this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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I want chocolate, I don't eat chocolate, exercise of free will.
By your logic no alcoholic could possibly stop drinking and become sober.
In my humble opinion, free will does not mean we are free of internal and external motivators, it means that we are free to either give in to them or go against.
Our universe is predeterministic. Block Universe (aka Eternalism).
Check mate.
It's not according to quantum physics we observe
Seemingly "random" events can still be containerized in the crystalized time structure.
There’s a reason you don’t eat chocolate - likely health concerns or fear of weight gain. Your desire to stay healthy is stronger than your desire to eat chocolate. But you can’t take credit for that any more than you can blame an alcoholic for their inability to resist drinking.
I am curious to hear why you insist it's inevitable. What intrinsic properties of the universe make you believe that we don't have any choice and all our actions are set in stone?
Your choice of words is an analytical failure it says that the the will somehow sitting on top of all those processes rather than being a function of them.
I don't think my wording implies that the will is sitting on top of those processes, but rather that it's an emergent property of them. You're the one who's implying a false dichotomy - just because our choices might be influenced by prior causes doesn't mean we don't have agency. I'm asking what makes you think our actions are predetermined, not what makes you think we have some kind of magical free will that defies causality. Can you actually address the question I asked, rather than nitpicking my phrasing?
What is agency
If your choices are a function of prior events and an emergent property of complex but deterministic processes where does agency come in? We are a complex deterministic process that simulates our own self to both predict a much more complex unconscious self and write rules to influence it going forward.
We call this process being conscious even when its writing just so stories after the fact.
For me. I think everything is physical, and there's always a cause and effect. There is no magical non-physical consciousness. A combination of your genetics, experiences, and environment determine the "choices" you make/actions you take. Free will is an illusion, IMO.
What is inevitable? At no point have I claimed that our actions are set in stone. That would imply fatalism which equally suggest that things can happen without anything causing them to happen.