If free will was not real

[bennyboy]

I can say I'm a chair as well, that doesn't make it true, no matter how strongly I believe it. Just as I can't move the chair with my mind simply for identifying with it, you can't control your hunger, your personality, your experience of hunger, and whatever else you feel like you have control over. You only think you can, whereas you don't think you can control a chair. That is the only difference between the chair and all those parts of yourself that you directly experience. The degree to which you feel like you can control them, precisely because of your varying experience of them.

Who says you can control all aspects of the self? Nobody, ever, has said that. Sometimes my leg is asleep. But it's still MY leg. When people refer to it, they say, "That's BEN'S leg."

You only experience the world, you don't control it. The world here being everything that is outside of your conscience at any given moment.

I control some of it, and one of the main points of life seems to be to expand how much of it I can control.

Do you control whatever is within your conscience, you might ask? No, you don't control that either, you are subject to causality at all times and causality doesn't allow for any control.

Consciousness, you mean? Yes, I have some control over my consciousness. I can decide, for example, to change what I'm thinking about. And, in fact, such an act meets my definition of will: I intend to change what I'm thinking about, and it happens. I do not need to be aware of the mechanism in order to bring the intent to fruition.

It doesn't matter whether there's a deterministic mechanism under the hood. WHATEVER I am, that is me. Whatever I am, will is the process by which I express intent as behavior. And whatever I am, free will is the ability to form intent according to my world view or my personhood, and to express that intent without external obstruction or compulsion.

Saying things like "Your hormones affect your behavior. Your instincts are beyond your control. Your feelings compel you," etc. doesn't make sense. These are all aspects of the personhood, and they are all part of the process of either forming or executing intent. They aren't external to the self.

That is all. Your life is written in the stars, in a sense, since the beggining of time. Everything that happened since then led up to this moment, and there's nothing anyone could've done any different about it.

Eh? This appears to be an argument from ignorance. Would you care to demonstrate the truth of this statement? As far as I understand it, which isn't very far, there's cause to believe that due to real randomness at the QM level, things COULD turn out differently if you rewound the universe and pressed the "Play" button.