RE: In your opinion what causes christians to believe in Jesus
May 17, 2025 at 9:21 am
(This post was last modified: May 17, 2025 at 9:35 am by John 6IX Breezy.)
(May 17, 2025 at 12:55 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Actually, yeah, that's a good boundary to set. If all of our choices are actually more like a menu..where the options are constrained...and then within each of those possible choices we're strongly predisposed towards one or against another...the freedom of our will quickly becomes a term of art.
Here's a different perspective—you need limits to have free will. We see this all throughout the brain. You need selective attention in order to navigate a visual scene, because you cannot possibly attend to every aspect of a scene equally unless you have an unprecedented amount of computational power. There's a reason why individuals with attentional issues, meaning they attend to everything, have a lot of difficulty engaging in any task. Another example is with decision itself—the more options you give a person the worse off they are at making them.
In other words, given that you have limited resources, your brain optimizes for agency by limiting its scope. People's ability to choose falls apart in every situation where the constraints are lifted and options increased. That shouldn't be the case under a deterministic framework where every behavior is the result of a cascade of priors, because under such a framework the choice is already made, it's just a question of whether the right inputs are present.