Most Humans Do NOT Have Completely Frree Will

[bennyboy]

I some have a bad definition of "will" in mind.  It seems they think "will" means "the Holy power of God to do whatever you want."  That's not right.  Will is the desire of the thinking agent to use its influence on the environment with a goal in mind.  Free will is the ability of that thinking agent to act without an external compulsion, i.e. that one isn't a marionette.

So in the case of drug use, a person has the desire to do a drug, and acts (or occasionally chooses not to) to procure and use it.  Freely.

Yes. I was just adressing 100% complete free will independent of any variables

I think as with many philosophical arguments, this comes down more to semantics than to a description of reality.  It depends more on how you define "free will" than on our experience of making decisions.

For example, to what degree do one's own feelings constitute a part of the self (which is free)?  If you see addiction as something external to the self, like a kind of heavy chain or something, then an addict very clearly is not acting freely-- you have to believe that without discomfort of the addiction, he/she would immediately choose to stop doing the drug.  If, on the other hand, you see the suffering as OF the self, then it has nothing to do with free will, because of course the person will act on that addiction and choose to do the drug. In this case, there would be a lack of free will only if the person's body literally moved of its own volition, without the knowledge or conscious compliance of the person-- and while this may be claimed sometimes, I doubt that it ever really happens.