Free will/evil/punishment

[The Grand Nudger]

Huh? Non-thinking things can accomplish thoughtful deliberation? What is it you're trying to say? I would not describe a purely non-thinking, or irrational, process to be one that involves choice. 

-by the description you offered previously, of thoughtful deliberation..the item you've now decided to prevaricate upon?  Yeah.  You described a situation in which there was no way to determine the difference.   Impulses, urges, then consideration of options, of effects, of intended outcomes.  The impulses and urges sound decidedly human to me, but the consideration leveraged is not a uniquely human trait.  We let machines do most of that for us.   I expect there to be a difference.  You seem to expect there to be a difference as well.  

I'm continually unimpressed with your feigned ignorance ("whatever that means") of your opponent's usage of terms that---not only are commonly understood, as evidenced by a simple perusal of a dictionary---but have repeatedly been defined and cited by example, here and elsewhere, in the abundance of material written on the subject. 

How would I know what your will was, or what you took your will to be.  How?  I've seen many an idea of will tossed around here.  Would you prefer that I -imagined your position for you and then argued against it-..........jackass.

Anyway, a "deteminist" like Jerry Coyne defines free will as a decision which "reflects anything more than the laws of physics that impinge on your mind, as reflected through your genetic endowment and the environments you've experienced," whereas what I mean by free will is the process of surveying and selecting actions through rationalization, taking an account of your various instincts, passions, memories, predictions, etc., along with the qualitative experience of acquiescing the most compelling factor at that given moment, not involving restrictions by other internal or external influences which could be said to infringe upon the desires or reasons consistent with one's character. 

There we go.  See.....elaboration was required and extremely helpful, because your idea of free will and mine are identical........except that I don't think it's free at all...and even after saying that... I'm not sure you and I actually disagree on the issue.  You've put a subset of internal things in one box, and called the rest "other".  The question asked is whether or not all of those things belong in the same box.  Your categories are helpful in trying to understand your framework...but they do not advance an answer to that question.  I certainly don't see how I could rescue it from bondage -by applying the label of "other" to a category I have invented in order to accommodate it.....

It seems to me that both of us feel that a certain amount of things can be crossed off the list. What remains, what we do when we make decisions, whatever that is..is "free will" to both of us. Yeah?

A person whose nature it is to act compulsively experiences, and actually possesses, a lesser degree of freedom than another who ponders potential consequences that may result from different actions, just as a person who studies a variety of worldviews and their practical outcomes is more free to make an informed determination about his or her own beliefs than a person who is exposed to a single ideology.

Some people's Free-Willers™ work better than others...you think?  I don't know about that, myself....don't even know how we could determine that.......how -have- you determined that.....? I'm not really sure that your idea of an informed decision is any different this go around than last go around, and it continues to assert the item in question..rather than demonstrate it. Start from the bottom. Bring me to where you are?

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