Free Will means that when someone is in a situation in which their life is about to expire, they make the decision to die or not to die

for example...when someone dies in a car accident...it has nothing to do with the car hitting them or the laws of physics crushing bones and/or organs ....they used their "Free WIll" and made the choice to die

if they use their "Free Will" and make the choice or decision not to die, after this is relayed to the surgeon they can re-attach their head and other various body parts and they can go home

"Free Will" takes the worry out of dying

I like this very much.

Funny thing, is that this is the same phenomena that starts wars on the basis of different ideologial convictions. And people are willing to go to kill others and risk dying, because they are totally too lazy to change their own thinking.

Brilliant. This explains all human societies, all wars, all stupid and smart movements in the history of mankind.

I guess the trick to drum up support for your theories is to tell it to children at the right age, and make their parents nod (whether the parents want to or not) during the indoctrination.

In Communist Hungary all adults were religious, or almost all, and all kids became atheist, or almost all, directly with applying this method.

There is just one problem -- it's not laziness that makes people not want to change the way they look at things. What does it is much deeper and much more functional than that.

It is a social tool of individual psychology that bonds people to help each other survive. A common ideology presupposes a common ancestral DNA, and funnily, in the rare instances that people convert from one group to another, of opposing or incompatible ideologies, the converts are accepted to be full practitioners. This is a perverse subversion of DNA protection, but it has much better advantages, stronger than disadvantages. The advantage is that the convert is willing to die for his ideological conviction, much like members of the group he is in now. This provides strength to the group, at the slight cost of unwelcome loss of self-protection to protect the survival of unrelated DNA which is not common to the group.


The very idea that perverse subversion of DNA preservation happnes, shows the strength of the survival value of the conversion, and the magnitude of the importance of the reluctance of going into conversions. As such, it shows that it is not really laziness that stops people from the willingness to exchange their views to something more beleivable or more rational, and it is not an action that is funny and stupid as Galbraith makes it seem to be, but it is a very strong survival element inasmuch as it even supplants reason in the individuals as the motivation for a lifetime of belief in an ideology.

All of this without ever acknowledging which definition of determinism you are using.

If you are not using the definition used by trained physicists then you are wasting my time.

Look up causal determinism. No conversation about free will vs determinism could be less absurd when switching between these definitions and not taking seriously concerns regarding the acausal overtones that are required by free will proponents which use QM to somehow explain consciousness but never make any progress in that endeavor.

In this case? Free will obviously, however emergent properties are everywhere. The color of an apple is an emergent property. Break down all of its atoms and its not red, or green or blue. Language is an emergent property of the structure and level of organization of large neural networks.

Looking at free will from QM is like looking at the elephant one pore at a time, never will you map the structure or have anything meaningful to say. The scale of inquiry is all off. At the scale of QM consciousness could never be seen. Like never changing the zoom of the fractal you are looking at and never learning the pattern.

I gave you the definition I was working from earlier:

"free will"…freedom of choice (if an event is not determinable, it and its effect(s) can only be known in terms of probability)

"determinism"… no freedom of choice (If an event is determinable, it and its effect(s) must be inevitable such that no other possibility or choice exists)


I did, but the word "antecedent" in the definition bothered me since it implies the arrow of time to be unidirectional. I don't believe that to be true.



What do "acausal overtones" have to do with my argument?



The structure resulting from more fundamental constituents might have what could be called properties of the structure, but were it not for the properties of its constituents, the structure would not be what it is.

Free will can only result from freedom to choose and that freedom cannot be gained from mathematical certainty. There must exist some non-zero probability of another choice being made. If the entire universe is composed of particles whose momentum and position at any point in time can be determined with mathematical certainty, then the whole universe becomes a clockwork mechanism where not even one particle can deviate from its calculated worldline. If that applies to every particle in your body, you have absolutely no freedom of choice and even the thoughts of a complex system such as your brain are determinable at any point in time. Free will could not exist in such a situation at any scale you pick.

The only thing that could possibly allow freedom of choice (and hence free will) would be if particle momentum & position could not be determined with certainty.

. . and you still do not see how this framework sets up an absurdity?

Discarding this framework is the first step in understanding choice, cognition, and whatever we might have in the way of freedom of action.

I do not tacitly agree with everything on this page, but he addresses the problems in a well articulated way.

