Free Will Debate

[polymath257]

I can’t add anything more than the example of the sun.  A deterministic free will is that we own our actions like the sun owns its reactions. 

But the sun does NOT have sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Slight changes in the initial conditions do NOT produce large scale differences in the outcome, but rather similarly minor differences.

With brains, small differences in initial conditions would produce a different choice.

To say this is absolutely not what the term is taken to mean in common use and for a long time is an understatement. 

So what *is* the common use? I have yet to be able to make sense of it.

A hammer owns its strikes this way.  A switch owns its effects this way.  Water owns its wetness, so on and so forth, all things ever believed to lack free will turn out to have it.  In fact….all things, full stop , have this sort of free will.

Not true, the major differences in the outcome of what happens to a hammer comes from outside of the hammer. The internal; state of the hammer is NOT relevant to where the hammer strikes. That is very differeent than the case for brains.

It was the contention that we were somehow outside of a causal chain.  That our choices were a pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of thing.

Except that we are also supposed to be the initiators of causal events. But somehow our preferences and viewpoints are also supposed to be involved.

That just means the whole concept is incoherent: we are supposed to be independent of causality but also intimately involved in it.

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@polymath257

If I will something, it doesn't stop being willed simply because it was pre-determined.

That’s exactly what happens. Freely willed events and pre-determined events are the opposite of each other. A thing cannot be itself and its opposite at the same time.

Boru

So a 'free will' should not have *any* dependence on my personality, desires, attitudes, tastes, hopes, or anything else about me? That seems rather strange.

It seems to me that we *want* free will to be determined by 'my' choices. And there is nothing about that contradicting determinism.

it seems to me that the opposite of pre-determined is 'random'. And having the choices be random seems even less 'free' than having them determined by my internal state (even if that internal state is determined by previous events).