[Morality Games]

Quote by: Leveller The assertion that we have free will because we lead different lives is highly missleading, and provably wrong. Free will contains 2 concepts. Firstly 'will', "the faculty of conscious and especially of deliberate action; the power of control the mind has over its own actions" (from dictionary.com), and 'free' "exempt from external authority, interference, restriction, etc., as a person or one's will, thought, choice, action, etc.; independent; unrestricted, able to do something at will; at liberty: free to choose. " In essence, to have free will, you must be free to do what you want, when you want. I make an assumption here, but I'm assuming you cannot fly (unassisted). As much as you may have the will to float above the ground, you cannot physicly do it, thus we have restricted will at best. Furtheremore, we are products of our enviroment, our genetic makeup, and our upbringing. Depending on where you are born in the world, your wealth, oppertunity and liberty varies massivly, and do you have free will over you date and time of birth? Do people born dissabled choose to be born so? Our will and or freedom are at the mercy of so many factors over which we have no control, free will is, therefore, an illusion, a trick played by our concious self-awareness.

The concept of free will you are up against is the classical formulation that there is some faculty of the mind which enables us to exercise absolute power of doing or not doing irregardless of the orientation of our being and the circumstances we find ourselves in.

However, freedom as a concept is fluid enough to be adapted and applied to the will in a deterministic universe in a number of ways, as I did in my first post -- after one acknowledges determinism, all disagreements about free will become semantic disagreements.