I don't think it's as polarizing as we have free will or we don't have free will. I think we have a degree of free will which can and is often affected by outside forces, but it's not like every single action in history was predetermined. I think that's nonsense.

I don’t quite follow this. The act of choosing must either have some cause or no cause. You suggest in this example that the choice has some cause, and that the being of volition is itself the cause?

All you seem to be doing is identifying the source of the cause. I agree that a being of pure volition could have itself as a source of cause, but the fact that a cause is necessary to produce the effect of a choice rules out “free” choice. The being of pure volition must resort to a cause to produce an effect. And unless there is no relationship between causes and effects, then a particular cause must be invoked to produce a particular effect. How is any of that free?

Right. And that raises the question of what "free" means. If it means "free of the determinism--determinism being the ONLY PROCESS we observe acting in the universe, other than the randomness of quantum mechanics--that runs everything in the universe" then, no, we are not free--at least we have NO CAUSE WHATSOEVER to believe we are free, in that sense.

as do I. there's absolutely no evidence to support that theory.

Gibran2, what you are saying about free will is a bit like saying that a clock doesn't realy show what time it is because there are all kinds of components inside of it, we don't see, that cause the hands to move like they do.

Yes, our behavior would be different without free will, we would be even more easily controlled by outside forces than we currently are. We become totally reactionary, pre-programmed robots ulitmately with no choice as to how we live our lives. Our "buttons" could be pushed in any number of ways and we would be forced to react as others dictate because we would have no will of our own.

I never said that only humans have free will, I said that consciousness has free will. Therefore if you believe in the primacy of consciousness, then a flower also has free will, a cloud, an atom, everything...the flower doesn't open to the sun because it has to, but because it wants to experience the warmth and growth is provides. Consciousness is fractal as is everything else in existence, infinite spirals up and down from our current perspective.

I disagree that free will stands in oppostion to this unfolding, but rather is the first law of creation, that consciousness is free to express itself in whatever manner it chooses in order to BE the growth and unfolding of existence. It is this choice, this freedom to experience and grow that expands the universe. Of course you can CHOOSE to resist the eternal unfolding, which can manifest as Dis-ease in your physical form, or you can go with the flow. Your choice.

I agree with you that the universe does not need free will, and there may even be parts of it where there isn't, or other entire universes where it is not operational. But we live in a free will portion of this universe, and you are free to resist its ever unfolding expansion, or rather choose to go with the flow.

Well, yes. If we're considering whether a being has free will, and the being itself is the cause in its own choices, then doesn't that constitute free will?



Now I'm not sure I'm following you. Consider a magical nonmaterial being which is capable of reasoning and acting without the constraints of a physical mind. It can perceive stimuli, but its reaction to them is not bound by any of the cognitive circuitry which limits our own stimulus response. And it is able to act on the material world without being physically acted on in return. This is all pretty standard fare for non-materialist worldviews, and is in fact pretty similar to the construct that many non-materialists regard as the "immortal soul".

In what way would this magical non-material being not have free will? It actions are neither predetermined nor determined randomly; they are determined only by its own volition. It is itself the cause of all its decisions and actions.

Quite correct. There is no evidence that the universe is deterministic. To the contrary, there is ample evidence that the universe is not deterministic.

Determinism implies absence of free will, but indeterminism does not imply presence of free will.

agreed.

The problem is when you say its actions “are determined only by its own volition”. What does that mean? What leads the immaterial being to act at all? And when it acts, what leads it to choose particular actions? Why one action instead of another?

Yet, it is likely to be limited by the shape of it's own nature.

Imagine you'd have an immortal soul. Could you then order yourself to 'will' anything? Could you want to love or like something you actually consider evil and disgusting?

Nothing can ever be completely free and yet exist within this material dimension.

I don’t quite follow this clock analogy, but I think of a clock as a very deterministic system. I would say a clock has no free will. The time it shows is strictly determined by the interaction of the gears and springs and pulleys that make up the clock.

I think some people would define free will as exactly that: indeterminism.

