Free Will (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by dhw, Sunday, September 05, 2010, 22:24 (5195 days ago) @ xeno6696

Matt has chosen (of his own free will?) to join the definitions game, and offers three essential elements: 
1.	An explicit assertion of conscious control.
2.	An ability to create.
3.	An ability to do something contrary to solid reasoning.
His proposed definition is:
Free will is the ability to alter circumstances of some situation through innovation.-I agree 100% with 1. As for 2 and 3, they should certainly be incorporated into our definition, but to restrict free will to innovation seems to me even more exclusive than the Romansh definition. An integral element of free will has to be the ability to make choices independently of constraints. If I go to a restaurant and select a meal from the 50 items on the menu, I like to think my choice is voluntary, unforced, spontaneous (although it will certainly be directed by subconscious influences like taste), but it can hardly be called an innovative alteration of circumstances. This applies to most of the decisions we take in our everyday lives in the belief that we are exercising free will. An ability to create is no more a sign of free will than an ability to destroy. An ability to do something contrary to solid reasoning is no more a sign of free will than an ability to do something contrary to intuition. -A definition of free will has to encompass all decisions and all influences that might prevent decisions from being "free". I wonder if it wouldn't be worthwhile looking at poor old dhw's definition, which everyone has ignored apart from Romansh, who has sort of come round to not entirely rejecting it (he doesn't like the "conscious" bit). Let's see if the revised version includes your criteria: -"An entity's conscious ability to make decisions independently of constraints beyond the control of that entity".
 
Conscious control? Yes. An ability to create? Making decisions incorporates all choices and actions, including creative and non-creative. To do something contrary to solid reasoning? Yes indeed, or contrary to intuition, a government decree, the ten commandments, social etiquette, or your wife's precise instructions. It also encompasses your extremely pertinent reference to and comment on Nietzsche's "pointed observation that a thought comes when IT wills. So to what extent do we actually control?" Nietzsche alone seems to have considered the influence I have been repeatedly trying to draw attention to, which is that we are subject to internal constraints as well as external. We do not know to what extent our decisions are controlled by our own "givens". -The definition must encompass all of these. Once we have it, we can start examining ourselves, other creatures, the environment, the universe, to see if or to what degree this conscious ability may be said to exist. I find Romansh's definition incomplete, and your own anything but "broadly applicable". So now tell me what's wrong with mine!