[nikkwong]

How do you know you experience it beyond a reasonable doubt? Thoughts and intentions just seemingly appear in consciousness, without any explanation as to how they arose. Feelings are like this too; we don’t determine how we feel, we are simply served them.

When experiencing a negative emotion, some people seem to believe they can ‘free will’ their way out of it by thinking positively or something there over, but that intention too is also just a thought that appears in consciousness. To decide what to think in a manner compatible with what most people think free will is would require you to decide what to think or feel before actually thinking or feeling it, which is not possible.

And when you think about the causality of feelings or thoughts, which are just neuronal signaling patterns/chains in the brain, it begins to appear much more mechanical than free will intention.

[nyokodo]

> How do you know you experience it beyond a reasonable doubt?

I have no reason to doubt my common sense experience.

> we don’t determine how we feel, we are simply served it.

No definition of free will that I have encountered considers it an absolute freedom from any form of determinism. We’re obviously influenced by our nature and external influences. For instance my emotional predispositions are largely determined and my thoughts are not entirely under my control but I do have scope to shape both my emotions and my thoughts over time by what I choose to focus on. I can choose to do what is necessary to change my behavior and to treat people differently than what comes naturally. I know all of this because I have done it, I have experienced it. No materialist philosophy of mind has produced any compelling evidence to contradict my experience of free will in this capacity.

[nikkwong]

I sort of responded to this idea in another comment, but again. How can you take ‘personal credit’ (as if you could have acted otherwise) for choosing to change your behavior? Isn’t that an idea that also just appears in consciousness that is, for inexplicable reasons, more compelling than other ideas at the time so that is the choice that your brain reasons to follow?

[robertlagrant]

> an idea that also just appears in consciousness that is, for inexplicable reasons, more compelling than other ideas at the time so that is the choice that your brain reasons to follow

This seems to be an idiosyncratic definition of free will.

[vasco]

On the other hand, I think it's simplistic to equate picking options from a mental list as "free will". I think the point you are replying to is valid because if there's free will, it's not just "choosing from a list". The list itself (the options you present yourself) has way more impact on your behavior than what you choose, even. So the matter of the question is, do you have free will in forming a list.

[robertlagrant]

> do you have free will in forming a list

This seems like a separate question. Having the power to choose doesn't mean you have every conceivable option in mind, nor that you have the power to exercise every choice, nor even that you like any of the choices.

[vasco]

There's a few things you can choose to do at any time. You can almost always choose to for example close your eyes and keep them closed. Why don't you do it? You have the free will to stop blinking but your brain doesn't pose you this question so you don't even consider it. But now it's considering it. I'm just trying to reduce your argument to the absurd, and probably doing a bad job, but I don't think you can separate the list of options that appear to you from the question of free will, to me it's paramount to what happens after, so if what happens after is what defines free will or not, the list has to be part of it.

Did the first particles that ejected from the big bang have free will?

[vasco]

Imagine there's no free will.

Whatever happens you'll end up crossing the road right now.

In one example, you absent-mindedly cross the road.

In another example a thought comes to you to get coffee, and you cross the road to get it.

In another example you consider not getting coffee, and going to the park instead, but end up choosing coffee because you feel sluggish.

If there's no free will, any amount of thinking before the decision doesn't prove there's free will. It's just more stuff that was also predetermined. You having an illusion of choice doesn't prove anything.

[nyokodo]

> You having an illusion of choice doesn't prove anything.

It's not reasonable to assume one's experience is an illusion without sufficient evidence which is a bar you haven't crossed. Therefore your argument begs the question.

[vasco]

I didn't say so. I said that having choices to make presented to you, if there were no free will, would be a valid state of affairs. Since it's possible that choices are illusions, you need to address how the choices appear to prove there's free will, it's not enough to say you consider different choices before acting.

[jhbadger]

>I have no reason to doubt my common sense experience.

