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RE: IN DEFENSE OF FREE WILL.

in #writing7 years ago

One of the questions that has always bothered me is, what is the falsifiable hypothesis in the free will debate? How would we know it doesn't exist? This all comes down to how we define it and life so many things such as soul or god, I don't think there is a clear univocal definition. Nontheless, conversations often come down do to determinism or super-determinism. What is the alternative to that? Stochastic systems? Assuming that there is such a thing of true randomness (eg a deterministic explaination for Bell's inequalities, such as retro-causality, does not obtain), is this tantamount to free will? To the contrary, I think it flies in the face of the very reason we often ask the question in the first place: we want to know that we have some impact on the world. Living in a world where cause and effect are reliable is essential to projecting will. Chance mutes it. So there lies the dilemma: we cannot exercise will without some determinism but too much determinism also makes us feel impotent. Perhaps the mistake was tying will to determinism in the first place.