Welcome to Gaia! ::

What is your view on free will, does it exist? Can it exist? Is it really free? What do you base this view on?

I'm not really sure. That would depend on if you believe in fate or destiny. If you believe in those, then there really is no free will, is there? Because if everything is predetermined, then it will happen either way.

However, I feel that you can conciously make descisions in your life, so you can kind of choose where you will go in life. I say kind of because there are things like family, health, education, etc... that can restrict what you do become, unless you are really extrodinary and challenge the system enough to rise above it. It seems to me that there are certain paths you can take in life, and it's up to you to decide which ones to take. For example, I have considered suicide before. Had I actually tried to go through with it, I might not be here, I might be institutionalized, I might be somewhere far away from here. What is certain is that I wouldn't be quite the person I am now, because I would have decided that my life was worthless and have tried to destroy it. As it is, I decided that it wasn't, and so I'm here today with a few good friends and lots of problems, but fighting through it. The question is though--was I always meant to decide that I was worth it? Or is there another, 'parallel' world that has a Cirendia that never existed? It's hard to think about these things, because if we took that view then there are an indefinite amount of parrallel worlds that have different outcomes.

I'm getting off topic.

Is free choice really free? I wouldn't think so. Every choice we make falls upon us usually, so even if we make the decision 'freely' the burden of having made that choice, good or bad, falls upon us. Also, there's always the wonderful peer pressure that comes from loved and not loved ones that try to sway your decisions, making them less from free from biased views.

My Introduction:
I think that the ideas of free-will is varied, and that views usually go from one extreme to the other. I believe in an 'ultimate goal' and little 'goals' that we are striving to accomplish, but we ourselves get to choose our paths. In a sense 'all roads lead to Rome', or in this case 'All paths lead to the ultimate goal'

"Concepts" of Free Will:
Some people quest for completely-free will with nothing holding them back. People like this want to be able to move and speak without being penalised or having to answer to somebody, But even this is not true 'free will' (I'll explain in a minute). The other end of the spectrum is that we are all puppets in a sense, being dragged and tugged in a certain direciton by 'destiny' and or/faith. Usually the people that have this idea hope that whoever is leading them is leading them down the right path.

Reasoning:
I do not think that free will is 'truly' free, due to scientific reasons. We will always have somehting holding us back, it's simply a matter of physics. A person without help cannot fly, they cannot disobey gravity, something to hold us back, and thus we are not free.
As well, there are so many laws an influences from outside sources that even our subconscious minds are being 'infused' with others ideas and beliefs, thuse disrupting our free will. An example, those catchy commercial jingles or theme-songs from shows, we may forget about them, and yet years later we will remmeber them. They are not stopping us from doing something, but they are there and we could not truly forget them.

Logic:
With all of this said, True Free-Will could only exist in an area of no influence, no other people or stimuli, where no physics would be applied. Since this is incredbly hard to come by...I would say we live in a free-will 'free' zone.

Free will is the ability to make decisions about one's actions. Depending on wether you believe that everything is predetermined or not, there are two ways in which the way we live now could work.

First, if everything is predetermined, people are fated to make certain decisions. In this case, in any given situation, a given person can only make one decision.

Second, if we do indeed have free will, people simply walk the path of life and can make any one out of a selection of decisions for a given situation. For example, I could have chosen to reply to this thread or lurk. I chose to reply.

Now, I could argue both sides of this. I could say that being the person that I am, my character being such as it is, I had only one choice, which was to reply. I am the type of person who likes to put in her own thoughts and take the chance of being contradicted. So, my brain would never go against itself and lurk.

There is a theory that from the beggining, wether that was caused by God or the bib bang, every cause had one effect. The beggining caused the earth to be in a certain place, and that place happened to have a perfect climate for life. One celled organisms multiplying caused evolution. Evolution brought humans. Humans were the cause of machinery.

I can argue on the side of that theory. However, I can also argue that people have very complex brains. It has been scientifically proven. But despite those complex brains, we do not know everything. As a matter of fact, we do not know anything. But that's off topic.

