Do you believe in free will?

[emjay]

Nice to meet another hard determinist

I would have hoped the avatar was a clue

[brewer]

[Disagreeable]

Nice to meet another hard determinist

I would have hoped the avatar was a clue

Hehe.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I believe that most people believe they have free will. I also believe that it’s impossible to determine if free will exists (which is why I didn’t vote in the poll).

Boru

[Disagreeable]

I believe that most people believe they have free will. I also believe that it’s impossible to determine if free will exists (which is why I didn’t vote in the poll).

Boru

So, if you think it's impossible to determine. How would you respond to this?

In the free will debate, Strawson holds that there is a fundamental sense in which free will is impossible, whether determinism is true or not. He argues for this position with what he calls his "basic argument", which aims to show that no-one is ever ultimately morally responsible for their actions, and hence that no one has free will in the sense that usually concerns us. In its simplest form, the basic argument runs thus:

You do what you do, in any given situation, because of the way you are.
To be ultimately responsible for what you do, you have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are—at least in certain crucial mental respects.
But you cannot be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all.
So you cannot be ultimately responsible for what you do

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

^I would respond, ‘Ok. Would you like a cup of tea, Mr. Strawson?’

Boru

[h4ym4n]

If it’s “god gave you free will” 

Then I would ask WHEN does god grant a human “free will”?

It definitely isn’t a free will choice to be born or not. That’s a fail


It’s not when I had my penis mutilated for Jesus, then that’s a free will fail.


It’s not when I’m forced to be born in a shitty location of this world, another fail.


It’s not when I’m forced to be born to shitty parents. Yet another free will fail.

god granting us humans free will means, to me, that I can make a free will choice that omniscient god did not know I would make.

[brewer]

Maybe, but I don't really care. Discussing free will typically ends up being a circular, go nowhere, non-practical discussion.

Let me ask you, in the end does it really matter?

I think so. I think punishing people because they deserve it would go away in a society that doesn't hold to free will. Instead, we'd only punish people when it benefited everybody else as a whole.

On a pragmatic/practical level I don't see all that much difference between sentence one and two except for justifying motive. You might need to explain it some more.

And 'everybody else as a whole' I might have some issues with until more accurately defined.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Generally I don't think it's that useful to talk about because it means different things to different people, what they consider the salient points are also often different, and it's very easy to conflate ideas within this space. All that said though, FWIW my own take, and the salient points for me, are that the anything my brain does follows the laws of physics and is therefore determined, and thus not 'free', but at the same time, my lived experience, illusion though it may be, is of the freedom to make choices... the freedom to weigh up options etc. In that sense I'm free, but given that ultimately it is my brain weighing up these options, deterministically, then ultimately no, I'm not free. But that is just my own 2c.

That’s more or less my own position: I don’t know if I have free will, but it pleases me to behave as if I do.

Boru

[Nay_Sayer]

Flips coin to decide answer*