Do you control what you believe?

[Edwardo Piet]

Just to be clear, what exactly are you denying when you say you don't think we have free will, DvsF?

The philosophically libertarian sense of "free will" that is incompatible with philosophical determinism and yet requires us to determine things freely ourselves. I say that any sense of free will we can have in an indeterministic world, we can also have in a deterministic world. The sense of "free will" that we can't have in a philosophically deterministic world doesn't exist.

Are we incapable of making any arbitrary act at all unless it is motivated by a fear or desire which the cosmic dominoes have caused us to possess?[quote] I don't know what other conscious motivation we have to act besides our motivational fears and desires. There may be others, there may not. But my point is that our conscious motivation can't be "free" in the philosopically libertarian sense.

[quote]Or does having a will mean you can choose to do a thing or not do a thing on a whim?

As I have said, having a will merely means having conscious motivation. Whether that's just our conscious fears and desires that motivate us or whether it's more than that.

It seems to me that unless there is some freedom in the system it is scarcely meaningful to say we have any kind of will.

I guess that means you are merely definining will as "free will", making the question of "is our will free?" futile.

I think some people actually think this, that we are scarcely more than marionettes who spin a rationalizing tale after the fact. If this were true then it isn't just free will that we lack, it is will itself.

We do have conscious motivation, and that is how I am defining the will remember, and I thought you agreed to that definition so you should agree that the will exists therefore. We are questioning whether the will is free, I thought, not whether it itself exists. Are you denying that we have conscious motivation? Are you denying that our consciousness motivates us at all? It's certainly possible, but I doubt it's true, and if it is that not only results in my conclusion that the libertarian sense of free will does not exist, that also results in the conclusion that no kind of free will exists - that is, of course, assuming we are still defining "will" as "conscous motivation".

If I am free to prioritize among my unchosen fears and desires -and to be creative about how I act to maximize my happiness given my understanding of what they are .. why is that not considered free?

As I said, our fears and desires, and other conscious motivation may be free in the sense they can lead to and influence each other, but they are not free in the sense that they are ultimately entirely determined by unconscious motivation and/or other unconscious causes. The philosophicaly libertarian sense of free will does not exist, that is the sense of "free will" that I am denying. I am not denying a sense of "free will" that merely means "our fears and desires, and other conscious motivation may be free in the sense that they can lead to and influence each other." That sense of free will is compatible with philosophical determinism, whereas the philosophically libertarian sense of free will is not.

If I must be free to choose my fears and desires, you may as well say I must be free to choose who I am or will be.

You influence who you are and who you will be, because you and your conscious motivation is part of the causal chain, but the fears and desires that you "choose" with your conscious motivation is ultimately entirely determined by unconscious motivation and/or other unconscious causes. That is why the fears and desires that you "choose" with your conscious motivation are not free. You make a choice, but it is not a free choice. You have a will, but it is not a free will. You use your conscious motivation with other parts of conscious motivation, but you don't do so freely because utlimately those "parts of conscious motivation" are going to be entirely determined by unconscious motivation and/or other unconscious causes.

On what basis then could I possibly make such a choice?

You make choices with your motivational conscious fears and desires and any other kind of conscious motivation, but those choices are not free. Unless you're merely defining "choice" as "free decision" which renders the question as to whether such a decision is free futile in the first place. If you are to say that choices are free decisions then I shall say there are no choices, only decisions. If you are to say that choices are the same as decisons, then I shall say that there are choices, but not free ones, just as there are free decsions, but not free ones. And when I say "not free" remember that I mean not "free" in the libertarian sense of "free" described above.

This is where I get stuck. It doesn't seem to make any sense.

I hope I've made myself at least partly clearer.