Edit: helps if I include the link, lol.

http://www.trinity.edu/cbrown/intro/free_will.html

I still don't see how my definitions set up an absurdity.

With regard to the link you posted, I can agree with two of the three definitions he gives in the paper, except definition #1 (which implies a fallacious temporal constraint). Obviously, since it differs from the other two, the three definitions are not equivalent.

"Determinism is the view that every event is completely determined by prior causal factors, so any view that denies this cannot be a version of determinism."

I can't agree with this view of determinism because like the first of the three prior definitions he gives in the paper, it adds the constraint of a unidirectional arrow of time. Like most definitions for determinism, it sees events only in terms of antecedent causes.

"Incompatibilists (hard determinists and libertarians) hold that one necessary condition of an action's being free is that it is not (completely) caused."

I have a problem with his parenthetic "(completely) caused." What does he mean by that? How can something be partially caused? He does not sufficiently define the concept. I am left to wonder if he really meant determinedly caused (i.e. that a given effect cannot imply a unique cause). We are left to speculate, so I'll leave his assertion alone.

In any event, I guess that means I'm not an incompatibilist, to spite my libertarian view, since (while I don't subscribe to causality myself, I can't rule it out either) I think any event can be completely caused (in the sense that at least one whole cause can be attributed to it).

"This clearly does not provide a sufficient condition, since various subatomic events (e.g. the decay of a radioactive atom on a particular date) are not completely caused, but are also not therefore free"

Here he takes his nebulous assertion and piles on a non-sequitur by concluding that something incompletely caused implies a lack of freedom.

Simplifying another of his above comments for clarity:

"…subatomic events…are not completely caused…"

That is an erroneous assertion by anyone that makes it. Simply, nobody can know that.

"Compatibilists think that in fact not being caused is not only not a sufficient condition for freedom, but not even a necessary condition."

Hmmm…I'm with Kant on this one. Didn't he call it a "wretched subterfuge?" I'm a libertarian myself…but wait…didn't I just say I wasn't an incombatibilist?…I guess either his definition or my political belief is wrong eh?…I'd better examine another definition for incombatibilism ASAP; there's an election coming up and I wanna vote for the right candidate.

Looking at random thru the web:

"libertarians have always denied the nonsense of compatibilism, and accepted the idea that free will is incompatible with determinism.
(OK…I'm definitely a libertarian.)

"But there is another view, that of determinists who agree that determinism is incompatible with free will."
(I could care less what the determinists think, but at least these ones are on the right track)

"So there are two kinds of incompatibilists…"
(of which I am only one, an indeterministic incompatibilist)

Hmm…We seem to have a problem…If I'm an indeterminist, I must not be a acausal one, as i believe causality, while sufficient, is not necessary for free will. Is this the apparent absurdity you referred to? No wonder you think its absurd, you are only allowing acausal indeterminism into the debate and fallaciously disallowing the concept of PROBABILISTIC indeterminism.

Even if every effect has a cause, that does not imply that the cause is unique to the effect (i.e. that any effect could arise from more than one possible cause). Similarly, what is to stop a specific cause from having more than one possible effect? If we cannot create a one-one and onto mapping of cause to effect, how can anything be determined as anything but a probability of occurrence? I suggest that it can't and that all events are probabilistic in nature. From any cause, more than one choice may exist for effect. Thus do we have freedom of choice in the construction of what we call our reality. In short, the universe is not strictly deterministic and free will exists.

At the macro scale, where things appear deterministic, they are based on this indeterministic "root". For instance, a coin toss result cannot be predicted even in principle because of the uncertainty principle. If we cause a coin to be tossed, we cannot know if it will come down heads or tails. You might say the tossed coin has freedom of choice as to how it lands. If a coin has that freedom, so does every neuron in your brain, and while we can say that the most probable, chaotic neuron firings in your brain, cause your actions, your actions are fundamentally impossible to know in advance because your brain state can't be known in advance except in terms of probability.

This post is an "oops!"...I clicked the wrong button in my edit and now find I can't delete this post.

Can you provide a good example of free will?

Sure...Since it was impossible to determine whether or not you were going to make your post, you obviously had the freedom to choose whether or not you would. The choice you made must then have been made as an act of free will.

This is not proof. Maybe my posting is nothing more than acting on instinct.

I have an instinct for self preservation. Not just my body, but also my ideas about the world. If I read something that opposes what I think is true, I have an instinct to fight it.

