(February 9, 2012 at 4:09 pm)Rhythm Wrote: But you can help it if you realize you're rigging the game, which you are. Taking an ability that we've determined to be a very human ability and then using it as the criteria for a concept like "free will" is about as crooked as the house can get. Of course animals that are not human beings don't have free will if the criteria for free will can be reduced to being human animals.
(It may be that this is exactly the criteria.. but we have extremely strong reasons to suspect that we're engaging in a behavior that is also very human, and also most often completely wrong, all of this without being able to establish that there is such a thing as "free will" in the first place...btw)
Like I said before, when I say free-will, I mean volition, that is capacity to make decisions with reference to knowledge, motivations, thoughts and actions. If you think that this definition is rigging the game in favor of humanity, then propose your own and we can discuss that.
FYI, simply defining free-will as the capacity to make a choice would be incomplete. You also have to point out what it means to have made a choice, i.e. how do we determine if a creature has made a choice and that the action undertaken was not a necessary consequence of its biology and conditioning.
