RE: Do you control what you believe?
November 1, 2012 at 3:22 am
(This post was last modified: November 1, 2012 at 3:28 am by Whateverist.)
Gad but I've been avoiding this like the plague. I've never enjoyed the free will debates and have never felt clear about many of the terms used. I think I may reclaim the apathetic high ground after conceding DvsF's points. So long as the free will that is being discussed is libertarian free will, then indeed it would seem we have not got it. What choices we have, unlike the decisions we make, are not and cannot be of our choosing. For whatever we would choose will always already be that which we would/must choose.
Neither am I free to be someone else for I am always already someone in particular with a given set of motivating desires and fears. The decisions I make in relationship to these may indeed feedback on the future state of my desires and fears. For example if I decide to push my fear of the dark and tight places by doing some spelunking it may well change the motivational charge of those fears. But my desire to push those fears already bespeaks a desire to break free of them, and not a truly free choice to do so.
Of course, if we understand free will in the ordinary sense of lack of constraint then indeed we do have that .. in spades. We are always free to decide what we will but only given what choices may present themselves for our conscious consideration. At some pre-conscious level we cannot control what choices we will become aware of nor how motivating we will find them. Those are things to be discovered about who we already are and not a blank slate to be written on with a god-like, disinterested hand.
So if someone just finds himself compelled to molest little boys, butcher prostitutes or vote republican I should not judge him to harshly. They need not ultimately be deserving of damnation to justify imposing a societal consequence. I can allow that it may be in their constitution given the road they have traveled to do monstrous things. I am even willing to give up being glad to see them suffer so long as they are prevented from continuing on their asocial path .. well, except for the republicans.
Neither am I free to be someone else for I am always already someone in particular with a given set of motivating desires and fears. The decisions I make in relationship to these may indeed feedback on the future state of my desires and fears. For example if I decide to push my fear of the dark and tight places by doing some spelunking it may well change the motivational charge of those fears. But my desire to push those fears already bespeaks a desire to break free of them, and not a truly free choice to do so.
Of course, if we understand free will in the ordinary sense of lack of constraint then indeed we do have that .. in spades. We are always free to decide what we will but only given what choices may present themselves for our conscious consideration. At some pre-conscious level we cannot control what choices we will become aware of nor how motivating we will find them. Those are things to be discovered about who we already are and not a blank slate to be written on with a god-like, disinterested hand.
So if someone just finds himself compelled to molest little boys, butcher prostitutes or vote republican I should not judge him to harshly. They need not ultimately be deserving of damnation to justify imposing a societal consequence. I can allow that it may be in their constitution given the road they have traveled to do monstrous things. I am even willing to give up being glad to see them suffer so long as they are prevented from continuing on their asocial path .. well, except for the republicans.
