TL:DR: Most things in our life are not of our own choosing, and those that are are still not in our hands, since what we desire and what we do not are not of our own choosing.
We are born into this world naked in every sense of the word. Devoid both of physical baggage and mental/emotional ones. Things even down to people’s hobbies, all those are formed by experience. After all, how can one like something they know nothing of? How can one be interested in something without their interest being somehow grabbed? Obviously, none of this was something we could choose.
Our ideologies, moral compasses, the people we like, the insecurities we have, all these are formed mainly by our experiences. What we consider abhorrent simply depends on what we have experienced. I can give examples, but this will get too long.
Even when someone decides to make a change in their life, from where did this strength emerge? It is more likely that they had something different than those who were in the same situation, and just wasn’t able to change. What was this? Perhaps someone in their life. Perhaps they were able to see some hope. This, too, was not in their hands. Since one cannot truly control their thoughts/minds, then them choosing it was just a result of other occurrences.
This is a bit problematic, though. How just is it, then, to blame people for what they do? I’m not advocating not punishing crime at all, as in my ideal world punishing crime exists solely as a mechanism to dissuade more crime and to make society safer as a whole. I’m talking about laying moral blame. Does it even make sense, or is it just human beings seeking agency where there is none?
Assuming I, the person who read your comment, decided to do so because you told me to and I thought it reasonable, I was influenced by external factors to even bother with the coin toss. Even if I weren’t, ideas don’t exist in vacuums.
The place of the coin’s landing can be predicted by the laws of physics, though rather rigorously. It’s not like it was random in the sense that it could’ve landed any other way in that exact situation with no factor differing.
My decision would also have been influenced by the coin, so not truly uninfluenced.
TL:DR Coins aren’t ever truly fair, and ideas don’t exist in vacuums.
My personal take?
People think on it way too much. Free will exists, we just decided that pessimism would rule us and that everybody’s influences and takes on the world are entirely influenced. There’s always that one, or those several, moments where you run on a whim that makes no sense to any experience you’ve had, and if you ask me, such moments speak of free will in its rawest form. We can easily think about performing alternatives to our typical actions too, and that’s where those whims tend to generate from.
Besides, the third paragraph implies that the inability to fully control our thoughts makes us automated. Sure, stuff like the random thoughts are randomized, but we can control how we react to such thoughts.
It is influenced by the laws of physics. You did say that I have officially made an uninfluenced decision. The result of the coin toss is also another path in the making of the decision. My decision to not just ignore the coin toss is ruled by my mental state.
The decision could never truly be uninfluenced. This is an impossible hypothetical if anything.
Irrelevant, even if you had a hundred sided die and you said that you would only do something if you rolled a 1, it’s still uninfluenced.
The actual probabilities don’t matter since even 99 to 1 odds are uninfluenced, they’re just odds and the only laws of physics on a fair coin would be .0001% air pressure or some shit.
We can control our reactions? The only way to do this truly is to fully control the wiring of our brains. It is the way we think and act, things entirely out of our control, that governs how we react to our thoughts. In what sense do you mean automated.
In order to continue, I need to know what you define as “uninfluenced”. Does that mean not changed by any external factors? How fair is it to omit the circumstances surrounding the consideration of even making a coin toss as irrelevant to the “uninfluenced-ness” of the decision?
Isn’t the decision to make a decision the first conscious part of even making one?
First of all, uh… No? I have been able to control how I react to random thoughts I have… And by automated, I mean the part that we cannot control: the random thoughts.
The probability of the coin toss is influenced by physics, the choice to make the coin toss is influenced.
But the actual outcome of it isn’t influenced.
Say you flipped a heads with a rigged coin where it was 51% heads, sure the probability was 51% but you still got heads, you ultimately could’ve made a different decision if it landed the 49% and the probabilities weren’t even. That doesn’t mean it was impossible for both scenarios to occur.
I’m not referring to conscious control. Even tthe configuration of your brain, that which controls consciousness and gives the illusion of conscious thought, is out of your hands.
Do you have control over your personality, for instance? If so, do you have control over the mechanisms that make up a personality?
But the outcome is a result of the probability in a hypothetical. It isn’t truly random, as I have said. It’s only seen as random because all the factors involved in it are so situation-specific and vast that it might as well be treated as such.
That’s not influence, again that’s following a Laplace demon principle that would take years to dispute and I don’t have that kind of time on a lego forum argument.
Unless you are a Laplace demon, then it is essentially uninfluenced, happy?
Ok, do you contend that if I were to create two exactly identical situations for a coin to be tossed, that the result would be the same?
And this was a diversion, anyway. Even if you were right, this doesn’t change the fact that the choices that resulted in the coin getting tossed were essential to the decision made after the coin toss, and the factors involved there can not be ignored.
Even if one factor were random, the consideration of throwing the coin was not. If it never occurred, then neither would the coin toss. It influenced it.
Except you couldn’t ever perfectly replicate an identical situation unless you are a Laplace demon
It didn’t influence the outcome, only the outcome before the outcome.
A causing B causing C
Doesn’t mean A caused C in every scenario
Say someone reached perfect Nash equilibrium, what would you think then?
If you want to write a multivaried equation for everything in your life for even an hour there would be too much for even all the computers on the world to comprehend so in our sense of ignorance and not being absolute perfect beings, have free will.
You can also consider free will as solely your direct actions and near direct subsequent actions.
