Free Will: not rejected, redefined (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, May 12, 2022, 15:00 (926 days ago) @ dhw

QUOTES: "All your choices are in a sense inevitable. A lot of the time, you might feel as though you have freedom to act as you wish (a view known as ‘voluntarism’), but taking into account your history, personality, mood and other factors, there is in fact an inevitability to everything you do."

"There’s no escaping the chain of cause and effect.”

"It’s useful to feel you could have done things differently, even if it’s a fiction.”

"Don’t reject the concept of ‘free will’: rethink it. The ‘compatibilist’ conception of free will acknowledges the causal necessity of the physical world, but it also recognises that, if no one ‘made me do it’, I acted freely."

DAVID: it is a reasonable approach, because it is obvious our personal background of influences always plays a role in our choices of action. Makes better sense than denying our ability to choose freely, as if our ability to choose did not exist.

dhw: This is all very much in line with the conclusions I tried to draw in earlier discussions. However, I do wish writers would actually provide a definition of what they mean by “free will” before embarking on such discussions. I can’t remember my own exact definition, but it was along the lines of: an entity’s conscious ability to control its decision-making process within given constraints. These were 1) outside constraints imposed by the situation or by Nature (you can’t “free-will” yourself to fly), and 2) constraints affecting the decision-making process itself, such as heredity, upbringing, education, illness, accidents, chance encounters. On the one hand, as this writer argues, we can’t escape the chain of cause and effect, so you can argue that free will is a fiction. On the other hand, you can argue that all the above influences have contributed to my identity, and my identity is mine alone. Therefore decisions are mine and mine alone (i.e. as above, no one outside of “me” made me do it), and this denotes freedom. Another all-important factor would be the source of consciousness, but since this is unknown, I would suggest that the question of whether we do or don’t have free will – as I have defined it - remains open.

Your approach is quite thorough. Our decision making is freely done from moment to moment, but all of the influences you describe must be in play. It comes down to teh question: free of what?