Does Free Will Exist?

the decisions we make,its not just abaut choosing A or B but also abaut deciding to change yourself,putting effort to change yourself.Tonight i went to a Turkish cafe house.i could have gotten into a fight,my oponent was disrespectfull,he crossed the line,i
chose to stay cool,the fact that he was also a chess friend there ,its midnight right now and i feel ok,after i write this,i will watch some tv and seems like have a usual normal night.i could have ended up in a police priecing.i could have gotten beaten up,i could have seriously damage him,i am happy with my choice,i am glad i didnt choose to start a fight,i have been working on being passive in situations like this for a long time,it used to hurt me cause i thought they deserved the puinishment but nowadays i see the wisdom in staying passive,if they deserved punishment,God will punish them,i dont need to,

When people suggest there is no free will, they take an ultra-materialist view of consciousness.

They imply, some perhaps unintentionally, that each of us is merely a mass of electrons and protons, responding as physics tells us (or someday will tell us) that we must. They imply, I think, that our very consciousness is a weird internal fiction produced by one of the several interactive biological machines within our skull -- a biological machine that evolved to produce a faux consciousness to steer us toward reproduction and survival and away from needless death and pain, as evolution itself promotes.

But, with all due respect, I think that such is nonsense.

Consciousness is, I believe, more fundamental than the hazy atoms we have come to think (rather pitifully) that we largely understand. Frankly, we confuse mathematical modeling with understanding. We understand relatively little of what there is to understand.

The universe is far more magical than we can let ourselves believe. And those who feel most sophisticated are often those who most self-restrain their own flights of fancy. The desire to get an A on every examination is strong in the sophisticated.

But, then again, perhaps a wet meat machine just churned this out, and it's far from truth. I hope we'll know some day. But if we do, the discovery will come to each of us one at a time.

Or perhaps it will never come. But I won't say that, because I think that faith, at this point, is far more rational than studious doubt. But this could just be the meat machine talking.

According to Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, there is no free will.

Freud was wrong about a lot of things.

We have to go way back to realize that.

But he did have some good ideas. And that's all that life requires.

@thebookstoreclerk said in #13:
> According to Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, there is no free will.

im sorry you were forced to write this comment

Freud had the sex and drugs down, but he was missing the rock ’n’ roll.

it was inevitable that I made this post about free will!

And I also have the free will to write

HORSEY CHOMPER CHORSEY CHOMPER CHOPMER WAMPOER DOPMER on it

yes.

Yes, humans have enough free will to choose to lead a good life or not.

Every time you avoid committing a crime or taking violent action, you are listening to that part of yourself that knows the difference between right and wrong. This aspect of the human condition has historically been referred to as the human spirit. Besides choosing not to randomly hurt others, you can also choose to get into shape, improve yourself, start eating right, work out to lose weight and gain energy, as well as improve your mood and outlook. There are an infinite amount of choices in life and you can change directions at any time. This alone is some evidence that the human will exists.

@potterchess said in #19:
> Yes, humans have enough free will to choose to lead a good life or not.
>
> Every time you avoid committing a crime or taking violent action, you are listening to that part of yourself that knows the difference between right and wrong. This aspect of the human condition has historically been referred to as the human spirit. Besides choosing not to randomly hurt others, you can also choose to get into shape, improve yourself, start eating right, work out to lose weight and gain energy, as well as improve your mood and outlook. There are an infinite amount of choices in life and you can change directions at any time. This alone is some evidence that the human will exists.

If the argument about free will is left in the sphere of philosophy in general, and moral philosophy in particular, there is no way to determine the issue. People start, as you did, with a priori (before the fact) suppositions or beliefs and then use them to prove what thay wish to prove. It is almost a type of circular logic: assuming free will to prove an act of free will, namely choice. People realise that if free will, as the freedom to choose at least within a limited range of choices, does not exist then our standard notions of morality could not be logically upheld. There could not logically be the standard justifications for praise, blame, reward and punishment.

But if we take biological evolution (a known and proven physical mechanism) as the substratum, rather than our culturally developed human ethics, we can place the origins of the desires to reward and punish back in the biological evolutionary process. On this theory, proto-eusocial species needed to further evolve desires to reward and punish in order to survive and become eusocial species. But this process should not be seen as teleological. It wasn't a matter of heading for a known or projected goal. The evolutionary process simply found a path in the fitness space. On this view, justifications and rationalistions of both the legal and the moral kind come after the atavistic desires to reward or punish. These justifications and rationalistions then function to reduce internal mind conflict to allow us to be comfortable with our own behaviour.

People who don't suffer remorse, another evolved response (like sociopaths and pyschopaths) and thus have no need of the guidelines and placation of legal and moral justification and rationalisation are therefore frightening and dangerous to the eusocial masses. In a sense they are not to blame for their acts but equally we, the eusocial masses are not to blame for our self-defence acts when we incarcerate and punish. Both are evolved responses which are then culturally mediated.

I am a bit time constrained at the moment so I will leave this answer at this point for the time being.