Your "Free" Will is Not Free

[IIIIITHE1IIIII]

badgenome said:

IIIIITHE1IIIII said:

You can ask the very same question to the murderer mentioned in the OP. From his point of view, murdering his victim would result in a more profitable situation than not murdering him. Whether he made a miscalculation and regretted his actions afterwards does not matter, because at that very moment he too asked himself "Why would I not murder him?" and came to the conclusion that murder would be more profitable than anything else.

Yes, you could, but that doesn't disprove free will. Or just "will", which I think is probably a better philosophical term, because of course your actions aren't completely untethered from the past experiences that have come to define your character over the years. If free will means that you just drift through life making a series of utterly random choices, then you'd have neither a chracter nor will. But if what you argue is true, every single thing that has happened - including me typing this post right now - was set into motion from the moment of the Big Bang or whatever and could never have happened any other way.

There is a huge gulf between this, where the leopard attacks purely based on instinct and literally could make no other choice because it operates purely on biological imperatives, and someone like James Holmes who shot up a movie theater after much meticulous planning and could have called the thing off at any time but chose to do it anyway.

The main difference I see between the leopard and the human would be the human's vastly superior ability of analysing the situation and predict several potential outcomes of his actions. In the end, James followed his instincts and did what he had wanted to do for a long time. It would make no sense for him to not do it since he so badly wanted to.