God has given us free will, correct? Maybe not.
I had a quite philosophical discussion with my roommate the other day, and I felt like sharing it with all of you.

I was doing an English paper on how students navigate academic literacy and my original thesis was somewhere along the lines of "students navigate academic literacy through their own ambition" so i went on to describe ambition as being internal or inspired internally by outside sources. Then I realized they're the same.
Ambition is inspired within us by sources in our environment. A non-profit TV ad makes one realize that their smoking habit is slowly killing them. The ad inspires ambition. This is a simple example.
Frederic Douglass started his quest for knowledge when his master's wife began to teach him the alphabet. His master found out and told his wife to stop and discourage Douglass's further attempts to learn. It's like giving a toddler a cookie and then taking it away. Douglass then had a burning desire to learn to become literate. He didn't do this himself. Without his mistress, he probably would not have had the desire to learn, being ignorant to literacy. The influences from factors in our environment determine our choices, our paths, our futures. Even little choices and small opinions are formed along the way from influences for our years at home with our parents, our time "on our own" in school or the workforce, etc. Just like there isn't one gene for head size and shape, there are many. Many factors influence one trait.

So do we ever really have a choice? Or is it all predetermined before we're even born? I hope you see the correlation between ambition and the illusion of free will. I didn't really tie them together well.

perhaps this even goes as far to attempt to refute religion- if God said he gave us free will but he didn't...

Free will is absolute--we create our own reality.

Thus, one may choose to create a reality in which one has no free will.

Free will is absolute--we create our own reality.

Thus, one may choose to create a reality in which one has no free will.

This is basically the best answer your going to get. If for some reason you choose to believe that you have no free will, than you won't. Free will, although it may not seem it at times, is really our own decision. The influences from factors in our environment will deff affect our choices, but that doesn't mean we still don't ultimately get to make the choice.

I completely disagree.

Free will is something that either exists, or does not. I do agree one with free will could convince themselves that they have no free will... this still being an act of free will. However, there is a good chance that free will does NOT exist... and its foolish to rule this out.

This is by no means a question of the existence of God. It has nothing to do with "destiny" or a mapped out divine plan. In a world completely void of any higher power... who is to say our actions aren't just an ongoing set of chemical and physical reactions that we ultimately have no control over? On the smallest level we are all composed of the same atoms... that have the same natural properties. We could very well all be part of an endless and extremely complex set of reactions.

As much as I hope this is NOT the case, and as much as I would like to believe in free will... Just because something sounds nice is no reason to deem it true.

This is one of those things we'll just never know.

The problem in the argument is 'what IS free will'. Or at least, what do you think is the acceptable way of looking at it.

The objective perspective. We're biological organisms that behave in predictable ways due to concrete reactions which are caused by concrete reactions dictating this universe only one way. No free will.

The existentialist or subjective perspective. My consciousness perceives my environment and I act the way that suits me at any time. Ala, free will.

Both answers are utterly correct and exist together as two sides of the same coin. This is philosophy. The answer is the logical compromise between the two.
In the end there's no great mystery and you discover "It's just like it's always been".

The progress of time is an illusion.

Personally, I don't believe in free will. I believe you can make decisions, but ultimately your decisions can be predicted.

Quantum Physics seems to say that free will would be possible, as the universe seems to function on randomness. In that case you wouldn't have a perfectly mapped out set of chemical reactions and stuff.

Quantum Physics seems to say that free will would be possible, as the universe seems to function on randomness. In that case you wouldn't have a perfectly mapped out set of chemical reactions and stuff.

A) These levels of reaction are merely to sustain higher atomic states which behave perfectly predictably.

B) Even if you were right, that doesn't prove free will. It would prove it's all random and we are ships adrift.
Personally, I'd rather have fate.

The progress of time is an illusion.

Personally, I don't believe in free will. I believe you can make decisions, but ultimately your decisions can be predicted.

Well your right, what we percieve as time is only the movement of one event, or point, to another event, or point.

The only way you would really be able to is if you somehow could view these events ahead of time. You would have to look at all possible outcomes and than see what events lead up to that specific event, which would be impossible.

Well your right, what we percieve as time is only the movement of one event, or point, to another event, or point.

The only way you would really be able to is if you somehow could view these events ahead of time. You would have to look at all possible outcomes and than see what events lead up to that specific event, which would be impossible.

Because the fact of the matter is, however you resolve a choice; you made that choice because of concrete factors. That's why you did it.
Now that doesn't mean that it will be right at a later point. But that doesn't matter.
Then you'll have another choice, which will only have one answer for you.

There's a whole group of philosophers called compatiblists. They contend that free will and a deterministic universe are not mutually exclusive.

You flip a quarter to see if it lands on heads or tails. It appears that there is a 50/50 chance of it landing on either side. But is there really? If you take into account all the forces acting on the quarter in the air (gravity, friction, air currents, etc.) and the amount of force you applied to the quarter, and where you applied it, and the inertia of the quarter, etc., can you not predict which side it will land on?

Any arguments that you can't because you don't know where the wind currents are going will be immediately shot down by me saying the quarter was flipped in a vacuum.

Yes, it seems some people here are arguing for compatibilism, which imo is just people making an argument on the equivocation of what free will is. They are going for something so basic, so tautological, that it is not very satisfying as what many of us think of free will as. For instance, St. Augustine basically argued we have free will because 'we do what we want to do'. Well yes, of course we can always justify to ourselves that we are doing what we want to do. The question is if what our impulses are, are actually anything we can consider 'our own'. That is, we never, at any point, decided our initial likes/dislikes, etc.

Another way to look at it is "man as conceptual." Man is nothing but a lot of atoms, there is no real "i" ("I" as an illusion) and therefore there is no coherent, single entity to identify as having free will. Modern neurological research would support this, insofar as the brain seems to have many different decision making inputs which fight over one another when a 'decision' is being made. A decision is made, our body reacts, then AFTER that it comes to our conscious, we justify it as 'my' decision and rationalize why we did what we did retroactively.

God has given us free will, correct? Maybe not.
I had a quite philosophical discussion with my roommate the other day, and I felt like sharing it with all of you.



is it just me, or does this look suspiciously like a self pwn.

That which defines the human IS the human.

The idea that we have free will is a bit non-nonsensical. Logically speaking, the religious free will is ridiculous.

However,

We ARE "free" to choose, and if "freedom of the human" is whatever the resulting human DOES - then the human is free. This implies "oneness" or "monism", meaning that everything is connected, and is a result.

This would mean that to the ignorant HUMAN, he is free to do whatever he can think of. But in God's eyes, he is a result.

is it just me, or does this look suspiciously like a self pwn.

How is it self own?