Reignited a debate between a friend and I tonight on the topic of free will so I pose the following question. - Are our decisions determined by a casual chain of preceeding events or are our decisions controlled by ourselves? - My opinion, we have free will. Why else would we have a conscious if every decision we make is predetermined?
I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze. But I think maybe it's both. Maybe both are happening at the same time.
I don't believe our universe is deterministic in any sense, so I don't believe our actions can be predetermined.
I believe in free will but it's hard to practice with all the legal reprocussions. it's something that is had but easily taken away..
I don't know enough about philosophy terminology to really argue the point, but I think I agree with your friend. I sort of see it as a matter of perspective. We make choices, but what choice we make is a product of who we are, and who we are is a product of the relationship between our genetics and our experiences. So, to me it would really depend on how you define free will, and a quick glace at wikipedia makes it look like that would take a lot of reading, and not everyone agrees anyway.
That may be a little too harsh. However, the determinism of our universe is severely limited. As we deduce cause from effect, the chain is pretty quickly either broken, or simply untenable. I think most occurrences in our daily life are stochastic, at least at their very root.
I agree with Ah Man on the points that the term free will is quite subjective and that our decision making process is determined by past encounters/experiences, but it leads me to ask, if we were given an identical scenario ten times, would we approach the scenario the same all ten times?
Your question is severely simplistic and fails to really divide the question of free will being the actual ability or not. Evidently, you do not know predeterminism from determinism. Additionally, it seems as if you don't really know what free will is.
If things played out satisfactory then probably yeah, for the first couple of times at least... Hard to divert from what's known and comfortable, but you'll never know if there's anything good or better by make a lousy choice.. Like wanting to have a kid but end up having one with the worst possible person ever..
That this world is governed by basic physical laws and that we are just a collection of atoms that follow these laws.
I thought so. I don't believe that's entirely consistent with what we've learned from the way atoms actually behave. I don't think that for every thing that happens, that there are a certain set of conditions such that only that thing could happen.
I'm a Christian, and do not believe in free will. It is an idea that is incompatible with our concept of God.
