To some, the subjectivists, Free Will is the most fundamental thing there is.
To illusionists, from William James to myself, it's an illusion, a story told after-the-fact. Our conscious self is precisely this storyteller. It's not a person-within-the-person in a grand theater pulling levers. That notion is a meaningless recursion anyway. If the person can't be explained, how can the person-within-the-person. It's simply deferring the question. If there is "Free Will", then how does a study of psychology even make sense? I am a "caused thing." How could it be otherwise? Only by some magic, say, a God who "created" my "soul." The reality is that while I myself have been caused, I then proceed to marginally cause whatever soul I have, if that concept even makes sense (which I think it does, in this sense, and to which a concept like justice or karma can be applied) through my own actions, which are the produce of a complex process only partly involving conscious choice as reflected back at the ultimate subconscious parts. The caused me I don't know is the real me, but that real me knows the one I hear as the "free" me as one of it's many caused facets.
Taken apart, the subjectivist version makes not sense and is entirely impossible, objectively speaking.
Are you arguing your genes and the totality of your intake and experience from the time of your birth to the present moment have nothing to do with your actions? If there is something else, what possible system of mass and energy engages it?
It is possible there a never-to-be explained factor. But that proves nothing. In many situations that can be shown to be quite small. Is "Free Will" somehow tightly partitioned in some cases?
If there is something like randomness in human behavior, that sliver can hardly be equated with the grandious "Free Will."
Anyway, this is also one of the fundamental hypocracies of capitalism, the claim that preferences are somehow "endogenous." That's to make you feel good about what's being done to you.
Meanwhile, ,gazillions are spent on direct and indirect advertising to make your opinion. The indirect part is the very operation of the media companies themselves--dependent on advertising revenues they are always subservient to that, and the need to gin up more conflict to cover.
Somehow, in my experience, I learned the importance of critical analysis. But that is simply one earlier experience that has had a relatively lasting effect, combined with various idosyncracies in my genes that makes me tend toward contrarianism rather than conformity.
To illusionists, from William James to myself, it's an illusion, a story told after-the-fact. Our conscious self is precisely this storyteller. It's not a person-within-the-person in a grand theater pulling levers. That notion is a meaningless recursion anyway. If the person can't be explained, how can the person-within-the-person. It's simply deferring the question. If there is "Free Will", then how does a study of psychology even make sense? I am a "caused thing." How could it be otherwise? Only by some magic, say, a God who "created" my "soul." The reality is that while I myself have been caused, I then proceed to marginally cause whatever soul I have, if that concept even makes sense (which I think it does, in this sense, and to which a concept like justice or karma can be applied) through my own actions, which are the produce of a complex process only partly involving conscious choice as reflected back at the ultimate subconscious parts. The caused me I don't know is the real me, but that real me knows the one I hear as the "free" me as one of it's many caused facets.
Taken apart, the subjectivist version makes not sense and is entirely impossible, objectively speaking.
Are you arguing your genes and the totality of your intake and experience from the time of your birth to the present moment have nothing to do with your actions? If there is something else, what possible system of mass and energy engages it?
It is possible there a never-to-be explained factor. But that proves nothing. In many situations that can be shown to be quite small. Is "Free Will" somehow tightly partitioned in some cases?
If there is something like randomness in human behavior, that sliver can hardly be equated with the grandious "Free Will."
Anyway, this is also one of the fundamental hypocracies of capitalism, the claim that preferences are somehow "endogenous." That's to make you feel good about what's being done to you.
Meanwhile, ,gazillions are spent on direct and indirect advertising to make your opinion. The indirect part is the very operation of the media companies themselves--dependent on advertising revenues they are always subservient to that, and the need to gin up more conflict to cover.
Somehow, in my experience, I learned the importance of critical analysis. But that is simply one earlier experience that has had a relatively lasting effect, combined with various idosyncracies in my genes that makes me tend toward contrarianism rather than conformity.
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