It seems the only argument anyone has that free will does guide our thoughts and actions is that it's self evident.

Well, there was a time when people looked up and saw the Sun moving across the sky and said it was circling the Earth. It was self evident, but also dead wrong.

From the minute you are born you are taught how to think, live and what to believe in. So where is the free will?

You didn't ask for proof; you asked for a good example.

Free will, like determinism, is not self-evident. It must be considered mathematically. Free will is based upon the idea that freedom of choice exists. Where there is no choice, there is no free will. Since it is mathematically impossible to determine whether or not you were going to post, either event had a probablility of occurance of less than 1, therefore your choice could not be predicted (i.e. could not be determined). Since your option could not be determined, it was not deterministic, therefore you were free to choose. Since you were free to choose, choosing your option was an act of free will.


It lies in whether or not you choose to believe what you are taught.

You mean became a hobo living under some bridge?

So how about suicide, I gotta think that can't be
anything but freewill

Why could it not be predicted? Because you didn't have all the information. There was a time we couldn't predict the weather. But, we learned about the patterns and assigned them values. Now we can predict the weather pretty accurately several days in advance. If we could put a device at every cubic foot in the atmosphere, we'd be able to predict the weather years in advance.

So, it's not that my posting cannot be accurately predicted. It's that you don't have all the information needed to predict it.

There simply is no hard evidence for free will. In fact, all the evidence we have suggests the opposite is true.

Go back to the beginning and read the quote. Does moss have free will? What about fungi? If free will is real, at what point on the evolutionary ladder did it begin?

If they commit suicide because they are depressed it may be from a chemical imbalance in the brain. If these chemicals are balanced differently it may lead someone to becoming the richest person alive, or the greatest baseball pitcher of all time.

But can I choose to live after my calling?

Yes we have choices and we exercise them everyday which are also limited BUT the subject is free will.

Killing might be, but suicide never!
Suppose ur balls are aching. Who cares whether ur gf or wifey wanted if they had the right to free will.(or whats the use of this freewill if u have none?)

also there might be free will but we don't have it.

Free (from?) is a relative term,needs agreement over its definition n no definition ever existed without axioms. So we are in the mire of intuitiveness n self evidence.

Now what is the point of defining unobtainium? Asking Is there any -- (place?) where there is no time is as futile(why cant the omnipotent god create a place where he cant go n go there ? F--k! Or create a ball that he cant buzz ) as asking if space would exist without matter or whether water in a bucket would cave downward if we could spin the whole world around it keeping it still ! (a soft compassionate reply is 'we are not ready to answer it yet.' a big wig would just give a get-the-hell-outta-here look'. )

better ask what's the chance that the best looking girl in office would fall for your apparently lame antics or whether u cud screw ur wifes aunt n nt get caught. Period

Oh, i forgot to mention. If i were gay, i ud have liked to coerce wux n texusscoundrel into a gruesome threesome against their free-will. Witty talks so exciting. Alas, i never saw a girl both witty n young.

Read my prior posts on this topic. Predictability of one's actions is not simply having sufficient information to make a prediction, it is a function of the IMPOSSIBILITY of having it. In that sense, moss & fungi have the "free will" to "act" within the parameters of whatever "choices" they may have. Quite obviously then, since freedom of choice always existed since the dawn of time, there has been free will since the first "willful" organism evolved.



Bit of a digression from topic isn't it? Oh well, be that as it may, your jest comes close to the truth, and my choice WAS an act of free will.

I couldn't swallow the garbage they fed me in the mis-educational system and opted instead for the truth. I saw regular society for the horrible nightmare that it really is. I freely chose to leave the commercialized company town you call a country, with its banks pushing the great green drug to the dumbed-down, doped-up and addicted masses. This entailed going cold-turkey in a complete rejection of the root of all evil (again my choice) and I now (somewhat proudly) live like a hobo under a bridge.

It gets cold under the bridge in the winter, but I find it warming to watch the people scurrying about busily "earning their keep" from their banking masters so they can pay the government criminals enough tribute to keep the outlaw enforcers from kneecapping them. Don't these people realize they have the freedom I did, to choose between the dignity of freedom and the shame of slavery?

I find it amazing that so few step back from the rat-race long enough to see that's exactly what it is and finally step off the treadmill.