If free will was not real

[Excited Penguin]

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.

Really?  Who/what am I?  You seem to be talking about a spirit or something.

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.

The problem is that the experiencer experiences freely buying ice cream.  The experiencer is whatever it is, including brain function.  It is not from this that the experiencer should be expected to be free in any sensible definition of free will.

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.

If my brain malfunctions and I cannot experience anything, then I will have neither a will, nor by extension a free will.

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.

Eh?  You keep on saying "you, you" and telling me all the things I am not.  What, exactly, do you think I AM?

Like I said, "you" are your conscious experience of reality. You do experience reality, don't you? That is you. The experiencer of your thoughts and senses. There's no other "you" beyond that.

Yes, the experiencer experiences freedom, especially if he is still under the illusion of free will, like you are. I said as much, so what's your point? There is no "sensible definition of free will", ok? They're all irrational by default. Go open a dictionary and read them carefully. They all imply some sort of escaping causality, which simply isn't possible. That's the moment where a word stops being useful and you exchange it for other words. The idea of free will carries a lot of baggage. If you want to talk about your subjective experience of reality, be my guest, but be literate about it or I'm going to criticise you for basically denying causality.


So you're saying, if you lose your free will you won't have any free will? That's tautological. There is no such thing as free will. Your life is going to be like whatever your genes coupled with your environment make it be. Genes and environment. Focus on that for a second. Genes and environment. There's isn't a third factor here. These are the only things that make up who you are. And you have no control over any of them.