What is Free Will?

[Kwing]

When people talk about free will, it's usually in the context of religion (If God knows what we're going to do, how can we have free will?) or physics (What if our decisions are just mechanical happenstance playing out?) Whichever you may find more relevant, I'd like to propose a more down-to-earth question.

First of all, let's just take an optimistic lean to this all and say that neither of the above proposals pose a threat to our idea of free will.

What does it mean to have free will? A free action means that you are able to make a decision without being impeded by an external force. Let's break that down a little: YOU are able to make a decision. Herein lies the issue. Who are you? What defines you? What is your identity? Are you the sum of your actions, thoughts, personality, beliefs, or motives?

If freedom means that you're not controlled by something else, how do you explain your own identity except in terms of factors outside of your control? Most people believe whatever it is they were taught growing up, be it scientific, pseudo-scientific, religious, social, or anything else. I cannot even argue my point without using a language that was created by someone else, and that language limits me when I run into an idea that has no word to express it.

Ironically, we think of the most profound acts of freedom as being actions that we take based off of our principles and moral compass, yet the distinctions that we draw from ourselves in order to make these decisions are not of our own choosing to begin with.

Even if you go against what you were taught growing up, there are usually reasons and buildup. Maybe you stopped trusting your local church when a priest molested you. Maybe your parents did something really hypocritical, or you were otherwise betrayed by some figure of authority. Perhaps your education nudged you to think contrary to the popular beliefs of your background. Our life experiences have the ability to change just about every aspect of who we are as people and how we behave - even what we want in life.

There's also the matter of our nature. We are genetically predisposed to certain things, be them physical attributes such as muscle mass, bone density, tendency toward disease or ability to digest different kinds of foods, and our genetics also control our personality, whether it's because of our intelligence, aggression, or attention span. This is obvious enough when you see just how much aggression we've bred OUT of wolves in turning them into dogs. But again, even if these properties are something unique to each of us as individuals, we still have no choice in the matter. They were decided by external factors long before we were even born. Even if you are a theist and believe that we have souls, or that we are reincarnations, our souls are not a product of our choices and our previous incarnations would have been just as susceptible to external influences as were are in this life.

It seems to me that no matter what we do, every aspect of who we are was crafted by the world itself. There is no room for freedom when freedom itself is a paradox. Everything that is going on inside of our bodies and minds can be summed up as an ego that we have been conditioned into thinking is somehow who we are, simply because we cannot process or interpret information unless our bodies collect that information for us.

[supergandhi64]

ironically free will is the god given power to choose whether you want to piously serve god or suffer eternal damnation lol

--supergandhi64

[tox]

i will read this.
i will respond to this.
i will have a thoughtful discussion with you

~starts to read~

[MrPercie]

Life, You are not free, you a trapped in a organic body of emotions, but you can do as you will.

Death, You have no will as there is no you, but you are now free.

[tox]

so then do you believe that as soon as we become a space faring race we will be free of this worlds chains only to be teathered to the next universal body that we are reliant on to survive?

at our level free will is very small as i see it, there are very few things that we can do when we are at the bottom of the social food chain that will allow us to make free decisions, while people that are at the top of our social world will be able to very realidly be able to made and form decisions based on the idea of free will...

free will, and the thought of what free will, is a expression of a third dimension or lower paradox the individuals or beings or entities in higher level dimensions will not express the feelings of free will, and or even think of it because everything else is so deeply structured, and they would not believe in an idea that anything could happen .. that is not already happening..

but because we exist outside of the idea time and time lines.. we are free to express that

thats what free will is..

the ability to chose a certain path for ourselves, follow it, and not be privy to everything that the other choices that we could have made, would have existed in and how it would have effected us

[Kwing]

At 11/25/13 04:45 PM, tox wrote: so then do you believe that as soon as we become a space faring race we will be free of this worlds chains only to be teathered to the next universal body that we are reliant on to survive?

Our behaviors are built around our environment and the stipulations of our existence. I doesn't matter where you are, the paradox of freedom follows you everywhere.

people that are at the top of our social world will be able to very realidly be able to made and form decisions based on the idea of free will...

