Free will Argument against Divine Providence

[bennyboy]

Here are a few more forms of non-freedoms:

- Biological non-freedom - your will needs to be free from your basic biological needs and instincts.

Just a class of physical causal determinism.

- Societal non-freedom - your will needs to be free from society's will.

Just an extension of the issue of individual will.

- Conditioning non-freedom - your will should not be determined by what happened in your developmental or formative years.

This is a good one. Given physical monism and brain as mind, however, it reduces down to basic mind/matter dualism vs. monism.

- Circumstancial non-freedom - your will should not be constrained by your circumstances.

A pretty vague word, but reducible to causal determinism.

I can choose any of the above and any combination thereof and define that free-will exists if it is free from those constraints.

Yeah, no. Your categories are about freedom, but not about will. Will is the concept of sentient agency, unique from whatever aspect of the environment might alter or determine its behavior. It probably stems from issues of morality, social control, and the rightness of punishment-- "He could have done otherwise, because God made him free to choose, so we are right to punish him for his misdeeds."

Before trying to think of non-freedoms - try and understand what "freedom" means. We take it to mean "the quality of being unconstrained" - but what it actually means is "the quality of being unconstrained by anything other than its own nature". Every object is constrained by itself, by its nature and by its existence. Thinking that 'total' freedom requires it to be free from itself is a logical impossibility and if that's the freedom you are looking for, then the whole idea of freedom is superfluous. Which is why regarding causal determinism as a "non-freedom" is incorrect. Every object, by its nature and irrespective of truth of free-will or substance dualism, is a part of causality. Regarding it as non-freedom means requiring the object to be free form itself - which is a nonsensical notion.

All fine and well. You're doing a good job of covering the "freedom" part, but not so much the "will." I can say "my door opens, therefore I'm free to open the door," but this is equivocating badly on the kind of freedom that has always been attached to the idea of will: specifically, the three kinds of freedom I mentioned. History matters.

And since physical monists (at least here) assert that such a monism is wholly deterministic, then free will implies dualism.

Wrong. Physical monists do not assert any such thing. Indeterminism is a form of physical monism.

. . . (at least here). . .

As for the idea that free will is an experience of part of brain function-- no. Will is an agency for motivated action, and no experience can be called that. If that is reality, then the reality is that there is no will, not that the will is compatible with brain function determinism.

No one describes free-will as "experience of a part of brain function". They describe it as one of the brain functions. And that is the explanation of will according to functionalism.

1) They do, too.
2) If the thing we're talking about is pre-conscious, then it even less deserves the term "will," since will refers to deliberate agency. Again, we're getting to a problem where monists take a word intended for use in a dualistic world view, define it as something completely than it means in its original context, and then moves on as though the word hasn't lost a huge part of its salient meaning. Without that dualistic context, how do you define will? Maybe: "The tendency of the brain to act on memories, rather than responding directly to environmental circumstances?" That's a useful function, but I'm not willing to allow that the word "will" may be used in that sense.