LuckyR wrote: ↑March 28th, 2023, 1:51 pm
Sculptor1 wrote: ↑March 27th, 2023, 7:06 am
LuckyR wrote: ↑March 26th, 2023, 6:50 pm
Sculptor1 wrote: ↑March 26th, 2023, 12:08 pm
No it is not.
Maybe I should re-phrase? How do YOU make a choice?
I mean just in the ordinary day to day sense of the word. You made a choice. What was happening?
If you could have chosen otherwise then none of our choices are valid.
If you have the option of chocolate or strawberry ice-cream, you cannot choses vanilla.
But the truth is that before you have the option your choice is already determined with as much surety as not having vanilla.
If your choice is chocolate then it does not matter how many times you could turn the clock back 5 seconds, your choice will remain chocolate for an infinite number of times. Now tell me, if you turned back the clock what would it mean for your choice to change to strawberry as you freely think you can? Would that not potentially invalidate every single choice you ever made? Surely given the circumstances of the moment chocolate was the choice based on your needs, desire, volition, taste. None of which you have control over; none.
And when you reached adolescence did you chose your sexual orientation? Did you chose to be gay or straight or trans? Do you chose to be born? Did you chose your body, your parents your school.
And when you did start to make your "free" choices - how do you do that, what did you base your conscious choices on?
The "truth"? According to what? Don't get me wrong your theory is possible, but since it goes against all subjective and objective experience in the entirety of the existance of humans, it is the epitome of hubris to try to pass it off as the "truth".
The truth is in the scenario was that vanilla is not a possible choice since it in not part of the scenario. The fact that you chose chocolate is the choice of that unique moment in history of the individual and so, like it or not, even though strawberry is on the table that too is not a possible choice; was never a possible choice. From hindsight choosing strawberry could only ever have been meaningless and random, because you favour chocolate.
The TRUTH is that our decisions are made consciously, and providing no one has a gun at our head these endogenous choices may be termed free because they are Determined by us alone.
And this is how the idea of freewill is compatible with an utterly deterministic universe.
And if you are like Value, worried by change, you have only to imagine a situation where you find you are fed up with chocolate, or this time it tasted of, or someone said that the strawberry is better - these ARE potentially causal factors that might mean that next time you will try strawberry.
That would be your WILL. Determined but changed. Determinism is all about change; meaningful change.
Ah so. I think I understand better. If I am getting your point, people have Free Will and the exercising of that free will is the Determining factor that leads to the decision. I don't disagree, though I use the terminology differently (as I suspect most Determinists do, me being not a member of that group). The way I see it you are drawing a bright line between Determinism and predetermined outcomes. Close?
Um not exactly.
I am saying that people make willful decisions which are determined by them and them alone; such examples may be termed "free".
If you ask me a question, the answer forms sub consciously and the expression of it contains a reflection of who and what I am*. It would be absurd and useless to say that I could have made a different utterance in that moment, in the sense those that are pushing a "free will" agenda, would have us believe. To have been able to do otherwise would negate the value of the event in the first place.
The "predetermination" idea is just a way that the radicalists try to insist that life would be meaningless if "free will" were not true.
The fact is that though we are bound by cause and effect, we are causative agents making the future as we act. That future is unknown, and so predetermination is not a valid objection.
THere are no predetermined outcomes unless you have a god like perspective. So yes, your last sentence is correct.
* what I am is the sum of my experience, and learning; my biology; desires wants, fears, and the events of the universe from the Big Bang to this current moment which have contributed to my existence. I can only reflect upon these thing with tools that are determined by the past. And in the same way that I did not chose to be born I have no control over my will, though I am free to act on my will.
Schopenhauer said something like I am free to act as I will but I cannot will as I will.