Why do people believe in free will?

Well, good for you I suppose. But how do you argue free will's existence?

Well, from birth you have been exposed to an environment which has influenced the development of your personality, and you have a genetic factor in how your brain works too. Your brain responds to the environment due to its structure & biases so in that respect you have no choice over your actions, since you had no choice about how your personality was formed.

Also, you don't choose which chemical process should happen in your body at a particular incident, and you don't choose how your body responds to that.

There's lots of evidence for it and not much against it. I know I can make a decision to do something and then change my mind. I can communicate ideas to other people who would go ahead and decide whether they want to carry out my advice or not.

The only reason for me to think that free will doesn't exist is if all of my perceptions of the world are wrong. This is too unlikely for me to logically accept.

Ok, but do all decisions from a formed personality? Regardless, independent of whether you formed that personality, that personality is still 'you. Therefore if you make a decision using that personality, it is really you making that decision.


That's sort of begging the question, no? To claim we have no free will is essentially the same as saying we don't control which chemical processes occur.

Besides, I'm not sure that I agree entirely. To someone not all that familiar with neuroscience, it seems like for many major functions we control 'what happens' at least on a macro level. Sure we don't engineer chemical processes, but if I think 'move arm', my arm moves.

there are different layers to the human consciencness.

underneath the culture, the current trends and the base instincts is a little voice telling you what you should actually be doing in any given situation.

They really are, I wasn't particularly sober when I made that point, no idea what I was thinking (usually I argue against that assumption). But when you decide to pursue a course of action, don't you subjectively feel as though you've made a decision?

Obviously if you were to look back on it you might be able to understand that really it was just a result of x, y and z (and many more things), but at the moment when one makes a decision, one feels as though one has a choice to do otherwise.

I think one's view rests on one's definition of free will. I don't think there's much point even discussing the religious idea of free will, it doesn't make the least bit of sense, and personally I don't know what people are actually arguing when they talk about it in that manner. It's meaning seems to disprove itself. However, if you define a free decision as one made without (much) hindrance from external influences, rather (mostly) through our predetermined motives, is there really still a problem? I suppose you could argue that it's hard to draw a line between internal and external factors? Sorry if I don't make much sense, I'm fairly useless at arguing, and may have just repeated what I've already said.

Drunken debating can be highly rewarding. Yes, of course, but I'd mention that decision-making would occur in both scenarios, so it wouldn't be an appropriate indicator of whether we had free will.

You're right, it does feel like you could choose to do something else, but this could well be accurate: In a deterministic model, it would just be that the reason you changed your mind was because of those factors x, y and z.

I don't think this would make an adequate enough definition of free decision-making, since it doesn't well-capture the 'free' element of it. For example, suppose that randomness exerted a large influence on our behavior (which it seems to me that it may well): In such a scenario, our decisions would not be fully determined by prior causes, but randomness also. It would not be particularly meaningful to describe our decision-making as 'free', however, since we wouldn't be in any position of greater control over it than had it been determined wholly by the prior causes. If my actions are controlled by a roll of the dice, I'm not free - I'm just a random actor. One of the major problems with free will, for me, is that nobody appears able to adequately explain the origin or nature of the supposed freedom that we are purported to have.

Well, from birth you have been exposed to an environment which has influenced the development of your personality, and you have a genetic factor in how your brain works too. Your brain responds to the environment due to its structure & biases so in that respect you have no choice over your actions, since you had no choice about how your personality was formed.
Also, you don't choose which chemical process should happen in your body at a particular incident, and you don't choose how your body responds to that.

That wasn't actually an argument for it, it was a response to you saying that you thought as though you didn't have free will. I meant that I didn't understand how one could think that way, as one regrets not making certain 'choices' over other ones, or feels relieved at having done so. Isn't that a result of thinking as though one had free will?

I understand that, but those factors are a result of one's mind- which is the definition of freedom I prescribe to.

It may be more of an emotional definition of 'free' than a one based in logic, it's more down to whether something feels free, in my view. What would your definition of free will actually be? I think that's the part which doesn't quite make sense to me. There seems to only be determinism and chance- does free will actually have a coherent logic-based definition? I use the other definition in part because I don't understand what any other one could mean.

Well, if you're rolling a dice it isn't actually random (I know it's only an example- I have studied a tiny bit of physics though). I've heard some argue that randomness only works on a microscopic scale. I'm not informed enough to have much of an idea, though that view seems unlikely (the butterfly effect etc.? Again, uninformed). Could you explain it to me in any more depth, or is it too complex?