Not really. They're able to acquire what they want to a greater extent, but they still don't choose what they want.

free will, and the thought of what free will, is a expression of a third dimension or lower paradox the individuals or beings or entities in higher level dimensions will not express the feelings of free will, and or even think of it because everything else is so deeply structured, and they would not believe in an idea that anything could happen .. that is not already happening..

Let me get this straight, you're saying that not knowing the future exempts us from the paradox of freedom? I touched on that briefly in my first paragraph but the entire post was following a different train of thought entirely.

the ability to chose a certain path for ourselves, follow it, and not be privy to everything that the other choices that we could have made, would have existed in and how it would have effected us

It's not so much THAT we choose as it is WHY and HOW we choose the paths we take. When it comes down to it, your mindset already has the framework to determine what choices you're going to make when they are presented to you.

[Luer]

It is a rare thing to find people with free will.

[Jester]

There's always a moment of horror immediately after I realize I've stepped into a philosophical thread.

[PrincessLuna]

I'd recommend reading "Free Will" by Sam Harris. It's the neuroscience perspective of what free will is, and is a wonderful read.

If you read it then message me, and we'd share views and thoughts on it.

[Entice]

I don't think I have much free will. I just respond to my body's demands and trudge through life on autopilot mostly.

[Xenomit]

If there is a god and he planned out everything you've ever done and will do, then there's literally no point to be a tit about it.

There's nothing you can do to stop it, everything you do, even the things that you think you're doing off of free will, was already planned, so it's entirely useless to try doing anything about it. Any attempts at attaining your free will would have already been planned by god.

This is assuming of course that he's not one of the many made up stories of deities.

[DM692]

Everything you possibly can do in any situation is hardwired into your brain, and it'll react how it sees fit when the time comes. Think of the mind and body as separate. Someone asks how you're doing. Your mind ticks, and your body greets them back. Did you consciously will yourself to do that, or did you think about what you wanted to say, whether you wanted to say it, and how they'll feel? Your brain works on a survival basis, and has for thousands of years.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that free will is an illusion (to an extent), albeit a very good one.

[Piper]

I see what you're saying, and I agree. Every person here has been shaped by their life experiences. If people here had the experiences and influences I had up to this point right now as I type (even being me, my family, my body, all of it) I can tell you that just about everyone here would feel the same way I do about a lot of things. Same thing with you, if I were you and had all of your experiences and influences I'd look at the world in a near identical way.

So if we're looking at the world as some kind of machine, playing out all the numbers and smoothing out anomalies it does make us wonder, what is free will in the sense of this world?

We can say that oppression may bend someone's will to meet another's. We can point out that at any given moment all of us here are free to do things whether they're harmful to others, helpful, or pointless and repetitive. These external sources greatly influence the different things someone would be okay with doing out of their own free will at any given moment. There is still a level of free will, yet one's choices and options may differ from one to the next simply because of the exact combination of experiences, events and influences in their lives.

I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself simply enough or not. But I agree that most people feel and think the way they do because their life brought them to this point. I also feel that people do have a free will, but that their options may be limited to what they would actually be willing to do because of their exact experiences and moments throughout life.

[tox]

At 11/25/13 09:29 PM, Kwing wrote:

At 11/25/13 04:45 PM, tox wrote:

no as in the paradox of being able to chose is a third or lower dimension ability.. higher dimensions are set in paths because they exist on a plane that allows a creature or presence in such the dimension to see ... everything that can happen and everything that will happen

we in the third dimension cannot see this, and so we describe it as free will to be able to chose something like.. lets say taking a bit of an apple because you chose to, but then later "finding" out that the apple war rotten inside, and so as a creature we learn from the experience,
the 4th dimensional creature would already see that, and not take the bite because they knew the time line and could see that the apple was rotten, equally they would see us, as third dimensional creatures and we would look like some sort of unholy mess of time lapses and failures but unreasonable happiness and vigor when everything that we seem to do is an unorganized conundrum of events that eventually stop when we expire...

the 4th dimension being would explain that, after thought, as free will
the ability to chose to fail, without knowing that that we will fail to achieve a desirable outcome that helps us as a creature in our existence

science bitch