Free Will is a Social Construct Based on an Illusion

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Because it would be a radically new way of thinking that might provide an avenue for a way to stick around a bit more. If I am very lucky I might be able to live another 20 years and from my vantage point that is a rather short time.

Well, of course not. An ethical view cannot be flawed. I do not mean to say that you are wrong at all, only that your position will not see free will as mattering other than if it were acausal because of your issue of laws, but not because of the impact of society.

I came back to this because I recognised that mixed up/confusing , almost painfully out-of-grasp feeling about it. I was getting that a lot the last couple of days, in between relief and wonder. Trying to work out how anything changed, etc. Input from the environment has to be the most potent force in changing someone's behaviour; life/the universe and all its data, etc. ( data in all its forms, and diet/physical/chemical environment, )

And wanted to say that I feel a lot less muddled having established the following:
I've realised, ( I am so slow sometimes), that free-will is just the traditional, ( though religiously and politically) value-laden, term for what is now better known as cognitive function. What used to be this great unknown, inside-the-head, has been dissected bit by bit, until the only thing left which bears any resemblance to free will is cognition, ... which not all people have equal amounts/kinds of, ( AS for example) , and is determined by genes, parenting, society, experience, language exposure, etc, and even that is affected by endocrine system function, etc. Totally caused, and not even universal.

We are fully caused.

I accept that some people experience something that resembles free will. But, having examined, as Izaak puts it, "introspectively", the workings of my mind for a fair few years now I can not say that I have found anything completely free in there. And I am fed up of trying to. It all comes from something.

PS: I did once experience an important, apparently inexplicable change of consciousness, though completely non-volitional. I used to call it a "moment of grace". I still don't know what it was. Some data suddenly got filed in the right place or something, shades of Gilliam's "Brazil", and ... whole new direction.

Last edited by ouinon on 01 May 2008, 11:50 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Unfortunately I have never experienced anything out of the ordinary to indicate anything but a totally causal universe. Very occasionally I have a dream which seems to relate to events the next day which may have some relationship to time leakage but that is very speculative and not to be taken very seriously.

I think that my own experience of something happening in my head completely out of the blue was like the exception that proves the rule, my one quantum moment which made it very clear that everything else that happens in my head is sequences of things following other things.

Not so surprising that it came with a brief out-of-body experience, ( not drug induced ).

It's taken me till recently to really get this, my being fully caused, but I can now see why issues of free will/personality "choice", etc were integral to the change which followed that quantum moment. I can remember trying to explain it to a friend, who cried listening to me because she thought it meant i was going "madder" than i had been so far, whereas I said i had seen something clearly, just was confused by it:

I told her that I was struggling with the dilemma resulting from being able to choose the food I ate but this food determining quite significantly what kind of person I was. I was profoundly puzzled by who/what chose the food I ate? If I became irresponsible/manic/over-excited eating cheese and baconburgers/pizza, coffee, icecream etc, then how could I be sure that I would ever decide to eat brown rice and vegetables again?

I think I was actually almost frightened by this. Is that what you meant, marshall?I think i was alarmed to realise that there was an edge to things, past which i couldn't seem to go.

Yep, my recent confusions/questions are nothing in comparison, because the first shock of discovery happened 16 years ago.