What costitutes free-will?

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Reply Sun 15 Apr, 2007 12:29 pm
What would you consider to be free-will?
I believe that to truly have such a thing of free will, then the human mind must posses a certain dgree of randomness within it's nature. For instance, if you are thirsty you drink, if you are not, you don't, but you can choose to drink if you not thirsty, or not to if you are!
I don't mean to imply that human thought is completely haywire (out of control), but to imply that human thought, to be free, must be of it's own devices, in other words, there must be a random capability in the brain, otherwise how could someone, faced with an identicle choice just say "oh heck this'll do!", if they did not have a random capability then I say they could not!
Althought there would need to be parameters, if you throw a bowling ball down a bowling alley, the parameters would be the sides of the alley.
What do you think? Is this free-will, or do you have a different idea of free-will?
 
Mr Fight the Power
 
Reply Sun 15 Apr, 2007 04:45 pm
@mike9989,
Free will is the illusion that arises when a man is drawn away from his natural values. Man only wishes towards to possible actions only when he is dissatisfied with himself and his nature.

If free will were to exist, it would only be capable through the self-creation of values.
 
redzeppelin
 
Reply Fri 20 Apr, 2007 08:16 pm
@Mr Fight the Power,
Mr. Fight the Power wrote:
Free will is the illusion that arises when a man is drawn away from his natural values. Man only wishes towards to possible actions only when he is dissatisfied with himself and his nature.

If free will were to exist, it would only be capable through the self-creation of values.


An illusion? You mean you didn't choose the words you posted? You didn't choose the thoughts that resulted in this post?

What does the creation of values have to do with free will?
 
Mr Fight the Power
 
Reply Sun 10 Jun, 2007 03:27 pm
@redzeppelin,
redzeppelin wrote:
An illusion? You mean you didn't choose the words you posted? You didn't choose the thoughts that resulted in this post?

What does the creation of values have to do with free will?


Of course I "chose" the words I posted, choice is a matter of will, but I didn't question whether or not we had a will, I simply stated that we have no "free" will. We can make choices because we have a will, we act according to our own values. But if we do not determine those values that determine our actions, how can you say that we have a "free" will of our own?
 
kennethamy
 
Reply Mon 11 Jun, 2007 08:44 am
@mike9989,
mike9989 wrote:
What would you consider to be free-will?


I think I am acting freely when I am not forced or compelled to do what I do. For instance, this morning I had Froot Loups for breakfast. No one forced me to do so. I want to eat Froot Loups, and I did. On the other hand, when I was a child, my mother made me eat oatmeal.

So, this morning I ate Froot Loups of my own free will. But when I was I child I did not eat oatmeal of my own free will.
 
pmd
 
Reply Tue 19 Jun, 2007 09:53 am
@kennethamy,
mike9989 wrote:
What would you consider to be free-will


The ability to perform an Free Action, that is, the ability to have not performed an action. To take kennethamy's example, he may consider his decision to eat Froot Loops this morning to have been made freely. To be sure, no one was holding him at gunpoint while shovelling milk and brightly-colored, sugary rings that taste absolutely nothing like fruit down his throat. "I want to eat Froot Loops," he says, "and I did." However, what must also be considered is why he wants to eat Froot Loops. His mother, he says, once forced him to eat oatmeal - perhaps his desire for Froot Loops now is a reaction against this, not freely formed but determined by previous actions. In order to say that Kennethamy ate his Froot Loops of his own "Free Will," we must be able to say that he could have decided not to eat Froot Loops this morning. This is a more difficult claim to test, of course.

I do not think that our first person experiences of being able to choose among options constitutes philosophically-defined Free Will. Our choices are guided by our environments, histories, and genetics combining and interacting with the sloppy grey computers in our skulls to generate our actions. In this way, the world is essentially deterministic - though it is also to remember that we, as part of that world, are also part of the determination.

So, I do not consider humans to have "Free Will" on a large or small scale, certainly not in the strictest, philosophical sense of the term. Our position as agents within the universe that renders us a self-aware part of the functions of that universe has engendered that illusion.
 
Aristoddler
 
Reply Tue 26 Jun, 2007 05:32 pm
@kennethamy,
kennethamy wrote:
I think I am acting freely when I am not forced or compelled to do what I do. For instance, this morning I had Froot Loups for breakfast. No one forced me to do so. I want to eat Froot Loups, and I did. On the other hand, when I was a child, my mother made me eat oatmeal.

So, this morning I ate Froot Loups of my own free will. But when I was I child I did not eat oatmeal of my own free will.

You ate Froot Loops because you didn't have Corn Flakes.
It was not your own free will, but lack of choices that decided for you.

(I don't actually know if you did or did not have Corn Flakes, I was just using it for illustration purposes.)
 
l0ck
 
Reply Sun 19 Aug, 2007 01:22 pm
@Aristoddler,
i think freewill is definently one of those illusions we can use to help us further our studies of our surroundings
which makes me think of spacetime
i like to think that its a really long movie or piece film that gets projected onto this movie screen 1 frame at a time
like a roll of film the beggining and end and everything inbetween are already present, but only 1 frame of the film gets projected at a time.. that 1 frame being the present
but everything else is already apart of this predetermined array of time
it creates the phenomena of destiny
and i think as concious beings trapped physically in a finite universe we tend to think finitely and pragmatically, so freewill seems to be the reason we have made our decisions because we are looking at the experience finitely.. or we're looking at the film 1 frame at a time
but with a mind percieving everything from an infinite standpoint, freewill begins to take on the form of destiny and everything is already predetermined but expierenced seporately through seporate individuals expierencing the entire film frame by frame
free will is real
but so is destiny
any person can look at any situation this way becasue both qualitys exist
to me freewill is necessary for certain qualitys to be expressed by the absolute
because without freewill and without seporation of conciousness into people, then conciousness could never be formed because the self would only be by its self, and unable to recognize it exists
so its kind of like its erased its own memory and split itself up in order to realize that it does exist
 
 

 
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