RE: "Free Will" Belief/Disbelief Poll
October 6, 2010 at 6:38 am
(This post was last modified: October 6, 2010 at 6:40 am by Edwardo Piet.)
Rayaan Wrote:I believe in free will because the fact that I realize that there are different choices to act upon means that I'm free to make a decision without being completely determined to do so.
One day you have option X. Another day you have option Y. So in that sense you have "different choices".
But at any given moment that moment is by definition that moment so how can you choose it to be otherwise? To generalize my point above into acting as if you can change what is happening at the moment it is happening to something else: is impossible by definition.
We live in the past, present, and future. The past is what has happened, so, as the vast majority or people understand I'm sure: You can't change that. Many say you can change the future. But the future means "what will happen" even if it isn't determined. You can't change that. How can you change whatever will happen to whatever won't happen? The future is whatever will happen, absolutely whatever that is, so you can't change the future either.
And the present is already present. The moment you think you have changed it it has already become the past. So how can you change that?
As theVOID says, I don't believe in free will because I don't believe we are acausal.
Futhermore though, if the universe itself is acausal (in the sense that it is probabilistic and some things are just an awful lot more likely than others and so that makes it seem as if cause and effect is more straight forward than it is) and we are naturally part of the universe, part of nature, how would we be able to break the acausal rules, whatever they are, and be self-causing agents?
