Free will and humans

[Angrboda]

It depends on what you mean by free will. We have desires and we are able to act on them. If that's all you mean, then of course we have free will. However, the majority of people mean something more by free will - especially in a religious context.

The usual understanding of it - and I say this based on asking people questions that make them explain further what they mean, as well as on what many religious (and even nonreligious) people say in general - is that free will involves the ability to choose from among more than one possible way of acting. So for instance, at the moment you decided to write your post, if there is such a thing as free will, then - everything else being equal - you could have decided not to write it. This is what is called "libertarian free will," by the way.

IMO, there is no such thing as libertarian free will, for a very simple reason: the very concept of it is incoherent.

Beautiful.
I had that same thought,now I know it's called libertarian free will but I don't understand why you think it's false.

Say your brain has an algorithm for choosing the best amongst alternatives. And it always chooses what it thinks is best after examining the alternatives. Now suppose you are shopping for a car. You have, already in place, a set of values or things that you desire in a car. And the facts about what cars offer which things suitable to your already existing values doesn't change. So this algorithm, by combining the values with the facts can only come to one conclusion about which car is 'best'. Given that you always choose what you think is best for you (including times when you think it's best to do the wrong thing), then you can only choose that one car.

Now saying that we have the freedom to choose amongst alternatives is a way of saying that if we went back to a decision which we had made, under those same circumstances, we could have chosen to do otherwise. That in the case of our car example, even though the inputs into our brain in terms of our values and the facts about cars, the algorithm in our brain for calculating what is the best fit for us could have had a different conclusion, and thus we could have had a different choice. But what has changed to account for this possibility "to do otherwise" that would be required for free will to be real? The algorithm is deterministic, it hasn't changed. And our values and the facts about cars haven't changed. So how could we come to a different decision?