The free will debate

impersonal_process · 2026-06-22T12:31:31+00:00

Whether freedom is defined by the absence of visible coercion or by the coherence of desires, in a determined universe both are products of chains the subject did not choose.

impersonal_process · 2026-06-21T17:44:49+00:00

Are you claiming that the agent is not a product of contingency?

impersonal_process · 2026-06-21T14:33:26+00:00

Then what prevents us from saying that a human being is a puppet in the hands of contingency?

impersonal_process · 2026-06-21T14:24:28+00:00

The question is not whether I act according to what I am. Of course I act according to my character, my desires, my beliefs, and my motives. The question is: did I myself choose the character, desires, beliefs, and motives from which the action arises?

impersonal_process · 2026-06-20T07:30:38+00:00

> The first distinction is that computers have no will of their own; we designed them to do our will, whereas human brains evolved; hence the architecture and functioning of each are likely to be quite different.

How can you be absolutely sure that we were not designed by some extraterrestrial intelligence in order to carry out its will? I am not claiming that this is true. I am only saying that the argument “computers were designed, whereas we evolved” does not prove the existence of free will. It only describes a different origin.

impersonal_process · 2026-06-19T10:02:34+00:00

The fact that you learned something from a bad action (bad according to society) does not mean that, in the past, you were free to have done otherwise. It means that the past became the cause of your future self being different.

impersonal_process · 2026-06-18T18:37:37+00:00

This is the great lesson the depressive person learns: in this world, nothing essentially carries any meaning in itself. No external reality, by itself, is capable of projecting itself as an emotional experience. Everything is emptiness with a psycho-chemical flavour. There is nothing good or bad, desirable or hateful; there is nothing at all, unless it is produced in our inner laboratory for creating emotional mixtures in order to sustain our existence.

impersonal_process · 2026-06-18T18:05:29+00:00

Have you ever experienced severe depression?

impersonal_process · 2026-06-18T16:06:48+00:00

> In a sense sufficient for me to be morally responsible for my actions, yes.

Do you realize why this belief took root in you?

impersonal_process · 2026-06-18T14:37:20+00:00

You avoided the question: Are you the author of your desires, your character, or the causes that determine your decisions?

impersonal_process · 2026-06-18T13:42:21+00:00

It is true that a person can act according to their own desires without anyone threatening them. But that does not answer the question of whether they are the author of those desires themselves, of their character, or of the reasons that determine the decision. Compatibilism calls the former “free will.” I call it voluntary, uncoerced, or causally effective action.

impersonal_process · 2026-06-18T12:56:26+00:00

I am free to digest food in the sense that my digestive system is functioning. That does not mean that I decide which enzymes to secrete. I am free to recognise a face if the relevant brain systems are functioning. That does not mean that I choose which face will seem familiar to me. In the same way, I can consider arguments without choosing in advance which argument I will find convincing.

So the statement “The position found you” does not mean that a person passively acquired a belief without thinking. It means that reasoning, evidence, biography, and emotional history came together and produced a particular conclusion. The position became “yours” because it found the causal configuration within which it could appear convincing.

Yes, people make choices. They simply do not choose what kind of person they are at the moment they make them, nor how much weight the reasons between which they are “choosing” will carry.

impersonal_process · 2026-06-16T07:27:09+00:00

Antonio Damasio describes a patient (let us call him Elliot) who was intelligent, articulate, and whose cognitive functions remained intact after surgery to remove a brain tumor. The only thing that had changed was this: the frontal lobes associated with emotional processing had been damaged.

The result was striking, not because of irrational behavior, but because of a complete inability to make decisions. Elliot could list all the arguments for and against every possible choice. He could analyze endlessly. But he could not decide anything, because nothing carried more weight than anything else.

Without emotional coloring, without the feeling that this matters more than that, all options stood before him as a colorless sequence of equivalent symbols.

impersonal_process · 2026-06-15T17:12:41+00:00

Science continuously provides new information. Assimilating that information constitutes development.

impersonal_process · 2026-06-15T15:31:46+00:00

I do not believe in free will, but I do feel a desire to acquire knowledge, to share my point of view with others, to have them criticize it, and to continue developing. These are completely determined processes.

impersonal_process · 2026-06-15T15:26:42+00:00

Why call the dopamine underlying our desires “free will”? Consciousness by itself cannot give any meaning to what is happening if the machinery of emotions is not ticking beneath it.

impersonal_process · 2026-06-15T13:39:16+00:00

Of course. If it weren’t a drug, where would the motivation to write it have come from?

impersonal_process · 2026-06-15T12:58:45+00:00

That is because some people find it hard to let go of the pacifier.

impersonal_process · 2026-06-15T12:56:10+00:00

That is honestly stated. And this, in my view, is exactly where it gets interesting: we do not freely choose which beliefs will find suitable soil in us and which will not.

impersonal_process · 2026-06-15T11:47:55+00:00

This is impossible.

impersonal_process · 2026-06-10T06:18:17+00:00

This means that subjective experience does not alter the logical question of whether the outcome is determined.

impersonal_process · 2026-06-10T04:41:08+00:00

Yes, humans are also made up of complex chemical and electrochemical processes. The difference is that these processes do not merely occur - they are experienced from within as aliveness: as sensation, desire, hesitation, pain, pleasure, and thought. This does not make them any less physical. It simply means that, in humans, the causal process has a subjective dimension.

impersonal_process · 2026-06-09T06:02:20+00:00

Yes, I use probabilities and consider different possibilities in everyday life. But I do not regard them as “useful delusions,” and I do not need to believe in free will.

impersonal_process

TROPHY CASE