Do you believe in free will?

[genkaus]

As long as we are leaving the word free from your will, it naturally contradicts the possibility of alternate choice.

Why would we leave it out if the possibility of alternate choice is within the nature of the will?

My definition of free will is the ability of an agent to to choose between alternatives free from causation.
It is important in a discussion of this nature to use the common consensus for the definition.

EDIT: Just to add.. there is no consensus, hence the difficulty in trying to discuss it with you.

I thought we did have consensus. This line of discussion started when you made the following argument regarding God's omniscience.

1. If God is omniscient, he knows all things
2. We have free will, defined by being able to make an uncoerced choice between alternatives.

and etc.

This is the definition I've been using all along. If you wish to change it now, don't lay the absence of consensus on my door.

“Free Will” is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives.

No mention of freedom from causality here and therefore, no requirement for freedom from causation - as your new definition states.

As such, and I repeat, the human agent cannot choose a particular action from among various alternatives. His choices are made for him through the natural processes of his mind.

And as I've been repeating time and again - "he" is not something separate or independent from the natural processes of his mind. "He" is those processes and therefore the choice is being made by "him".

You wish that free will is compatible with determinism, which is fine, thats your view, but just because it appears to be a free choice, ignorance of the causation of motivation make it pure illusion.

That would be the case if freedom from causation was required to make your will free. Given that nothing in its definition establishes that - my understanding of free-will is very much real.

What can I say, our illusion of free will is a strange beast.

It hasn't been established as such.

More to the point, if our instincts are subject to being justified, what makes you think the big decisions aren't.

Because you don't make up rationalizations or justifications for actions that are product of reasoned action.

You're starting to remind me of the creationist who claims macro-evolution cannot be implied from micro-evolution.
What do you think big decisions are? They are just lots of small decisions put together.

When you aim for a career growth, you don't make instinctual choices and start justifying after the fact that they are all leading towards your intended goal.

Or when you cook, you don't automatically throw together whatever ingredients fall in your way and then claim that the final dish was what you were planning all along.

Or when you go to a restaurant, you don't grab your wallet, check your cash, lock your apartment, catch a cab, tell him where to go and get a table - doing all this on autopilot and then justifying it to yourself.

Unlike evolution, all these small actions are leading towards one single purpose - all of them the result of the same motivation for that purpose. The purpose isn't assigned after all the actions have been taken.

The point is, that your motivation is certain and inevitable in a given situation. Of course their consistent. But ignoring the causation of motivation is your fundamental error in reasoning.

Why would ignoring causation of motivation be an error, once you have judged it irrelevant?

However, do not apply that definition to me, you brought it up. I was merely pointing out that motivation and action are consistent merely because the causation of motivation leads to the action.

True. How does this make the will not free form coercion?

You don't. There is no such thing as an uncoerced action. Hence hard determinism
The argument is that the illusion of freewill can make you feel free from the coercion of causative factors, but that is all it is.

That is where you are wrong. Either you don't understand what coercion means or you do not understand how to to apply the principle. The meaning of coercion is simple - if an act is according to the will of the agent, then it is not coerced. If it is against the will of the agent, then it is coerced. How the will came to be, is irrelevant.

To state that there is no uncoerced action - means that any and every action you undertake, you did not want to undertake. Any causative factors in the picture would not make an action coerced if there is no conflict between will and action.

Simply because I agree with a hard deterministic school of thought on the matter does not equate to misunderstanding free-will. I can only put this down to arrogance on your behalf.

It is not your agreement with hard-determinism that leads me to the conclusion, but your virulent disregard for any concept with the words "free" and "will" in it - without any actual consideration to what the concept actually signifies.

Kant sums it up quite nicely;

According to this, that is sometimes called a free effect, the determining physical cause of which lies within the acting thing itself, e.g., that which a projectile performs when it is in free motion, in which case we use the word freedom, because while it is in flight it is not urged by anything external; or as we call the motion of a clock a free motion, because it moves its hands itself, which therefore do not require to be pushed by external force; so although the actions of man are necessarily determined by causes which precede in time, we yet call them free, because these causes are ideas produced by our own faculties, whereby desires are evoked on occasion of circumstances, and hence actions are wrought according to our own pleasure. This is a wretched subterfuge with which some persons still let themselves be put off, and so think they have solved, with a petty word- jugglery, that difficult problem, at the solution of which centuries have laboured in vain, and which can therefore scarcely be found so completely on the surface.

You do realize that Kant committed the very same fundamental error I've been talking about (considering the agent independent of material world) and considered causality to be the illusion?

CERTAINLY would not hold? The world of neuroscience awaits your revelation with baited breath. Everyone's a closet Nobel prize winner today.

No one in the world of neuroscience would greet it as revelation. Hell, no one with common sense would greet it as revelation.

It still comes down to lots of little decisions to create the larger conscious decisions.

Yes, but those little decisions are undertaken with that larger conscious decision in consideration - the large decision is not justified a-posteriori.

But until you present some evidence that the conscious ever directs the action itself without recourse to causation, I will remain a hard determinist.

Why would I present any evidence for such when that has never been my position.

For that, there is no evidence you act after you think. I think that is remarkably telling.

I find the idea that you act before you think to be more revealing. I, however, try to think my actions through before acting them out.

The indications do so far, seem to correlate heavily with a determined response system. Whether it is entirely true or has exceptions like you suggest, remains to be seen. But the indications are certainly there, and until I see evidence to the contrary, I see no reason to see determinism and free will as compatible.

Do you still not see your problem? Compatibility (not compatibilism) does not require free-will to be proven by exceptions to determined response system - free-will is a part of what determines the response of the system. I never suggested that there are any exceptions.

Typical philosophy discussion, if the definitions are not clearly defined at the start, and philosophers have yet to come to a consensus on it, so theres no hope for amateurs like you and me.

I thought you started out with a pretty decent definition. I'm not sure where in between you lost your way.