Do you control what you believe?

[Edwardo Piet]

Whateverist:

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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.

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Agreed.

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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.

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Agreed again.

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.

Many people do indeed define 'free will' as merely having some degree of self-control in the sense that our conscious motivations can influence other conscious motivations that we have. But many people also believe that 'free will' is deeper than that.

At some pre-conscious level we cannot control what choices we will become aware of nor how motivating we will find them.

And of course we are ultimately entirely predetermined by unconscious motivation(s)/causes.

I shall also add that apparently there is scientific evidence that all the actions we make are already determined by our unconsciousness shortly before they are determined by any conscious motivation that we have.