Free Will

[Pyrrho]

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.

If I understand you, that would mean that it would be totally impossible for a will to be free, according to your ideas of what it means for "a will to be free."  You did not choose to come into existence, and your will, what you desire, came into existence without you choosing it.  You did not choose to be born with hands (or born at all), and you did not choose to have nerves in your hand that lead to your brain, or to have a brain, or to have these such that sticking your hand in a fire would cause pain.  Yet that is likely very relevant to what you want, whether you want to stick your hand in a fire or not.

Notice, it makes no difference whether you were caused to be this way through eons of mindless evolution, or if you are the result of a set of random quantum events such that you spontaneously poofed into existence, or sprang fully grown from Zeus' head.  You did not choose your starting structure, nor did you choose the beginning of your willing.

Indeed, it is logically impossible for one to will oneself into existence.  Before you exist, there is no "you" to will anything, and after you exist, it is too late to bring you into existence.

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).

People very often have conflicting desires.  For example, the desire to eat a large plate of brownies every day, conjoined with the desire to not become nauseous and the desire to not become fat.  As long as one acts in accordance with the strongest bit of one's will, one may be said to be acting in accordance with one's will.