Why subjectively? If I can choose, and my choice is not compelled, then that is free will.

Well that would depend on how you define what a soul is. If you define it as and intangible absolute then anyone that states they have a soul has to be religious. So like this: God gives you a soul at conception. That soul that he gives you, gives you the ability to actually make decisions. Instead of the brain synapses controlling you, you control the brain synapses. So its an immaterial thing.

Ok so in your view you do not have a soul.
Alrighty then we'll move from there.

When you make a decision to go to work in the morning how do you make that decision? Tell me how scientifically you make that decision.

I don't want to hear:
"Well I weigh the benefits of getting fired versus having a day off..."

Since there is no soul then your mind is not actually choosing one thing over another. Your brain's synapses are firing, data is flying around etc... Do you have control over your brains synapses? No they control you. What every they do, you do.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. I'm going to try and work with you to get you to see this. But it all comes down to whether or not you have a soul. If you don't, kiss free will good bye.

But please do answer how you 'make a decision' and we can go from there.

I think you miss the point slightly. No one is forcing you to chose Vanilla except for your past experience and things that have happened to you in this world. The point is that you are part of a natural system. You are a biological organism and as such every part of you is subject to a set of natural laws. Vanilla I presume is a flavour which you like to eat, possible because you liked it as a child, possible because it pleases your particular neurological set up and the size and sensitivity of your taste buds on your tongue. Now you may say well I could have chosen another flavour. False, if you could have chosen another flavour you would have done and you would not have chosen Vanilla. I doubt you chose to crave an Ice Cream when you did. Either a craving for food from your body or the release of chemical stimulants in your brain on site of an ice cream parlour will have made you crave that ice cream. The list of causes and reason for you being in that situation is endless.

I still don't see how choosing vanilla ice cream from all these factors requires that my picking vanilla ice cream is determined and that I have no free will about it, only that the situation is influentially arranged in such a way that I'm much more influenced to pick vanilla over other the other options.

Well I wouldn't say that you can determine what those influences are. I would say that those influences aren't binding upon you, so that you could still pick chocolate, strawberry, or w/e ice cream instead.

You're last paragraph was basically a version of van Inwagen's consequence argument against determinism. And yes, I think, I agree with that assessment.

I would say that you can determine what those influences are. In fact, I'd say this is precisely what the will is and does.


No, actually I was explaining why people make such arguments against determinism, or giving one very strong reason for it. The actual argument is very flawed (I knew this as I was writing it); my point was that then accepting the opposite is too difficult. We reject the notion that events 1000 years ago pre-determined out choice of ice cream flavour, and it is easy to see why we tend to reject it. However, the argument for the rejection is simply no good.

In what way can you determine whether or not you like vanilla ice cream, or say have a strong urge to gorge on vanilla ice cream? Those types of influences don't seem determined by your will at all.

Why do you say the argument is wrong, as Van Inwagen formulates it?

In what way can you determine whether or not you like vanilla ice cream, or say have a strong urge to gorge on vanilla ice cream? Those types of influences don't seem determined by your will at all.

Why do you say the argument is wrong, as Van Inwagen formulates it?

I didn't say the influences were determined by the will, I said they were determinable. When we choose, we do so with cause. We could in principle determine those causes before the decision and predict which decision we would make, and in fact that's exactly what we do, except it's not a prediction, it's the decision itself.


Well, I'll answer that twice, because I'm not strictly arguing against Van Inwagen, I'm arguing against myself as I was being sympathetic to people who cannot tolerate the idea of deterministic will. Against my earlier comment, this is not a proof but an act of flight, a repulsion from the very idea of events 1000 years ago determining our choice of ice cream.

As for Van Inwagen, his very language on the matter sows the seed of his argument's destruction, as do all incompatibilists. "I could have done otherwise if I'd wanted to." One can never do otherwise. If I have two mutually exclusive choices, I can never do otherwise, I can simply do one of them. Will, free or not, does not allow us to do both if both are mutually exclusive. Therefore the notion that not being able to do otherwise (determinism) is incompatible with free will is ridiculous. Free will destroys the possibility of the 'otherwise's by converging to a single decision. The freedom comes from the scope of possibilities considered.

