Your "Free" Will is Not Free

[happydolphin]

appolose said:

IIIIITHE1IIIII said:

To sum it up: Every single decision you make is entirely based on your personal preference, which you can't overlook. Humans will always seek for the greatest possible amount of profit through their actions, and whatever that profit consists of is based on that very same personal preference.

I believe the crux of your argument is this: every time someone commits an action, you can always find some motive or desire behind it, such that when they performed that action, it satisfied or achieved that desire or motive.  And in the case of two conflicting desires, the one determined to be ultimately the most satisfying will be achieved.  Therefore, actions are determined by the most powerful preset preferences, which is decidely not free will.

 

Assuming that's an accurate summation, I would contend that a person can make actions that are not the ones determined  by that person to be ultimately the most desirable.  In any scenario given in this thread, one can find a motive and counter-motive.  But in none of them can it be definitively shown which was the most preferred motive. Perhaps one might seem likely to be the more preferred, but how could we really tell?  And since free will, by definition, can choose an action without regard to its value, we cannot tell if an action was chosen because of strongest preference or free will.

Exactly. A person reading this could decide "whatevs, to prove this 'profit' thing wrong, I'll just do the thing that profits me the least in something really trivial, just for the heck of it".

@OP. I don't disagree with you, I disagree with the wordings you use and how your view is supported. First of all I don't think the word profit is what you're looking for. I think what you're looking for is inclination.

Reason. There are cases where a person will purposefully do something that profits them the least, simply because that's what they want to do most, with no gratification whatsoever, it's just their nature. An example would be deviance. Above and beyond the gratification of self-worth related to deviance, a person may simply not want to do what others tell them to do, no matter how counter-profitable that may be. In essence, you're using basic cases to explain a more complex concept, but the basic cases make your explanation seem unreasonable, yet they intend to make it more comprehensible. By being overly simple, they cause us to miss the point of what you're actually trying to say.

What you're actually trying to say is that noone can be considered guilty or laudable for any given action at any given time, since this is ever a product of their inception. It doesn't matter what they reason in the end that choice will never ever change given a chance to "go at it" again.

Am I right?

I think this is true, but how does someone put that into practice? I can leave this convo and say "In that case fuck it, I'll just do whatever I want", since it's inconsequential in the end. Right? Wrong, because even if I have the "choice" to do what's wrong, I was given (by nature, by God, same diff) enough to make the right choice with a minimum of effort. As such, with my predisposition, if I make the wrong choice (like hurting someone with absolutely no reason), I have used my given abilities for evil whereas a less fortunate person would have wished to have what I had to make better choices.

For those that believe in God, this goes in line with "God judges the heart" and the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30).