Free Will

[GrandizerII]

Whether materialism is correct or not makes no difference.  If substance dualism is correct, you still have a hand that you did not choose to have (unless you happen to have no hands, but then we can just change the example; the point will still be the same), and it is still connected to your mind such that you are unlikely to want to stick your hand in a fire, due to the nature of your hand and the nature of the connection between your hand and your mind.  The only difference is the idea about what the mind is, that it is immaterial rather than some processes in a brain.  But that makes absolutely no difference for the pain of sticking your hand in the fire, the consequences to your hand for sticking it in a fire, etc.  You still did not choose to have the hand, and the connection of the hand to your mind, and that you have a hand with a connection to your mind is why you don't want to stick it in a fire.  In other words, either way, what you will can be traced to something that you did not choose.

Well, I'm not so sure I agree that materialism makes absolutely no difference. First, of course there are personal character traits that are preselected independent of will, and secondly, yes, these characteristics apply pressures of varying degrees on any given individual choice one makes. Most of us, after all, aren't going to have the strength of will to pull a  Scaevola. My criteria for free will, if it is to mean anything, is that a person has the genuine ability to choose alternative possibilities. In a materialistic universe, which seems to allow for nothing beyond determination or randomness, and most scientists think it is only the former that is relevant to any discussion about decision-making, I cannot conceive how it could be that free will exists. If the will is immaterial, however, then I think it opens up the possibility that even given two scenarios in which the exact same circumstances are present, whatever the sufficient causes may be, a particular action on the part of the will needn't necessarily follow. It could be the case that from a desire to preserve their so-called freedom of the will a person disregards the physical discomfort that ensues when flame meets flesh and they choose not to react. We can always look for further causes in such an act and say that these antecedents are responsible for the person's willingness to endure the pain, but it still doesn't establish that the choice was necessary. If it wasn't necessary, then it was determined by the will alone. And as I said, if the will is but a material composition of causes/effects or impulses that spontaneously generate from indeterminate states, this makes all the difference for what freedom means.

How is a purely immaterial will any better? You still have the same problems.