It acts or chooses not to act autonomously. It chooses particular courses of action for its own reason, whether out of whim, curiosity, or for its own amusement. In an immaterial realm, why should there be any constraint that its actions arise from external causes?

What outside interference is necessary when you are in that state and all of eternity is open before you? The Now is all that exists, the past and future illusions. When you are in that state you are truly free.

No, I don't have total control of my physical body, that was not what I was implying at all. I was using a metaphor for the mental realm in which we all reside. This is all a mental game, change your thoughts/beliefs/assumptions and you change your reality, pretty simple.

But you can choose whether to create that new version of yourself or not...perhaps for a determined reason, perhaps on a whip, perhaps as an experimentation, perhaps because you are bored with your current life, perhaps becasue of some experience. Apparently determined, but the choice is ultimately yours to make irrespective of whatever may have influenced it.

I think you’re defining free will in a number of different ways here. In your first paragraph, you are equating free will with autonomy.

In your second paragraph, I have trouble understanding how you define it. I think of consciousness as a state and free will, as it is often defined, is more of a property.

In your third paragraph, you say that “consciousness is free to express itself in whatever manner it chooses”. The question then becomes – how does consciousness choose? Why does it make one choice instead of another? Is there a reason for its choosing? And if so, how is the choosing free?

(I choose to go with the flow.)

Yet, the outcome of those mechanisms is what we call 'showing the time'.

Free will in my opinion is exactly the same: the outcome of all processes occuring within the brain.
We cannot call any of it's isolated mechanisms 'free will', but only the endresult.

The brain projects free will. It's the projection that we call free will.

It doesn't realy matter whether you could realy determine the mechanisms behind it or not. It doesn't make the end result less real.

I don't see how free will should nessecarily imply an immortal, immaterial soul that is totally boundless.

That's where my clock analogy comes from. Ofcourse a clock doesn't magically know what time it is, but does that make it less functional, less acurate or less meaningfull?

To me, in my daily life, a clock shows the time. Only when it's incorrect i'm reminded of the fact that it's just a bunch of gears and pulleys and not time itself that's running it.

If there is no free will, is there some kind of intermediate will then? Are there different degrees of freedom in choices? Do they vary even within one person? Is this related with consciousness, and if so, how?

I dont believe in this abstract free will, but subjectively I feel like the more I work on myself, and try to become aware of how different stimulus affects me, how the past affects me, how I react, etc, the more I feel like I can make some better/more aware/more real kind of choice inside my limited degree of freedom (which usually would mean choices that lead to more of that inner growth). I know I still am influenced by things I have no clue about, in the very least my unconscious psychological mechanisms. I also dont think its a linear growth, it feels more like spirals, forwards and backwards but slowly up. But if I compare to myself in the past, I feel that in general now I am much less of a victim and more of an active co-creator of my life. And it feels like theres a lot of room for improvement.

So what do you guys think? Is it all an illusion and all the degrees of choice freedom are just the same deterministic/random (no freedom at all except subjective illusion), or are there some sort of levels inside of it? Is there some validity or benefit to using a model of different levels of choice/will?

In this case, the constraints are not external, but rather internal: Where do the reasons come from? And if the immaterial being can only act according to its own reasons, how is that free? Isn’t it then bound to act the way it does?

If reason X arises, then I’ll choose X’. If reason Y arises, I’ll choose Y’. Do you see the problem with this? If an immaterial being is bound to choose based on reasons, regardless of the origin of the reasons, then how is it exercising free will?

And if it has no such constraints, then what can it do? Would its choices become random? If not random, then what? And if random, then how is making random choices an exercise of free will?

Yes, it's a gradual phenomenon.

The irony is that by acknowledging you are not entirely free, your degree of freedom increases because higher levels of self-awareness allow for more reflection upon your actions.

It's like when an alcoholic firstly accepts that he has a drinking problem, that he can work on it and eventually say 'no' to it: by accepting that he is a slave he becomes less enslaved by it.