Philosophy Now Forum

Alright, I've got a new freewill theory for you guys to try out. It's Spinozean but goes further than Spinz. Or rather, it explains what he means.

Okay. Freewill does exist, and we exercise it only in saying 'no'. When Spinz says something like 'freewill is having the knowledge of causes', he's being cryptic and hinting at the mind transcending the body by not engaging... by not becoming an effect... or rather, by not being moved by an external cause and becoming its own causa sui therefore. This is in direct contrast to his thesis that improvement comes from increased capacities to act, to engage the body.

Freewill is then the active striving for one's annihilation by disengaging the material world of cause and effect and refusing to be moved. Another way to say it is that freewill happens when movement stops or is reduced by degrees. Conversly, if you are moved, you are affected by a cause and therefore not free.

Could this be what Choong Su Lin meant when he laughed at his pupil and said "how can you be free? You are walking around the garden!"

Now, all you first grade freewillists aren't gonna follow this one. You'll need to let your ranking metaphysicians deal with this one because it's rather complicated.

An interesting aspect of biology concerning free will would be the topic of epigenetics. Google it! It is very damaging to the belief in free will.

Here's how imperative commands in language don't necessitate freewill in the language users.

Now you'd think for the phrase "you're going to the beach!" to be meaningful and make any sense, the language user needs to know what that is like... going to the beach. A child, for example, can't know what that means unless he's dunnit or seen a depiction of it happening.

But one need not insert the doer for such a statement to be meaningful and true for you could tell a robot that it's going to the beach (or else) and going to the beach would be meaningful to it. A command involving an executive goal, as it were.

So a language user doesn't need to think it has freewill to understand its compulsory actions as meaningful things. It doesn't have to picture itself - the him in the "you're" - as making a series a choices in order to go to the beach. His body just goes to the beach, and he ain't driving.

Ya'll saw that slick Wittgensteinian insight in there, right? Me and bro think alike. We got unique angles on things you know.

That makes a lot of sense. I agree that intellect opens up the range of choices available, but also consider that you would not have any choices available to you without memory, which must play an important part of an individuals free will. Therefore, memory is the key component to having free will, and intellect opens up a wider range of options giving free will more breadth. This also helps to explain why inanimate objects without any form of memory have free will.
Of course free will can never be proven, but that becomes an epistomologial question. Free will remains the most likely outcome of being able to use your brain to make choices based on information you can remember from previous moments in time. We can see the results of our choices, which is strong evidence for free will and we can understand the parameters of the range of choices availabel to use, based on our personal knowledge, which indicate free will has its limitations.