If “physiological conditions” include the ability of your brain to reason and make a selection, why is that inconsistent with free will? And why isn’t it an evaluation?
The book can neither consider its state of teetering nor elect whether or not to fall.
This is sounding a lot like semantics to me. If the decision is based on such variables as “personality, motivations, or mood,” why can’t we call those variables, collectively, the will, which in turn “causes” the choice? Why aren’t all those variables, in essence, me, in the act of choosing? Why is the result “dictated” as opposed to “chosen”? It seems to me that the result only becomes inevitable after the selection is made. Before, having no frame of reference to see how the situation will unfold and no way to predict it, we cannot “know” the result; the result itself does not exist. Once it appears, it exists and is immutable. How is that not choice?
Well, not to get too deep, but this only begs the question of what is “real” as opposed to illusory that does not exist physically. You want to call all the elements used to make a selection “variables” and you want to say that we have no “choice” but to choose what we will in fact choose – which I assume you admit cannot be known until after the choice is made (i.e., is not subject to prediction, because the variables are too many and too complex). I don’t have a problem with that, I guess. I just don’t see how it’s that much different from free will, on a going forward basis. Even if you posit that every choice that is ever to be made is already set forth (predestination, as well as predeterminism), that’s of no relevance from where we stand in the timeline, actually weighing variables and preparing to make selections that only become inevitable in retrospect. But then, every thing becomes inevitable in retrospect. I don’t see how that proves that free will is an illusion.
ThePCCapeman –
If it’s completely identical in every respect, how is it not this same existence?
Could she decide otherwise? Sure. Why not? But why would she? Since we are both living the same existence, making an identical evaluation of identical factors, why would we not exercise our wills in the same way? If you replicate the exact same experience for the exact same person, you would expect both iterations to make the same choice, no? How is that inconsistent with free will? If I don’t like chocolate, I won’t select chocolate. If you theorize a separate universe where I still don’t like chocolate, the fact that I don’t choose it is hardly surprising. You can theorize a thousand universes, and if I don’t like chocolate in any of them, I won’t choose it in any of them. How does that tend to disprove free will?
Again, as far as I can see this whole theory is entirely retroactive. The minute you choose chocolate you can no longer choose vanilla. Once you have exercised your ability to choose, you have lost it. But it makes no sense to me to say it didn’t exist before that.
I have no organized POV based on any resources; I’ve never heard of this stuff before. I’m just stating the obvious objections as they occur to me.