Another Free-will poll, please bear with me!

[robvalue]

Long and tedious post:

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Wallym: I've read your objection and I don't see how you are disagreeing with me. You can describe processes still, but to say we can "change" anything isn't accurate in my opinion, if we're only at the mercy of QR. So either I'm missing something or we're just using different terms for the same thing. My point was that people worry about how the justice system should change if we find out there is no free will, I'm pointing out that this is a non-issue. If no one has any free will, then it can't "change" in any meaningful way. I think people sometimes revert back to the idea of free will for some parties even after making an assumption that there isn't such a thing.

By "choice" or "change" I mean a genuine decision where an agent has picked from more than one actual, real possibility that isn't just being randomly or predictably chosen. Definitions are still a problem here, of course.

We either start a discussion with the assumption that we have free will of some kind, or that we don't (unless we are discussing whether we actually have it or not specifically). If we assume that we don't, literally nothing means anything, there are no choices to be made, there is no "ought", stuff is just going on.

I don't deny that it can totally feel like we're making decisions, even if we're not. It's just I don't think we can be certain whether we are or not.

I used to say I "Live as if there is free will" but I have realized, just yesterday in fact, that it is impossible to do otherwise. It is a contradiction to say that you would choose to act as if you have no free will, because then in fact you are utilizing free will to make that choice. And how would you know how you "would act" without free will anyway? You could have a sensation of letting go, feeling no guilt, and so on, but who's to say that isn't you making an active choice to feel that way?

You say we can learn things by finding out that there isn't free will... but again, if we assume there is no free will, then we either will learn things or we won't, no actual progress or decisions are going on beyond QR. So yes, we can "learn", but our very actions of learning, and then putting this into use, is just clockwork like everything else, possibly with random elements. So it is as meaningless an issue as everything else. If you begin with the assumption there is no true free will, that is. There is no danger of "missing out on learning" because we're not choosing anything anyway, we will learn or we won't.

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Apologies if I'm not explaining myself very well. Finding the right language for this kind of topic is very hard for me! It's like each word needs carefully defining, and then each word in the definition needs carefully defining... eventually I snap a twig and someone hears me.

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