In determinism, one can very well determine what 'would have happened otherwise', i.e. under different conditions. This step is never made with free will because the only people who would make the argument are those who reject the possibility that our choices are circumstantial. And yet, if they are not circumstantial, how could we possibly choose otherwise? We only have one set of circumstances at a given moment - we can never put ourselves in the exact same situation again and choose differently. When considered alongside the fact that the will does not allow for the choosing of more than one mutually exclusive possibility, well it's sounding very compatible with determinism indeed.

My thoughts are that if there is no free will, we still wouldn't know. The brain is more than likely run by quantum operations that run subconsciously. One way of looking at this is that when you think things through in your mind, you think them in your language. Before your mind can form these thought words, it has already completed these thoughts. Your brain, without free will, still operates the same way it always has in your life. You may still think of it as free will. It is still a process that is uniquely yours. What difference does it make?

Arguably to whether or not we should ascribe moral responsibility. Even most incompatibilists such as Daniel Dennett say we shouldn't ascribe moral responsibility under certain kinds of casual necessity, such as situations of local fatalism, say if A-Rod tested positive for steriods, because he constantly was being shot with tiny little darts filled with steriods and A-Rod wasn't aware of this (absurd I know, but it helps get the point across).

He contends that if determinism is true, no one could have done otherwise than perform the action that was performed...

... which is to say, no one really had a choice about whether or not to A or ~A.

In other words, if determinism is true then given all the relevant specific conditions at t1 (laws of nature, state of the universe, etc.) there is only one outcome, and because of the sufficient casual chain none of these outcomes is in any robust sense 'up to us.

van Inwagen isn't contending that you can both A and ~A at the same time. He is saying it is possible for you to either A or ~A at a specific point in time, under the same conditions (even if say 90% of the time you will A instead of ~A, just so long as your Aing is not determined 100% of the time).

Of course they are. The 'us' is in that causal chain. There's no sunshine without the sun, sunshine.

That wasn't what I was saying, or at least what I meant. Clearly we can't do both, but neither can we do 'otherwise'. Percentages don't come into it: we get one shot, we will choose one thing and will do so with cause. We can't rerun and cover the otherwises.

Yes, we are part of the sufficient casual chain, but if determinism is true then with 100% certainty, one could extrapolate 10 million years ago--if s/he knew all the relevant factors--whether or not I was going to take a sip from my water bottle at this precise moment. It seems very counter-intuitive to say that that is 'up to us,' in the sense that we freely formed our own character or w/e which ushered in our decision. Our character, at least looks like, it was 100% determined without any realistic alternative possibilities open to us, outside of the claim that if the causal chain was different then our character or specific decision would have been different.

The issue is whether or not we sometimes have the ability to do otherwise under the same conditions. I.e. If we "rewinded the tape," so to speak, and generated the same scenario over and over, eventually Ted would choose not to rob the bank and a different outcome would occur then the one that actually did (or did the first time). Clearly, though, we can't ever replicate the exact same state of affairs, so there is an epistemological problem here definitely, but I don't see how that settles the issue (if that is what your implying?)

Sure, and this is the unlikeable aspect of determinism and the reason why, ultimately, most people reject it. The idea that the universe as it was in every detail 10 M yrs ago determined us having this dialogue is, to some, horrifying. But the idea that our circumstances 5 seconds ago determines them does not, nor does the idea that those circumstances were determined 5 seconds before does not, ad infinitum for 10 M years. Approached that way, it seems less counter-intuituve, so somewhere our intuition is playing tricks on us.



Not the point I'm trying to make, but let's play with it and see if mine comes out. So, let's say Ted has robbed a bank. Now let's say we can reconstruct the entire universe exactly as it was 1 second before he did. Ted II has the same memories, the same feelings that day, the world is the same, he has the same financial problems, everything is identical in every conceivable detail. Now... what would stop him from robbing the bank in an identical universe? Whatever effects his judgement must have been present to the same degree for Ted I. Whatever it contents with is there to the exact same magnitude. Whatever processes he follows must be the same. Where can he effect the causal chain?