Free Will Debate

[polymath257]

But the sun does NOT have sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Slight changes in the initial conditions do NOT produce large scale differences in the outcome, but rather similarly minor differences.

With brains, small differences in initial conditions would produce a different choice.


So what *is* the common use? I have yet to be able to make sense of it.


Not true, the major differences in the outcome of what happens to a hammer comes from outside of the hammer. The internal; state of the hammer is NOT relevant to where the hammer strikes. That is very differeent than the case for brains.


Except that we are also supposed to be the initiators of causal events. But somehow our preferences and viewpoints are also supposed to be involved.

That just means the whole concept is incoherent: we are supposed to be independent of causality but also intimately involved in it.

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So a 'free will' should not have *any* dependence on my personality, desires, attitudes, tastes, hopes, or anything else about me? That seems rather strange.

It seems to me that we *want* free will to be determined by 'my' choices. And there is nothing about that contradicting determinism.

If determinism is correct, then what you think of as ‘choices’ are nothing of the sort - you aren’t willing anything. In other words, you only feel as if you’re making a choice. If you debate with yourself at length whether to pick up a spoon with your right or left hand, the result will always be what it was always going to be (in a deterministic universe).

But again, I’m not arguing for or against determinism OR free will. I’m saying it’s a mug’s game to try to determine which is correct.

Boru

I made a choice: that choice was determined by my psychology. I was uncertain about hat I wanted to do, I felt the urge to decide the way I did. And then I did it. How is that *not* 'will'? Willing the choice is part of the causal sequence.