Free will Argument against Divine Providence

[genkaus]

Just a class of physical causal determinism.

Just an extension of the issue of individual will.

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

A pretty vague word, but reducible to causal determinism.

Did you miss the point here or did you forget your own argument?

You chose causal determinism as a "non-freedom" from which one's will should be free. You didn't explain why it must be considered as a whole or why it is the only choice.

Similarly, I can choose a set of restraints some partially reducible to causal determinism but not reducible to whole of it and regard them as the 'non-freedom' the will should be free from.



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

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.

You did forget your own argument. I didn't cover the "will" part because you didn't bring it up in the argument. The freedoms mentioned above are the ones associated with "will". Your broad generalization is incorrect because philosophers don't stick to those specific kinds of freedom.

1) They do, too.

Who are they?

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.

Then that would be your problem. Your failure to grasp the change in the meaning of the word due to differing ontological presumptions is not an issue for the philosophers.

Consider the trivial "proof" given for substance dualism. It goes something like this. What do you mean by "I" or "me" or "self"? How is it defined? Its not my body parts, my arms, my legs my eyes etc. Its not my name or my behavior. Its not my brain. Its not any part of my brain which can be found by cutting it up into pieces. I'm not referring to any of these things when I talk about "I". So, I must be a spiritual entity. I am a soul in a spiritual plane and my body and brain are the means of my interaction with the physical world where "I" am nowhere to be found.

This definition of "self" has been used by substance dualists for centuries. So, any time you try to use this concept within physical monism, it would lose what you might consider a salient aspect - its spiritual nature. Are you arguing that physical monists should not use the word "I" or "me" or "self" - rather accept that within their ontological context, the self cannot exist?

That would be ridiculous. The spiritual aspect of self is a salient feature only within the dualist context. The actual meaning of the word would be the individual's identity as perceived by his consciousness. Those words would take on a completely different meaning within the monist context and yes, some of the salient features gained within the dualist context would be missing here. That does not mean that the words cannot or should not be used within that context.

Coming to the question of "will" - it is defined as "the mental faculty by which one chooses a course of action". In and of itself, it has no dualist or monist connotations. Your will is an attribute of your mind - that is its salient, defining feature. Within the monist context, the mind is a emergent attribute of how the brain functions - and will becomes one of those functions. It is as simple as "Entity A feels hungry. Entity A sees food. Entity A eats food." Here, the will of entity A - the will to eat food - is the result of the interplay between external and internal stimuli. It does not matter if you can reduce the entity A and the set of events to a series of biochemical reactions. Existence of will and its functions take place at the level of a person's identity - not at chemical levels.