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

by dhw, Sunday, September 12, 2010, 15:53 (5185 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Balance_Maintained believes in free will, but does not think humans exercise it. I don't know whether we have it or not, or to what extent we may have it, because I think it's impossible to gauge the degree of influence exercised on us by factors that are beyond our control. However, I FEEL that we have it, and would like to examine your arguments by referring to the person I know best in the whole world, which is me. My observations, however, can be taken to apply to anyone else.-You seem to base your assessment of free will on predictability. I'm able to predict many of my own decisions, not because I do or don't know what has influenced me, but because I've experienced similar situations in the past. You equate free will with unpredictable action. If I'm unable to predict my own actions, that will be because I have never experienced anything comparable. For instance, if you give me a choice between chocolate and ginger, I know from past experience that I will choose chocolate because I don't like ginger and I do like chocolate. (And my wife will go the opposite way!) However, if you ask me to predict how I would behave if a gunman was holding my family and me hostage, the answer is I don't know. In my view, this has nothing to do with free will.-You argue that if someone fully understands the influencing factors (which I think is impossible) "they would be able to choose a path that was antithetical to those influences, essentially removing the influence". In some situations that is obviously true ... after all, it is the basis of psychotherapy. But even after the "cure", we would still never know all the factors influencing the new behaviour. The most we can say is that the potential range of freedom will have been extended. In any case, your hypothetical "full" understanding would still only have limited application. If science discovered that I have chocophile gingerphobic taste buds, would I then be able to choose ginger instead of chocolate? Apart from in extreme cases, such as trauma, I doubt very much if knowing the influences would change people's character or decisions (but I fully acknowledge that this is a subjective opinion based on non-scientific observation of myself and those closest to me). -To sum up, my view is that we can neither know nor remove all influences. Predictability of our behaviour or that of others will depend on experience, not on knowledge of influences. And finally, if we do have free will, our decisions will rarely depend on our knowledge of the influences, but on our inborn nature interacting with the influences themselves (whether conscious or unconscious) that shape our identity.