Welcome to Gaia! ::

I'm not sure that your point is correctly illustrated by your sentence, "If we had absolute free will, then I could make the decision to fly to another planet so clearly free will is not absolute." I think you're mixing free will with omnipotence; you can make thte choice to fly to another planet, but your ability to carry it out is limited by such factors as gravity.

That being said, I absolutely believe in free will. Humans have instincts, but we constantly go against them, for better or worse. There is then the question, however, of religion. When I was very small, a fellow second grader told me that god knew all of my choices, knew everything I was going to do until I died. I don't like that particular theory, but it is an interesting thought. Are our actions dictated by a higher being? Then it becomes a theological discussion.

Free will is a complex thing. You do have free will, in a limited way. The stream of time and history carries you along, and you must move within the bounds set for you by society. True Freedom of Will and of Choice always must include the Freedom to take the Consequences.

It's all cause and effect. You use your free will to murder someone, and the consequences, pre-set by society and convention, include having to avoid being caught. If you cannot avoid being caught, you must then avoid prosecution. And if you cannot avoid prosecution, the consequences are more dire. But if you can avoid being prosecuted, then there is a certain stigma attached to your name subconciously by anyone who has heard of your trial or doubts your innocence thereof. And if you avoid being caught, you must avoid being caught for the rest of your life.

Therefore, it would simply be better to be carried along by society and history and refrain from killing people, or attempting to break out of the bounds that society has set for your life. More often than not, it will end badly for you.

- First, free will is not ability to do, but ability to think. Our will or what we really want to do and carry out may not necessarily be within our ability. Plus, our minds are part nature and determined by instinct while the other is nurture and determined by what we have learned through our lives. Our will is a direct representation to that and is determined by that. Does that make it less "free"?

- In a since it does, because of the fact of our human condition allowing us to always be in ignorance there is no way that we can ever know everything at once and in that same since make a full and completely 'free' determination of our lives, on top of that we don't know the future (of course if we knew all of the infinite things in the universe at any given moment, we could pretty much know the future) so our determinations are biased for what we know at the time and are made with the knowledge that future events may work opposite of our intentions regardless of what we think about them currently.

- In another since, we are even less free than that because of two other of our human conditions: frailty and death. When our minds lose the power to think anymore, we cease to be us anymore and can no longer make the same determinations that we once did making the us that once was no longer 'free' to make a decision in the us that now exists or no longer does.

The freedom of choice is an illusion caused by interaction of particles and energys in the brain.

Ok, and taste is an illusion caused by nerves in the tongue sending signals to the brain. You still taste, correct? Same thing with all the senses and faculties, including reason. It's possible to break everything into simple chemical reactions, and yet choices change the world.
Thus humans seem to be an interesting example of the whole being more than the sum of it's parts.

... Right, I'll stop arguing if you promise to stop misspelling the word 'particle'.

eek Neutrons have free will!

Seriously though, you still make choices. You could say that humans are always driven by instinct or by nature, like atoms sharing electrons; they do it, not because they choose to, but because they are compelled to do so. However, drinking a Pepsi instead of a Root Beer isn't really nature's decision, it's ours. Perhaps in matters of life and death we simply follow instinct. However, in the small every day matters, we make choices.