| RolStoppable said: Now you are more or less just making up strawman arguments. Firstly, I do not deny the base level. I deny your and others' assumption that the base level is enough to jump to such conclusions as free will does not exist. Okay. If you don't deny that in essence the brain is just a bunch of chemical reactions and electrons together, none of which you have any say over, then I don't really understand how you can still cling on to the notion of free will. At least not without there being some metaphysical unobservable thing that enables us to have free will. But alright. Secondly, and this is a very blatant strawman, you say my answer would be "bad morals" when I explicitly gave a different explanation in the following paragraph. Your explanation was that he caved into his instincts instead of his rationality, right? That's not the "why", it's the "what". WHY did he cave into his instincts instead of his rationality? Do you think he had control of the process that ended up with him caving into his instincts? Thirdly, if your age is real, then you are probably unable to properly judge such a scenario to begin with. Nice one. Trying to dismiss my arguments due to my age. That's a low blow. You also do not address willpower and pretend that no such thing exists, but it's the reason why rationality can win over instinct. The instinct is about short term gratification for your body, but rationality takes the long term consequences into account. A man with no willpower will tell himself that he had no choice, because it's easier to pretend that something else is at fault. But other persons go through the same scenario, so they have the experience that it is very much a choice whether you have sex or not. I've adressed willpower. Willpower is essentially when you have several different thought processes (chemical reactions) in your brain, one which benefits you in the short term but is perhaps detrimental in the long term, while the other isn't so enjoyable in the short term, but is mroe beneficial in the long term. Having "willpower" is just that the chemical reactions for picking the long term over the short term are dominating. I've tried to tell you this, time and time again. This isn't about "instincts" versus "rationality". You may use your rational thinking capabilites and end up with a different result than your instincts. But that's not free will. Because you still don't control the outcome of the rational thought process. You don't even control when to start the rational thought process. Other people go through the same scenario and get a different outcome. That's not because they have free will. It's because they have lived a different life with different external stimuli and have different genes, all which affect the exact state the persons brain is when the two "competing" chemical reactions occur, and influence which of the two that "win". Lastly, I think the definition you've given for free will is something different from what you argue. What you are arguing is not that there's no choice of behavior, but rather that there's no control over which thoughts cross someone's mind as chemical reactions are triggered by various stimuli. Nope. You literally have no control over any of your thoughts. And since your thoughts control your behaviour, you have no control over your behaviour either. I've literally explained to you how you don't control anything of what goes on in your mind. How you behave isn't separate from what goes on in your mind. Everything you say and do originate from your mind. You can't say a thing without your brain giving the signals the say that specific thing first. |
