Free Will, Decision making and religion

[JuliaL]

Interesting. My only objection would be to the need of maintaining any illusion. I don't require the illusion of free will in order to go on choosing as if my life depended on it. The illusion only enters in when you suppose that conscious considerations are the only ones in play and that your conscious assessment is the only one being made. They aren't. But that doesn't negate the relative freedom of the conscious mind. Of course pre-conscious screening and valuation enters in to color our perception of each outcomes desirability even as we suppose we are weighing our choices in an entirely free manner.

One might even argue that the loss of such pre-conscious participation would be a real set back and a kind of malady. Pure, detached choice making would not be a desirable state of affairs.

I don't believe there is an actual need of maintaining the free will illusion. Natural selection does not always optimize. It most often works on the 'good enough' solution (That would be from the standpoint of the individual. From the tautology of survival of the fittest, the ones who survive are, by definition, most fit and the process that got them there was optimal.) So both the interplay of unconscious, which I think you refer to as the pre-conscious in the context of intentional movement, and the conscious may be seen as a 'good enough' solution to the problems of universe modeling and future predicting. It was good enough to get your parents laid- leading to the most important and momentous event in the universe (from your standpoint)--you.

Another sub-optimal 'good enough' solution that I really don't like is pain.
In Catch 22 Yossarian criticized God for his creation of pain.
When Lieutenant Schiesskopf's wife defended pain as useful he said:

Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead? Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn't He?

I've tried to think of a better system than the one that natural selection came up with. You do need something which is at least distasteful to reduce dangerously stupid behavior like base jumping or snake handling. Lepers have extremities go gangrenous and drop off because they don't feel enough pain to motivate protective behaviors. Maybe just make painful things smell bad but not hurt. Some of it just doesn't make any sense---why have an organism feel so much pain from their teeth that they starve to death?

Whether the Universe is absolutely deterministic as Laplace viewed it or fundamentally possesses an element of probability is an open question. Moreover it is not known whether this question can be answered at all (it's a philosophical issue).

Largely agree. Even if we knew every event in space time, we wouldn't know that there are not events outside those we knew about which could subsequently affect the former. I Godel. I see no way to a solution without doubt.

Considering the above definition it may be said that Free Will exists when there's more than one possible way to choose between. Although it's clear from the beginning that there is only one actual way (a "trajectory").

I'm a little confused by this. Is it that there appear to be multiple possible choices but in fact there is only one trajectory rendering all other of those choices void?