Long Ball Larry
Footballguy
I am sympathetic to this view, although it seems like you mainly just want to absolve yourself of responsibility when you lose in the FF championship this week…Perhaps some of that was explained poorly but the things I gave examples did not feel like decisions or ideas I had. They felt like things I just did or things I knew were going to happen regardless. Yes, I make decisions like will I watch a movie or a football game tonight. But in general, I feel more like an antenna receiving ideas than the person generating them. I feel more like I am observing myself follow a path. There is pretty much no meaningful situation that I ever consider. I just do what I do and it works out well.I’m not a strong proponent of free will, but I’m not sure that these negate the concept of free will. The fact that you can have the idea to try to change and can sometimes change are evidence of free will. The fact that you can’t accomplish every single goal doesn’t mean that there is NO free will. I would say that an organism that can’t even entertain the notion of doing something different is demonstrating a lack of free will much more clearly. While I do agree that that people often have more of an illusion of free will than they realize and that basically everything that we do is influenced by outside factors in the past and present and specific incentives that may be known or unknown, within that framework, we do make choices. We also make choices about our futures and about a future self that is far less connected to us than many other people or activities in the present or immediate future. The breadth of choices we make about different timelines and about a (perceived) continuous self over decades suggests that there is some level of free will that exists.You’ve never wanted to change something- maybe even something really important and failed repeatedly? Think of all the people wanting to lose weight, learn a new instrument, stop drinking, save money, etc. Also, the idea of where do our thoughts come from? Some of the most meaningful things I’ve ever done have been almost without any thought at all, they just happened or I just knew it what’s I would do. I often find the more I have to think about something, the less likely it is to happen. Why did I become a teacher? No idea just knew it was what I wanted to do and I love it. I was confident who I was going to marry pretty much 8 years before we ever even went on a date. When I cleaned up my health, it just happened. I went on a treadmill one morning, threw away all my weed, started eating less and just kept doing it. There was no plan or forethought.Free will is one of those topics where extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence. If there's one thing that each of experiences every day, it's the experience of thinking about stuff and making decisions. The fact that you considered the topic and decided that "free will" might be illusory is itself a data point in favor of free will. I know that I personally decide things all the time. When you have a lifetime of first-hand experience with reality, it should take gigantic amounts of extremely high-quality evidence to even budge that prior. Your reluctance to adjust your prior should only go up once you get into it and realize how much of this debate is just a semantic argument about what the term "free will" means.