ttruscott wrote:
William wrote:If you would address my arguments so far, that would be unusual, but a step in the best direction.
I stand by post 15...
Which I already addressed and debunked - but here, I will repeat myself.
[
Replying to post 15 by ttruscott]
If a hypnotist hypnotises you to always chose the red pill, when you are given the choice to choose the blue or the red pill, are you really choosing the red pill?
Is it the case that we are all hypnotized?
If your dna has given you a taste for seafood over red meat, are you really choosing it when you reject the red meat?
Are you declaring that our dna forces us to choose only seafood? If so, are you also declaring that if we have choices as to which seafood we will eat and which we will not, is that also because of our dna?
Are you saying that dna makes a choice for us? If so are you saying that dna has will, and a consciousness of its own separate from ours?
Or if you grew up in a home that served only red meat and scorned those 'fish eaters', are you really choosing to reject seafood when you choose red meat instead?
Yes, if it is on the basis that you do so because that is what you learned to do ''in the home' and
choose to continue in that way.
If, when you were three years old your mother left you for a month with a babysitter while she must attend elsewhere and then in your young adult years your wife goes out with her sister and they are gone 2-3 times longer than they had thought they'd be and your anxiety grows until you decide to phone the police with a possible missing persons report, are you really deciding to do this or are you forced by your emotional history to act this way?
You are choosing to behave this way and be dictated to by your emotions, illogical as they are.
All decisions are indeed by our will but the word free sharply cuts between influences upon our decisons that can be resisted (if we want) and those influences that cannot be resisted and so force us to choose in a certain way. Whether we recognize we are under a compulsion or not has nothing to do with this.
The point being is that either way, forced or resisting force, use of the word 'free' simply to define difference in the way personal will can or cannot be used is misrepresenting the truth of our position, leading us to suppose that actual free will exists.
For example, your own theology says that we are all imprisoned upon this planet. The nature of being in prison is that we are not free. Therefore we cannot have free will.
If you say we can, then you are contradicting your own theology.
A true free will is a will completely free from the influence of any coercive force whatsoever. A partly free will is one only partly coerced by influences in his life but not as fully as the secular definition of our will being absent and the illusion of choosing is only a product of the chemistry of our dna and the effects of our environment...
And as soon as you bring in the
extra idea of '
true free will' you imply that the free will you argue we have, is not free at all anyway. It thus has to be a false 'free' will. In that, you contradict yourself again and at the same time agree with my own argument.
iow, there is no ghost in the machine.
We are the ghost in the machine.
It is the machine which disallows for
free will, while individual
will, is still an option.
