I’ve been thinking lately that it is.
The very fact of me making this topic makes it so.
Free will is axiomatic because it is “… implicit in all knowledge, that it has to be accepted and used even in the process of any attempt to deny it.”
There’s actually an old topic in the Premium forum that talks about this. The concept of volition can’t be identified without the preceding axioms of Existence, Identity, and Consciousness, but the *proof* of volition is *ostensive*, based on direct perception, and in that sense it is axiomatic–induced directly from facts instead of deduced from previous conclusions.
The idea of free will vs determinism confuses me, i have never understood its importance (any help would be great). I have noticed that determinists tend to have bad philosophies, while free will advocates tend to have rational philosophies, but i don’t understand the connection. Would there be any bad philosophical consequences if everything was predetermined? I have always wondered why people are so passionate about free will vs determinist debates. I think that the present is an accumulation of past events, and that we are pushed towards the future by past events, rather than pulled towards a predetermined future. I also beleive that people make independant decisions, but in a different sense. Are there any empirical examples of matter behaving in an unpredictable way? If matter didn’t behave in predictable ways, our bodies would be unstable and chaotic, instead of being relatively stable over time. Or do you mean free will in some other sense?
Or do you mean free will in some other sense?
Yes. This isn’t the “free will” of many philosophies which believe that you can create reality by concentrating. It’s more properly termed volition in that you can direct your thinking and thus control things that are dependent upon your thinking. It’s not a mystical mind power. It is not “indeterminate” in the sense of being uncaused or the results being unknowable. It’s just that the cause is not an obvious mechanistic billiard-ball type of action. It’s a complex system that allows us to pick our own causes assuming we go through the effort of initiating the thinking process.
At this stage, *how* volition works is a total mystery. I suspect, but do not know, that it is an emergent property of the many, many activities going on in the brain at the same time. But you don’t have to know precisely how something works to observe that it does and act accordingly.
Determinism means precisely the claim that *every* action in the universe is precisely a mechanistic billiard-ball style reaction and that people cannot direct their thinking. Fortunately, this position is self-defeating because if you cannot direct your thinking, then you cannot take into account any evidence that the determinist brings to you to *change* your ideas. The idea of even attempting to separate truth from falsehood is dependent upon your ability to *do something* about it afterward. So, if we’re determined in this fashion, why talk about it?
No one could actually live their lives in accordance with this belief because there IS no automatic pilot for human beings.
Thanks, that clears a lot up.