RE: What do we do while deciding if free will exists?
April 19, 2015 at 7:25 pm
(This post was last modified: April 19, 2015 at 7:27 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
See...I knew it was important to you that free will was "really real"...lol....... 
Precisely the point of contention. You don;t -have- to be a free willed agent capable of arbitrating decisions to be -something-.
Quote:Let's say I have a decision to make-- among the various candies in the candy aisle.assuming your conclusion...but I'll let it slide..lol.
Quote:I experience desire, then I look at the different candies and experience my emotional reaction to each one. I go back and forth until one of the candies really catches my fancy. I choose that candy, buy it, and eat it. Was this a process of free will? Well, if not, I didn't actually make a decision.Granted.
Quote: Nor was there even a "me,"Doesn't follow.....here you go again..."no free will...then no -x- neener neener"......right from the very beginning.....there's just no other way you can argue free will..is there?
Quote: by which I mean a free-willed agent capable of arbitrating decisions.
Precisely the point of contention. You don;t -have- to be a free willed agent capable of arbitrating decisions to be -something-.
Quote:There was just the awareness of a deterministic process, and the "decision" was illusory because my choice was inevitable.also doesn't follow, nor would the world need to be deterministic. Could've been a random event in a random universe, still no free will involved.
Quote: The joy of eating the candy was equally illusory-- there's no "joy" in the universe; it's just a word I give to mechanical processes.sounds to me..from your description..like there was joy after all...you just described what joy was in that thought experiment - a mechanical process.
Quote:In other words, a view of the human experience without free will means that each of us is here purely as an observer: watching a virtual movie, in essence. But that view of human experience doesn't really describe it very well. It seems to me very much that I'm an active participant.Sure.....but "active participant" does not mean "free willed".
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