Depends on the situation. If we, as you say, try to judge the amount of freedom while driving a car, there's still little actual freedom as such. Yes, you are the one controlling the car, but most of the time you're merely reacting to the situation - if the lights are green, you keep driving. If they're red, you stop. And, to tie this in with the main theory, even your style of driving and such aren't really chosen by you - it's again your past experiences and your personality that's influencing it.Darth Wong wrote:In any case, I don't see why free will should require that one is completely "unconstrained" by external influences, to use the second part of your definition. When you drive a car, 99.99% of the car's actions are dictated by its inherent structure, the laws of physics, the actions of other drivers, traffic lights, laws, etc. In effect, you are heavily constrained by the nature of the car. Does this mean that you have no control over the car's movements? Of course not.
Well, how free of external constraints can anybody be? If outside influences mold one's personality, and our personality is what constrains one's decisions, isn't everybody being constantly constrained by outside influences? (with the possible expection of people who spend their lives in deep meditation or something similiar)Darth Wong wrote:Freedom is not a simplistic all-or-nothing proposition. There are "degrees of freedom", to use an engineering term, rather than drawing a false dilemma between zero freedom and total freedom. You don't need to be completely free of external constraints in order to have free will, which I see as a problem with your argument. In short, your definition is overly strict,
True, and you're right - lack of free will doesn't necessarily lead to predictability. That's not a very big issue, however, as the predictability part was used to prove a point more than anything else. Just as lack of free will doesn't lead to predictability, unpredictability also doesn't lead to the existance of free will.Darth Wong wrote:This is where your argument stumbles into logical fallacies (not to mention unfalsifiable theorems). You can prove that individual behaviour is not free of external influences without necessarily proving that it is predictable, even in theory. There are a lot of systems in nature which are unpredictable even if they aren't sentient at all. What about the possibility of randomness? What about the possibility that there is inherent unpredictability in complex systems? You are making a logical leap from "not completely free of outside influence" to "predictability".
True as well. It is, as you said, a question of definition. I don't think that just because the structure of one's brain is an internal influence, there would be free will any more than there would be if it was an external influence, partly because the function of your brain is still an influence to how your mind works. But fitting that into the second definition is tricky and mostly a question of how one wants to interprete it, I admit.Darth Wong wrote:One final concern is that the distinction between internal and external phenomena is fuzzy. When people start describing the inherent nature of your own brain as an external influence, I would submit that the data is being skewed to fit a conclusion.
Of course, it would be possible to argue that since one doesn't control evolution, and one doesn't control their growth in the womb, how their mind and brain work is an external influence. That, actually, is pretty similiar to the first argument - outside influences create our personality, thus making our personality a creation of nothing more than external influences, and thus isn't as unfeasible as it might sound.
