If free will was not real

[Excited Penguin]

You are coerced by environmental factors. You can't escape them. And no matter how much you rationalize your decisions after the fact, it's been proven beyond a doubt that most of the time people have no idea why they do what they do. They come up with reasons if asked, and they truly believe those reasons, but they turn out to be wrong more often than not. Because you see, you are only conscious about so much that goes on in your brain and gives rise to your consciousness and subsequently to your decisions. But you don't control any of it. It controls you. You only experience control, but it isn't really there at all.

I'm not coerced by environmental factors-- I respond to them according to my world view and my personhood.  Saying, "You wouldn't have bought ice cream unless it was hot. . . so there!" doesn't really say anything useful about the human experience.

And what's this "your brain" stuff?  Am I more than my brain, or other than it?  You would argue not, I assume.  It therefore seems to me you are saying, "The brain's brain doesn't control any of the brain.  It controls the brain.  It only experiences control, but it isn't really there at all."  Again, it doesn't say anything really useful about the freedom I exercise in buying my ice cream.

You don't control your thoughts.

I AM, at least in part, my thoughts.  Thinking otherwise means I would be able to control my own nature.  But this introduces an obvious circularity, and circles are bad.

Yet your thoughts are what you are, in a sense. Your thoughts are what make up your decisions. Without thinking, you wouldn't call yourself as having free will, would you ? But that's just it, you can't control your thinking. It just comes out of nowhere, and you identify with it because it's always there and thus the illusion of control comes in, naturally.

Your environment produces your thoughts. And your thoughts produce your decisions. Nowhere is there a place for a free agent here.

Who's this "you" you keep talking to?  A boy does not have a name.  A boy is only a brain.  A boy is only a collection of neuronal functions.

/GoT plagiarism

Let me put it this way.

You can't claim to "be" anything more than your conscious experience of reality, not in the sense we're talking about here. So don't give me that bullshit about your being your brain. You are most definitely not your brain. Your brain is yours, but you are not it. You don't control your heart beat, your brain does. You don't control your metabolism. Your brain does. You don't control the movement of your muscles. Your brain does. You can only experience things. That is you. The experiencer. You are not in charge of anything, and you can't claim to be anything that controls you.

Your worldview means shit if your brain suddenly "decides" to paralyze your body and make you unconscious. You would have no idea why it just did that. You enjoy your "freedom" while it lasts, but simply the fact that you have no control over your life and are bound by reality is what disproves this notion of freedom completely.


Now let's look at the ice cream example. First of all, your "choosing" to eat that ice cream for whatever reason had fuck all to do with why you actually ate that ice cream. You didn't control how hungry you were going to be at that moment, or indeed whether you'd like an ice cream or not. That's simply ridiculous to think that you did. Your body did, you didn't. No, you are not your body, as I just said, anymore than you "are" your atoms. You didn't choose the presence of the ice cream either. You just happened onto it.

You're trying to describe the fact of causality in such a way that it offers some extra meaning to your meaningless life. Well, I'm sorry, there isn't any kind of meaning to be had here. Get over it.