[sysbin]

You're interpreting my definition of what makes the mind different than your own. I consider the mind to be free if independent from what encompasses it. Meaning the ability to choose how life plays out. That's not truly fitting of free will either because even then a person will desire whatever the first experiences force them into desiring. Everything is predetermined. Cause & effect.

[Emma_Goldman]

No, I am not. The three substantive positions that I described - emergentism, neutral monism, dualism - reject the idea that mental activity is reducible to antecedent physical processes. Agnosticism suspends belief about the mind. Existentialism recasts this as a phenomenological issue; about our subjective experience of radical freedom.

In other words, every one of these positions rejects the idea that we are imprisoned by a physical nexus of 'cause & effect'.

[sysbinn]

Those three positions are substantive? How so.., I assume if you're that loose with the word.. the most widely shared definition of free will should be substantive to you. Even one could say free will rejects the idea that we are imprisoned by a physical nexus of 'cause & effect' and typically what people follow from reading the bible. Evil fairy tales that delude a person. Anyhow I wish I knew of cause & effect very young because then I wouldn't have been grossly taken advantaged of and I assume is the reason the majority of people are conditioned to stay deluded.

[Emma_Goldman]

I am struggling to understand what you are saying. Your views are not clearly stated or elaborated, and they are not obviously related to what I said.

I called them substantive because they are worked out philosophical theories, as opposed to agnosticism, which is simply the suspension of belief.

[sysbin]

Maybe email me at alizeebellerose @ icloud .com and we can have a better discussion. I was temporarily banned from HN for conversing about this topic. In any case the discussion would be better by email or elsewhere. I'm agnostic in the sense of purpose but I enjoy neuroscience enough and with physics that I cannot see real control existing in reality. Although, I would love to have someone explain to me how they see otherwise.

[aeontech]

Even if every possible event had a particular root cause it could be reduced to (and I think that assumption itself is oversimplifying things vastly), the relationship would not mean any given event is predetermined. You are ignoring the effects of randomness and aggregation of randomness. Your view is equivalent to assuming that if a coin was flipped and has landed tails, it has always been so predetermined, but we know that the chance of that has always been 50%. It seems to me that if we take your view to it’s logical extreme, there would be no motion in the universe, no change even on subatomic level, no evolution or growth - it would be an inert static thing, as there would be no initial root cause to trigger any change that would cause further reactions.

(on a personal level, if you seriously feel this way and want to talk, feel free to email me, aeontech at gmail).