I've been thinking about this bit for years. It's pretty interesting, so maybe it's worth a thread.
The question: Is every choice a person makes simply the product of countless exogenous factors (biological, etc)? Would this mean that free will is nothing more than an illusion?
What's your take on this? There's a million ways to go about it, but I've always thought it was a fun question to debate/get peoples' takes on.
I don't like this one very much since babies seem to be creatures (heh) that rely completely on biological instinct.
And yeah I feel like the biggest argument (if you even want to call it that) for free will being an illusion is what amime summed up in his post. For true free will you'd need some sort of concept of spirit/soul/raw will that is capable of arbitration based on inspiration and inspiration alone (alternatively, Foxie has a pretty cool idea about randomness being at the core of every individual).
I've heard the theory that a person only has "free will" for the first few years of their life. The choices that they make in the beginning of their lives determine their natural responses to everything else. I'm really not sure how true that is, though. I find the concept incredibly interesting.
yes, the world is mostly-to-fully deterministic and free will doesn't exist
the only source of randomness is quantum mechanics, which physicists are pretty split over. even if there was randomness at a subatomic level, the law of large numbers or whatever prevents it from ever affecting the lives of humans in a natural way.*
*footnote: unless someone builds a computer that bases its decisions on "randomness" and gives it all of humanity's decision making power. lol science fiction