That's why people thought the Sun moved around the Earth. I mean, it's just "common sense" -- you see the Sun in the East in the morning, and then it's in the West in the evening. It turns out "common sense" is not useful for understanding how things work.

[somenameforme]

Hrm? When I think of things I tend to see multiple possibilities at once, and then decide which I think is the most reasonable, and go from there. Similar for emotions. I'm well aware of my emotions but can control them. And I think not doing so would be quite a poor way to behave.

Perhaps it's that we all think in somewhat different ways, yet because our own mind is the only one that we will ever know - we simply posit that everybody else must think the same way, or at least quite similarly. For instance there's that weird datum that supposedly some huge percent of people don't have an inner monologue, at all. I find it extremely difficult to believe, but if it were true then it would certainly be much easier to understand how somebody else might not believe in free will.

[pjerem]

> Hrm? When I think of things I tend to see multiple possibilities at once, and then decide which I think is the most reasonable, and go from there.

And based on what do you decide ? Probably your past experience, your knowledge, your education and your moral values. Which are all somehow environmental factors.

[somenameforme]

Of course. I'm not saying environment has no impact at all - that would be plainly absurd. I am saying that, in the end, the choice of what you do is up to you. Your experiences will influence, but they will not dictate you. I assume you'll appeal to physicalism here, but at that point we just end up getting into an unanswerable philosophical debate. So I would simply say that while what I'm assuming is not falsifiable, neither is physicalism.

I'm largely swayed by the 'conscious experience.' Presumably neither of us believe that if you make a program to add 2+2, that some entity suddenly pops into existence and imagines itself to be adding 2+2 only to then zip out out of existence. Where we may differ is that I don't think that changes if we go from adding 2+2, to instead sequentially carrying out arbitrarily more simple instruction.

Yet here we are - 'passenger' or 'driver' in a body feeling as though we have complete control over our own actions. I tend to believe what lay before my eyes. And so in this case, I am obligated to reject this as being an emergent property of complexity, or as a facade. Which, in turn, obligates me to reject physicalism.

[nikkwong]

Are you positing that you have free will but that those around you with less emotional control don’t? I don’t think your example is serving your argument; your brain is structured in such a way that you reason in a way that is unique to you, and others reason otherwise based on the structure of their brains. I don’t see how this grants you free will. You’re talking about feelings and reasoning as part of conscious experience and that’s, in my opinion, the end state of all of the neurological activity that pointed us to feel or think a certain way in the present moment.

The chain of causality that leads to thoughts and emotions in consciousness is completely determined by the structure and action potentials that propagate through our brain and nothing else, and this doesn’t leave room for some conscious agent in our brain also pulling levers and further modifying causality.

[somenameforme]

No, I am stating that we can control and change how we behave, which is largely the definition of free will. This is why even identical twins growing up in a practically identical environment will not end up identical. To continue with claims of no free will you end up needing to start appealing to some sort of a butterfly effect of environment. And while that claim is not falsifiable and probably never will be, I think such diverge is vastly more easily explained by simply people having agency and, in identical circumstance and even near identical genetics, being free to make different decisions.

[TFYS]

> To continue with claims of no free will you end up needing to start appealing to some sort of a butterfly effect of environment.

The differences between the lives of even identical twins in the same environment are a lot more than a flap of a butterfly's wings. They don't spend every second of their lives together, so their experiences will differ quite a bit.

[lynx23]

You already said it. "practically identical" is not the same as identical, which alrady explains the (butterfly?) differences. Miniscule differences actually add up...

[samus]

The amount of possibilities you see might be influenced by your emotional state, and what you call "reasonable" might not be the same thing as other people consider it.

A lot of our reasoning are applications of observations and best practices rules that we are sometimes not really aware of unless challenged by circumstances or outsiders.

This is to some degree necessary - the outside world is too complex to fully model inside our minds. The most important things that we can only build approximate models about are other people.