If free will was not real

[bennyboy]

You can't claim to "be" anything more than your conscious experience of reality, not in the sense we're talking about here. So don't give me that bullshit about your being your brain. You are most definitely not your brain. Your brain is yours, but you are not it.

Really? Who/what am I? You seem to be talking about a spirit or something.

You don't control your heart beat, your brain does. You don't control your metabolism. Your brain does. You don't control the movement of your muscles. Your brain does. You can only experience things. That is you. The experiencer. You are not in charge of anything, and you can't claim to be anything that controls you.

The problem is that the experiencer experiences freely buying ice cream. The experiencer is whatever it is, including brain function. It is not from this that the experiencer should be expected to be free in any sensible definition of free will. Are you sure that the sense of agency and self aren't as illusory as free will? And if so, then who's this "you" to whom you keep referring, as though it were not an illusion?

A boy has no name.

Your worldview means shit if your brain suddenly "decides" to paralyze your body and make you unconscious. You would have no idea why it just did that. You enjoy your "freedom" while it lasts, but simply the fact that you have no control over your life and are bound by reality is what disproves this notion of freedom completely.

If my brain malfunctions and I cannot experience anything, then I will have neither a will, nor by extension a free will.

Now let's look at the ice cream example. First of all, your "choosing" to eat that ice cream for whatever reason had fuck all to do with why you actually ate that ice cream. You didn't control how hungry you were going to be at that moment, or indeed whether you'd like an ice cream or not. That's simply ridiculous to think that you did. Your body did, you didn't. No, you are not your body, as I just said, anymore than you "are" your atoms. You didn't choose the presence of the ice cream either.

Eh? You keep on saying "you, you" and telling me all the things I am not. What, exactly, do you think I AM?

I'll tell you what I am: I'm my ideas, my beliefs, my experiences, my sensation, and my feelings. I'm not controlled BY my hunger, I AM, at least in part, the experience of hunger. And when I eat, it's a natural expression of that aspect of my personhood at that moment in time. You want to separate the agency into an abstract concept, and all the mechanisms of agency into the category "environment," to show that I am compelled by my environment. This view isn't a good one, in my opinion: ALL the things you keep saying I'm not are exactly what I am.