We do not know everything. Therefore, we will not always make the decision which our character promotes. For example, although I strongly dissaprove of lying, I might slip and tell a lie. That is unpredictable. Furthermore, there are so many different causes and effects happening at this very moment. Any one of them can collide with another purely by coincidence, and set off a whole new chain of unpredicted events.

Moreover, people react in different ways to life. People might, despite the natural human inclination for wanting to know everything, choose ignorance. Therefore, they will not expand mentally as they should, causing them to react in different ways to different situations than if they had chosen to learn more.

I do not know wether everything is a chain of predetermined events or not, but I do know that the world is not black and white. Everything has a shade of gray to it that will not fit into a perfect rule. Wether you choose to judge life by the black and white aspects of it or the gray ones affects everything around you. Domino chains, so to speak, branch off of you in many directions. But in the end, they will lead you to the same place: the one you choose to go to.

Now, wether that choice is yours or another domino in the chain is left for you to discover.

Wow everyone here is really smart, I feel so out of practice with philosophy. All I can guess on each subject is donate my own personal thoughts and views.


I think we've basically been given a branching path, with options and rules outside of what we know. Fate is a coin- it has two sides, but because it has no definate dimension it can have many more.

If humans are neutral then we have a choice of a good or evil path to take, eventually we'll be more of one way. But I believe in balance, and it is always maintained. So you do something good, its gonna be balanced with something bad. You don't get what you give, you get the opposite. Otherwise everyone would do good, and good would always be good and we'd always get good things in return, and everyone would be happy.

I'm kind of even confusing myself here. This is my first time in this guild, but I enjoy the practice.

To say the least, the post was freewill, but it helps my mind from slipping.

Here's where this gets fun: I have two opinions.

The first being that destiny exists, but in a beaded manner. Meaning that certain events must occur, for what ever reason, and it doesn't matter how they come about, their consequences, or even who fulfills them (the 'if Hitler didn't do it some one else would have' argument).

The second is that we have complete and utter decision about what we do. True free will. And, given we truely believe in our freedom, we have the freedom to 'strategicly break' the laws of physics.

But, I also have this leaning towards another idea. One that states that are actions are not our own, but that of a puppet master of sorts that exists on a subconcious level.

Who know.

I wrote a little thing on this once, but it was only like half a page long, but here we go:


Free will is not a factor of destiny, I think, because I don't think that destiny or pre-determined actions are real or in effect in any way. You see, if everything was governed by destiny, how would they be controlled? By a god? or by some unseen, great force? Yes, and what force is this? I don't think this is true, because the existense of a greater being makes no sense to me. If you take a look at christianity, the whole thing is based on a human arrogance, and focuses only on humans, and not the rest of the organisms on this planet. So in other words, as far as christianity goes, destiny does not work, unless all the stuff on this planet centres around humans and every action made all part of God's little ol' 'plan' to better this world for humanity. If that makes any sense. I don't know that much about other religions, but all in all, the existence of a god or superhuman entity goes against scientific reasoning.
Now, like someone else said, free will is restricted in some ways to gravity and flight and other things like that. But as far as actions and decisions go, anything on this planet that has any sort of processing unit inside of it, has the free will to do whatever it wants. Now, I guess sometimes things are just going by instinct, like the flight-or-fight response; sometimes organisims will play dead to avoid danger, others will run, others will stay to fight (adrenaline, neh!?). I don't mean to elevate humans, but our brains I guess are further developed than other organisms, and so we can choose to, in the face of great danger, not run away, but to stand our ground, and fight, or die, if that is what we wish. But I'm sure that spotanaeity such as this does appear in, shall I say, 'lesser' organisms, because it all depends on the brain structure and what parts of it are being used.
Pretty much, I guess any sort of choice depends on how one's brain is constructed and utilised. Like great mathematicians use other parts of their brains to calculate mathstuffz (right!? I saw this somewherz) than average math-skilled people do. And so, going off of the basis that our brains and our bodies our purely a result of our parents's progeny, free will is only how our brains work and what parts of them are more developed and used more often

Free will...meh. Will. It controls our actions, yet obeys our commands.

Free will is the Force.

I'm also very tired, so don't take much stock in what I say. I'll probably be along tomorrow with an argument that actually makes sense.