficient and ineffective in correcting the character defects which led to the crime. It should be an educational and transformational operation and it most frequently is merely a session of brutality and social revenge. In all probability, society has neither the will, the finance nor the skills to carry out the correct process.

Again, it's a matter of human perspective.
Logically, the future is either concrete or it is not, regardless of human perspective.
Thus, the branch of study you're dealing with here is actually Psychology more than Philosophy or Science,
in that you're discussing how theoretical knowledge of the future affects the human brain, and the human will.

Last edited by Ragtime on 23 May 2008, 9:49 am, edited 3 times in total.

It's not a matter of human perspective. It's a matter of four dimensional physics. If we live in a continuum of time and space the future does not pop out of a top hat like a magical rabbit. It is obviously not perceptible since information cannot travel backwards in time but the continuous continuities of cause and effect indicate the future as a reality. That we cannot perceive it does not indicate its absence.

Well, if it is in the East, then it is a "used to be" as in India and Hong Kong, both societies have clear majorities of people who believe in free will and believe human responsibility depends upon it. The US believes more strongly that responsibility needs free will, but actually India believed more strongly than the US that we had free will. I posted about this a bit earlier.

Impersonal would be that the universe is set up by forces that don't care, such as in a world without a deity, or a world where the deity or fating force is not anthropocentric. Personal is a universe that has a deity or some mysterious force of fate that is centered on people.