Is free will real?

[bennyboy]

Okay, here's the elephant in the room.

You've identified both free-will and the "homunculus" of self as illusory. But why, knowing these things to be illusory, do you continue to act as though you have free will? How, in any non-forum-debate context, does this knowledge inform or guide your decision-making, your social relationships, etc? Why, for example, don't you study Buddhism or Hinduism, some schools of which share the same philosophy, but apply it in more depth?

Or. . . wait a minute. . . you're not turning into a closet Buddhist are you?

I don't act as though I have free will. I'm quite aware that each thought that pops into my brain is subsequent to a chain that I do not in any sense control, that senses fluctuate and internal changes prompt me this way or that. I'm not under the illusion. But I can distinguish my freedom in the sense of being able to sit and type out this message as opposed to a hot supermodel pointing a gun at my head and telling me to strip naked.

Okay, so you woke up, you had breakfast, you thought to yourself, "What will I do next?" Your (determinate) thinking mechanism weighed the balance and caused you to log in to the internet, open AF, navigate to a thread about free will, and compelled you to come and write a response to my post. You spent several minutes watching yourself construct and organize sentences, and then pressed the "Post Reply" button.

And you think all this is a simpler, more meaningful explanation for your behaviors than free will?

Anyway about the Buddhism, it sounds like you are engaged in the practice known as "watching the watcher," where you start observing that little homonculus and realize that it's an idea, rather than a thing. Avoiding Buddhist philosophy because of religious stigma will mean you miss out on some of the philosophy of mind that is most closely related to your philosophical position.

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However, could such knowledge guide our "decision-making"? Sure. It could, just as one example, provide the metrics by which a reasonable expectation of success in rehabilitation is achieved. If we're essentially "programmed items" - then knowledge of how and by what would be immensely useful (and already seems to be useful to us....with what little we know).

Useful for what? If the self is an illusion, then all the utility that contributes to the development, sustenance and pleasure of the self is pixie dust.