Free Will, How do you feel about freewill?

[Gizmonicgamer]

What is free-will in your eyes? How powerful is it? ...Does it even exist? What are the extensions and ramifications of this?
etc. I'll post my opinion after a post or two.

Opinions?

[SketchMan3]

Free will, to me, is having the brain-power to be able to the existence of free will.

[Gizmonicgamer]

to acknowledge/determine? You didn't exactly finish that sentence.

[SketchMan3]

Sorry, "Question" should be in there.

[Ragamuffin]

I'm not quite sure that the ability to question the nature of free will equates to our having free will. The act of questioning may or may not have any significant bearing on ones 'destiny,' preordained or otherwise.

If our entire existence has somehow been planned out, let's say in this case by a higher power of some sort, we could question free will until blue in the face and still have a set future. The higher power would look upon our furtive scribblings on the subject and, perhaps, furrow its brow at such a notion.

I-I guess what I'm saying is that if a higher power coded into us the ability to question things, yet still assigned us an exact life program that dictated every action we took, every situation we were faced with, that wouldn't be free will at all...?

Goddamn I hope that makes some kind of sense I'm typing through a blinding headache.

(Also I don't believe in that higher power bullshit just so my stance on the subject is clear. I just like being argumentative :3)

[Gizmonicgamer]

Yeah, I agree in that regard; simply knowing what will take place (even if this knowledge is actually of all potential actions, not just a linear path) kind of lessens the impact of free-will, and the very existence of a God with that kind of foresight basically abolishes the concept of universal free-will.

In my eyes, "free-will" is really nothing but an illusion - albeit a very necessary one. It seems that the more we learn about human psychology and even biology, the more limited it becomes; our tastes, form and some of our preferences are determined through heredity, and as individuals we are shaped by our environments. Our parents, our teaching, our learning, our life experiences. We learn from our mistakes and our history, we have memory and this presence of memory and learning inherently affects our future and decision making process, subtly limiting how free choice actually is. Combine this with the fact that it is impossible for a man to do anything without any actual cause, and you have a "bleak" picture where free-will, as opposed to dominating both nature and nurture, becomes a slave to the aforementioned - possibly even to the point of complete and total submission, destroying the very concept.

The illusion of free will is granted by our presence and perspective of time. The fact that the future is unknown is the only reason that we percieve free will and utilize the concept of possibility and probability.


Something that must be understood, in my eyes, is the fact that if "Free-will" were as free as everyone would like to believe, we would have to exist as a perpetual tabula rasa - having no memory - the past defines us thus the past must become irrelevant.