MisterMaggot wrote:How can we have free will and experience hunger?
All living things are coerced into doing things by hunger, hunger is painful and cannot be ignored. Even the most intelligent human will, when hungry, think only of acquiring food. Our actions are governed by hunger, thirst, tiredness, the need for sex etc. These are fundamental 'needs', such as those in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. All of these needs cause discomfort when not addressed. How can anyone experience these needs and still maintain that we have free will?
Humans are capable of resisting these needs, such as resisting hunger when dieting. However this resistance is caused by a greater need, perhaps the need to be accepted or find a mate.
I conclude that all human actions are caused by human needs. Therefore we have no free will, we are simply machines waiting for our need for 'x' to reach a certain level at which point we must address it.
What are your thoughts on this theory?
Hunger for food is one obvious type of compulsion. The human body (and in that I include what is called the 'mind'), is comprised of a complex interaction of a range of other internal necessities.
Consciousness is the acknowledgement and recognition of those compulsions.
When we 'make a choice' it is the culmination and acceptance of a particular course of action that matches the complex but necessary act of will.
It is not free in the biblical sense. But what we term free will is simply nothing more than the expression of inner necessity determined wholly by antecedent condition which exist within the brain.
Thus the survey at the top of the post cannot be answered, as it is more to do with what is meant by 'free' in the context of the will.
To assert that we act out of our will freely, can only mean free of external compulsion. As Einstein puts it:
In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a
disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in
accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do
as he will, but not will as he will," has been an inspiration to me since my
youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience
in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others'.
Choosing to watch
Breaking Bad rather than
Dexter on the TV tonight is as a result of a inner hunger that favours
Breaking Bad. It is an act of will, which is free only if not prevented by another person. It is not free from ourselves as a causative agency. We cannot will to will
Breaking Bad, we simply will it to be so. And that is deterministic.
