RE: Do you control what you believe?
October 30, 2012 at 12:20 pm
(This post was last modified: October 30, 2012 at 12:25 pm by Edwardo Piet.)
(October 29, 2012 at 7:36 pm)IATIA Wrote: If one has no free will, then one cannot 'choose' what to believe.
If 'choice' is defined as 'free choice' then yes, but if 'choice' is merely defined as 'decision' then, no, because decisions aren't necessarily free, are they? If you say that they are then, assuming that decision-making exists, that would imply that all decisions are free. But in that case you're already saying that we have free-will, so then what is reasonable is motion towards "free" needing a definition.
Quote: The problem is that within the 'system', we have no way to prove free will exists. (Though there is substantial empirical data that suggests it does not.)
Well, I'm sure that there is enough scientific evidence that the typical compatibilistic sense of "free will" exists. Our decisions are free enough to affect other decisions that we have. Our will is partly free.
But I also believe that our will is ultimately entirely not free. If we don't look to the present but instead we look to the past, and we trace our will causally back to the beginning of the universe, our will is ultimately entirely not free.
Quote:If one has free will and 'chooses' to believe or not, there would be no discernible difference if there were no free will for the mind would 'convince' us that we had made the 'choice' of our own 'free will'.
Whether the difference is subjectively discernible or not, there's still a difference. Well, sort of. If libertarian free will was a coherent concept there would be an existent difference if it were then true. The only real difference between no free will and the libertarian sense of free will is that libertarian free will is false because it's not even logically coherent.
Quote:With that said, it would seem prudent to accept free will as a fact and accept the responsibilities/consequences involved in making a choice. If we do not have free will, then all is moot anyway.
Free will of the typically compatabilistic sense is not an illusion but is trivially true and I think barely worth pondering over. Fatalism is almost certainly false (and it's not the same as determinism). So we obviously accept that. Free will in the libertarian sense is logically incoherent so I don't know why we'd want to accept that unless we wrongfully confuse the implications of the absence of its meaning with fatalism.