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Concerning Free Will


pljames

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We do what we want except when we acknowledge the law. I do not understand the problem, we do not have free will? If we brake the law (for whatever reason)we answer to it. What is the law? Another word for order. There's order in chaos and vice versa. Then there are a set of rules about emotional disorder. Did the person understand why we have laws? When the mind snaps we are in chaos and obey whatever voices tell us without thought.

 

Like it or not we have to have some order in our life and in society. Society in today's world has lost there respect for themselves and the law and there fellow man/women. Where do we start to rebuild these offenses to our self as a society? Are is it to late? Thoughts please. pljames

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your paragraph seems quite the jumble.

 

so, I think it is necessary to separate out the things we can control versus the things we can't.

Stefan Molynuex offers the billion dollar wager on various actions and deeds to see if free will applies.

if I catch cancer, and someone offers me 1 billion dollars if I can will myself into not having cancer anymore, I think I would tell them where they could cram their money. but if someone offers me I billion dollars not to smoke for a month, or to lose 20 pounds, or not to commit a violent act, my eyes would most likely light up with glee, and I would try to take him up on his offer. Now whether or not I succeed, that has already been predetermined by the organization of my brain. but by the very nature I can try to change my behavior, I would dub such changeable actions as free will.

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Thinking,

There are limits to free will. I meant to say morally in breaking the law type situations. If one is physically ill they still have options of free will. To take therapy to try to save there life like chemo and such. Hopefully using common sense and rational reasoning associated with the problematic action. Paul

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I do not understand the problem, we do not have free will?

The main classical philosophical problem of free will comes from the concepts of causation and determinism. In short,

If everything has a cause,

and everything includes us,

then everything we do is determined by things that happened before we existed.

 

We may believe we make choices influence only by our “will”, but what we do, including believe this, was determined by things preceding us.

 

The free will problem/question is one of the most described, discussed, and answered ones in philosophy. My personal take on it is that it arises from a reification, the belief that the self, or “I”, is an objectively real thing, rather than a purely abstract concept, such as “beauty”.

 

This is not to say that free will, and the self, aren’t useful concepts, but rather that what we commonly imagine them to mean doesn’t correspond to anything actually real.

 

There are limits to free will.

In the usual philosophical question, the existence of free will is true/false – we either have it, or we don’t.

 

When you say’s “limits to free will”, Paul, I believe you mean, more or less, that we don’t always get what we want.

 

If we brake (sic – should be “break”) the law (for whatever reason) we answer to it.

I don’t understand what you mean by this, Paul. People break countless laws often, and are caught at and called to answer for it only rarely.

 

When the mind snaps we are in chaos and obey whatever voices tell us without thought.

You state this as an absolute rule, Paul. I don’t think it is. I’ve known many people who suffered from obsessive thoughts, even prolonged auditory hallucinations, that thought a lot about what the voices told them to do, and did not do it. Suffering a “psychotic break” and disordered thinking doesn’t, in my experience, cause someone to cease to think.

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