Reply To: Good News: And No Religion, Too

I have finally got round to watching that video on so-called “free will”. Alex presents his case well enough. See post #238723.

But what he is actually arguing against is the claim that people are free to decide to do something they don’t want to do. This is because he assumes, by definition, that what you do (unless coerced) is what you want to do. So whatever you do do, you wanted to do, otherwise you wouldn’t have done it.

It’s a bit of a sophist’s argument rather like the subject of a student study essay I once had to write: if good is what you want, can you want to do bad?

What about at a factual level? Most people will agree that at least some of what they want to do does depend on external factors such as the past and present experiences such as the way they were brought and the type of society they are living in.

But agreed, they will still want to say that they can freely choose between different options on simple everyday matters such as to what clothes to wear or what to eat for breakfast.

Alex says this is an illusion (because everything that happens anywhere in the universe at one moment is determined by everything that happened before right back to the Big Bang). Maybe it is in that unhelpful sense (unhelpful because it doesn’t explain anything). Or maybe “free will” is the (unhelpful) name given to that illusion?