• 0 Posts
  • 4 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 29th, 2023

help-circle

  • Neither. The is no free will. You will think about which choice to make, and you’ll make a choice. But not only your choice, but also all of your thoughts about what to choose, were the inevitable result of everything that has happened in the universe leading up to that point.

    It feels like you could have thought different thoughts and come to a different conclusion, but actually you couldn’t have.

    Look at it this way. A supernova is the end result of an unimaginably large number of complex interactions, some of which may have been random. But there’s no reason to suppose any free will is involved. Your brain is not, philosophically speaking, meaningfully different


  • Yes, but none of that refutes the argument that we lack free will. The trillions of interactions leading up to an ‘action’ on our part can be random, determined, or some mixture - but they still ‘cause’ our next action, rather than our 'free will ’ causing the action. If you believe in free will, you believe in a magical quality we possess which is somehow neither random (else it wouldnt be ‘will’) nor determined (else it wouldn’t be ‘free’)