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Old 06-02-2017, 08:35 PM
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Default volition

The current on-going thread on free will is malodorous. Time to kill it.

People have been making freely-willed decisions long before science was born, you know, like people have been eating food for a long time too. What is this problem that causes so much angst?

Free will is volition. This is a real thing. Science studies it. Reality does not conform to your fundamentalist ideologies. Who among you tell your children that they have no choice?
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Old 06-02-2017, 10:58 PM
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Default Re: volition

Quote:
Originally Posted by apathist View Post
The current on-going thread on free will is malodorous. Time to kill it.

People have been making freely-willed decisions long before science was born, you know, like people have been eating food for a long time too. What is this problem that causes so much angst?

Free will is volition. This is a real thing. Science studies it. Reality does not conform to your fundamentalist ideologies. Who among you tell your children that they have no choice?
I don't agree, I've learned quite a lot from the posts on this thread, perhaps some of it I already knew, but it's nice to refresh your memory.

Part of the problem with parenting is to educate children that they do have a choice, too many times they misbehave because they don't choose to do the right thing. So it's not a problem of teaching them that they have no choice, but to teach them that they can choose.
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  #3  
Old 06-02-2017, 11:12 PM
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Default Re: volition

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...Who among you tell your children that they have no choice?
Nothing? Silence from the noisy?
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Old 06-02-2017, 11:17 PM
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Default Re: volition

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Originally Posted by thedoc View Post
...
I don't agree, I've learned quite a lot from the posts on this thread, perhaps some of it I already knew, but it's nice to refresh your memory.

Part of the problem with parenting is to educate children that they do have a choice, too many times they misbehave because they don't choose to do the right thing. So it's not a problem of teaching them that they have no choice, but to teach them that they can choose.
We learn from the kids around us, one way or the other. So news flash, they learn from us. Is this about parenting, or about volition?
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Old 06-03-2017, 04:42 AM
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Default Re: volition

Are the anti-free-will crowd really quieted so easily? To their credit, I suppose.

Best classical rock ever, stairway to heaven? Pretentious and repetitive. I do like it, though. In the background.
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Old 06-03-2017, 10:37 AM
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Default Re: volition

It strikes me that some confusion sets in when people seem to conflate the ability to make choices according to your preference with the ability to completely control your own experience.

Do we have the ability to make choices? Sure. In that sense I think we have free will. and in general it is what people mean when they use the term.

Do we have control over much of the rest of the world, which shapes both our preferences and the things that are available to prefer? No. We are, to a certain extent, products of a past that we had no influence over at all. We receive a biological heritage that we cannot choose, which develops and expresses itself in a world shaped by a past at which we were not present. We get to choose those things that we prefer, but we do not get to fully choose what those preferences of ours are.

In that sense, it seems obvious to me that we do not have free will.

But the two should not be confused with each other. We may not have a kind of Jovian free will in the sense that we completely control how our own minds are formed. But that does not mean that we cannot make choices according to our preferences.
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