Dontaskme wrote: ↑Thu Jun 20, 2019 9:21 am
Free will means making the right choice in order to feel love and goodness, a sense of justice, security, peace and harmony, mainly, the natural equilibrium of being no thing and everything.
Any objection?
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I think what you mean by "love and goodness, a sense of justice, security, peace..." is simply, put in psychological terms, "human needs"-excluding physiological needs-. In other words, what we need in order to have free will are:
A) Being able to make a choice
B) Choosing something in order to fulfill a need.*
B is definitely what humans do directly or indirectly. Every action of someone serves a purpose:To fulfill a need. We seek love -in a romantic and a nonromantic sense- because we need it. We listen to music because of the harmony and it calms the mind down, generally speaking. But is B an instance of free will by itself? Definitely not. Think of a very advanced Sims game. In this game, Sims are just programmed to seek those things and can also feel those things. But their thinking proccess is one of this:
They encounter a thing, they evaluate it based on how they can fulfill a need based on the thing, and they display the most appropiate response in order to fulfill a need.
Do the Sims in question have free will? I would say that most people wouldn't say that they do. We also need A.
But while A is needed -to make a choice, you need to be able to choose or else it wouldn't be a choice-, A renders B kind of useless as A is what is the definition of free will as commonly thought-the ability to make a choice. Any other addition is really unneeded.
Then, the question is, can anyone be able to make a choice? Since there is really only one proper objection not based solely on determinism, i will object with that:
The basic idea is this:Either determinism is true or indeterminism. Under determinism, you can't make a choice. Under indeterminism, you still can't make a choice. So, making a choice is impossible.
Assuming determinism:
Premise: Given a specified way things are at a time t, the way things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of natural law. (From Stanford Encylopedia)
Premise: If the way things go thereafter t is fixed (as a matter of natural law), then any action after the given time t couldn't have been due to a choice made by a conscious agent. (Because the future is fixed, while choice requires future to not be so)
Premise: If an action couldn't have been due to a choice made by a conscious agent, then that action could not have been due to free will.
Therefore, any action after the given time t could not have been made out of free will.
P
P entails Q
Q entails S
Therefore, S
It follows that free will fails to exist under determinism-or indeterminism where the event was caused by an event before it because, in the relevant timeframe where the action is "choosen", the things that could've affected it are fixed in terms of the way things will play out-untill another uncaused event happens. Basically, indeterminism with all relevant events not uncaused is determinism within the relevant perspective.
The same for indeterminism, with the assumption that the event was uncaused. Let's say that action A was done by an agent:
Premise: There was no reason -or, more strictly, cause- for action A to happen.(Indeterminism is simply the belief that some events have no cause)
Premise: If there was no reason or cause for an action to happen, then the action was done randomly.
Therefore, A, an action done by an agent, was done randomly.
Premise: If an action was done randomly, then it couldn't have been made out of free will.
Therefore, A wasn't made out of free will.
Q
Q entails S
Therefore, S
S entails P
Therefore, P
If an action had a cause, then it wasn't done out of free will. If an action didn't have a cause, then it wasn't done out of free will. Therefore, no action could be done out of free will-otherwise, we will run into a contradiction.
*"needs" as in the needs that are in Maslow's Hiearchy of Needs.
Edited heavily because the two arguments seemed to have no connection and the second argument didn't logically follow from the premises-but was informal in logic. Now, it is truly formal-albeit a little bit complicated since it has to be that way in order for the consclusion to follow after it.