Free Will

[Mudhammam]

How is a purely immaterial will any better? You still have the same problems.

Maybe. I don't have any clear conception of how a will might operate that isn't subject to the same problems that the constraints of physical laws impose; perhaps, however, self-determination need not be random. Can a will act on accord of its own self-willingness in which its exertion is neither necessary as a result of immediate antecedent causes nor involuntary impulses? It's a possibility that I'd like to maintain, at least as a matter for further consideration. The best I can currently entertain at this point, the most intelligible notion of something that strikes me as genuine freedom, is that perhaps human intuition includes foreknowledge of a range of possibilities in which one actually is completely free to pursue whichever course it ultimately decides upon - either because a particular path appears the most reasonable, or feels the most satisfying, or promises to serve as a worthy test of fortitude, or has the potential to forge an identity (an act of protest, say), or even because it considers irrationality a right to be exercised. I don't know really. Why does one of these sometimes agree with my will, at other times not? Am I responsible for that judgment? Is it something of a symbiotic relationship with my genes, environment, past choices, etc.? Or does it ultimately transcend all of that, and coincide instead with a natural affinity to reason, sometimes present in the conscious intellect, sometimes absent; sometimes embraced, other times ignored? Maybe it boils down to the ends: self-preservation, on one level, of the body, on another, the inner "self", on yet another, the will. Or perhaps its all about pleasure; or freedom. Even these seem like choices to be considered to some extent.