A Sense of Free Will: the consciousness quagmire (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 11, 2015, 15:29 (3300 days ago) @ romansh

Dhw: It appears that all arguments other than cause and effect are rabbit holes you are not prepared to go down. -ROMANSH: For me they miss the point completely.-Your definition of free will as “the ability to act or make choices independently of the environment and the universe” makes free will an impossibility. Your insistence that cause and effect are the only possible approach also makes free will an impossibility. On this level I therefore agree that free will is an impossibility!-As for the rest of your post: “In a sense” you don't reject the compatibilist definition of free will, but it isn't philosophical enough for you; you apparently do not dispute that our identity is ours alone regardless of the influences (causes and effects) that have helped to form it, but you believe the self to be an illusion, so presumably your belief somehow invalidates this particular approach; I agree that you have as much right to insist that cause and effect are the only possible criteria as I have to disagree with you; the two thousand year old debate is not based on a “semantic misunderstanding”, but on different views of what constitutes free will; you presumably consider your definition of free will to be accurate, and so you presumably continue to reject my own: “the ability to make conscious choices within given constraints.” -When we last corresponded on this issue, six weeks ago, I suggested that “whether we think we have what is known as “free will” ....depends on how we define the term”. Since I accept that your definition and your cause-and-effect approach eliminate free will, and since for you the compatibilist approach and my identity approach are rabbit holes that miss the point completely (the point presumably being that nothing is independent of cause and effect, the environment and the universe), I really think this discussion has now run its circular course.