Free Will

[Darkstar]

I have always treated free will as pertaining to whether or not your will is free (hence the name). If your will is not free, then you don't have a free will.

What do you mean by "your will is free"?

But I am more interested in your question about whether it is possible to do other than what you will.  Why does that matter?  Would there be an advantage to being able to do what you do not want to do?  Would it not be better if you cannot fail to do what you want to do?

However, that seems to be getting into the question of whether determinism is true or not.  I do not care about that for what I mean by "free will."

I suppose I really need an answer to my first question in this post to be sure how to react to the rest of what you are saying.

When I say that a will is free, I mean that said will is not controlled by forces over which the person having that will has no jurisdiction. You said in your first post:

As for why you will what you will, that is not something you control (generally), and it is absurd to say that you do.

Hence, if you always do that which is your will, and you have no control over your will, then by extension you indirectly have no control over your actions. Sort of... What you are getting at with your definition is something I personally would refer to as free agency, rather than free will.

I guess the importance of resisting one's own will depends entirely on the definition of will. If your 'will' simply refers to something that you have a strong desire to do, then the ability to resist, say, punching an extremely annoying person in the face could be very important. On the other hand, if your will is that which you, when all things are said and done, most strongly want (such as not getting arrested for assault), then it would probably be not only impossible but nonsensical to resist that by its very definition (i.e. if you punch the guy anyway then you must have, at least in the moment, had a greater will to hit him than avoid assault charges).