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  1. Home
  2. ›Constructive Skeptical Philosophy
  3. ›Free Will is an Incoherent Concept

Free Will is an Incoherent Concept

C
chetin
Constructive Skeptical Philosophy
·...
psychology · 0.6

Free will is defined as the ability to make choices that have no dependency on anything in the universe. Literally not anything: not your past, not your experience, not your knowledge, not your upbringing, not the people who are around you, not your culture: freedom depends on nothing.  No fact about any existence would constrain your choice in any way. The way this is usually described is that you could go back to some point in time, when the universe was exactly as it was the first time around, and make a different decision. If the will depends in any way on the state of the universe, you would never be able to do this.

We think we have and desire free will, but in fact free will would be pretty horrible. It would mean that your choices might have no dependence at all on whether the choice was good or bad. It is quite important to make choices that in fact depend on the way things are. A choice that has no dependency on anything in the universe is essentially random.

Instead, we have and desire self will.  That is, our will should be determined by ourselves, by what we have learned, what we desire, and what our culture has taught us.  We don’t want undetermined choices, but instead we want choices determined by ourselves.

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psychology
philosophy
cognitive-science
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