/lit/ - Literature

I wish that determinism thread didn't die. I spent the whole thing just knocking down people's retarted unrelated arguments. I guess that's fine since whether or not it's true doesn't matter, and i was only on there for a bit of fun. I guess i'm regretting not having slightly more fun than i did.

I ought to clarify that i'm stuck with the definition of free will from my youth, where "one has sufficient control over his actions that failing to act in accordance with certain rules does and should lead to eternal suffering." If your conception of "a true freedom of the will which is actual in human experience" has to exclude that such a universe would be just, then we're talking about different things, and thats ok.

Whether or not the mind is governed by material deterministic principles, a decision is the weighing of two stimuli. You always choose the more compelling stimulus, and you don't get to decide which stimulus is more compelling. A serious drug addict has very strong compulsions, a healthy person choosing between two apples has weak compulsions, neither one gets to look inside the box and guide the magnitude of his stimuli. deterministic or not, any model which agrees with this definition of "a decision" cannot even conceive of the meaning of "freedom of will".
compatiblists just offer up alternate definitions of the free will. I knew a philosopher almost a decade ago who said "all you need is a true counterfactual", that if the conditions were different, you would have acted differently, therefore your will is free. well if i drop my book here, it lands on the table. Now if i drop it /here/, it lands on the floor. I get to decide where the book falls sure, but no one gets to decide where they /want/ the book to fall. A rational enumeration of options and consequences only keeps you from acting on first instincts, but your final decision will still be based on instincts at the bottom. To argue otherwise is to fail to recognize the is-ought gap. Values can only be grounded in other values, and the moral atoms at the very bottom are given to you and never chosen.