Summations Only

The prior state of your brain is the big one. You didn't have enough free will to invent your brain from scratch, you inherited it from a huge combination of things from genetics, your upbringing, the culture you live in, the drugs you take and your medical condition ( to name just those I can think of off the top of my own brain).We also now know - or are at least beginning to understand - that emotions that we call morality are hardwired into our brains from very early in life. Not so much free will then - it's something else, more a flexible but pre-conditioned mind.

Sure, in the sense that you brain is in your head and not someone else's head, it's yours. And also in the sense that you live in your brain which is the sum total of your life experiences plus your inherited genes and that's what makes you you.But you simply don't have the freewill to say, rape a nun, just on a whim. Your brain is pre-conditioned to make that not a real choice for you. (Unless, of course, you're a psychopath with a sex and religion predilection - which is the other side of this argument).You're free to take morally neutral decisions freely, but once you hit on something of moral dubiety, bits of your brain that you have no control over start to make some things difficult to do.Freewill is a religious concept like the soul - it doesn't have a reality of its own.

But the reason you don't want to rape the nun was not arrived at by your choice - your will - it was pre-programmed into you.You are free to override the bad feeling and do it anyway but in some cases, such as this one, you may also not be able to physically do what you are attempting to do as a result of your choice.Your freedom to choose has been limited by your brain before 'you' arrived in it. You live inside a house that the 'you' that you call you, didn't entirely design.That's fine and dandy because you are happy with the you that doesn't want to rape a nun. (And so am I.) I assume that the psychopath with a fondness for nuns is also happy with his you too - or is he?But are either of you totally free to choose? I don't think so, or at least not as much as we think.

There is no puppet master, unless you call evolution the puppet master. Our sense of morality - and it does seem to be something akin to a sense - is the pre-programming and it derives from being social animals.People whose programming goes wrong do not have these moral inhibitors, we call them sociopaths and psychopaths. They behave differently to us - do they have the same free will as you and me? (Real, not retorical question) I run into diffulties all over the place - for a start it's not at all clear what anyone here means by free will, including me. Nor that we're even talking about the same thing. It's a rather slippery concept. You seem to define free will as whatever you want to do. Ok, you think therefore you are etc.My concern with that is that you, like all of us, have our ability to know what we feel/think about, say, rape, prejudiced by neurones in the pre-frontal cortex that have literally and physically made up our minds for us before and very soon after birth. By the age of two, some important parts of our moral senses have been set. It's unlike you to erect straw men in this way.I do not believe that. I'm simply pointing out that our will is not as free as we generally believe it to be. As your man on the Clapham Omnibus would use the term. We have some predispositions that exclude some actions and desires.I am not asking you to admit that you have no free will; I'm suggesting that your freewill is subtley limited.If you define freewill as the ability to do what you want to do, then of course, by that definition, you are free to do what you want to do - but only because you have defined it to be so.My point is that what you want to do (empathise with others, love etc) and not do (rape nuns, sell children etc) has already been at least partially pre-determined at or soon after birth. That does not in any way mean you are a marionette manipulated by a third party, it means that some key elements of you have been pulled up by their own bootstraps.

i think you've forgotten about Fred.EvC Forum: Biology is Destiny?If you get Fred's tumour, are you the same you with the same free will or are you a diferent you with a different freewill? If your definition of freewill is simply being able to do what you want to do, with Fred's tumour you want to do rather different things don't you?

Fred didn't change who he was; he was - in your terms - himself with his own brain making his own choices. His choices would be diferent though. He still has freewill, but his choices are conditioned by his illness.If it's true that our brains are set up to preclude and include moral drives, that they can change during our lives beyond our own control, then the range of what we call 'free' isn't quite as wide and as open as we assume.It's simply a truism that we are free to do what is in our heads to do, but if you exclude how those ideas and feelings arrive in your head to start with, you're making a limited point.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Says the guy who doesn't want to touch identity ;-)

In man in the street terms - which you rightly ask us to prefer - when you use words like me, I, my choices, my personality, my wishes, my mind, you appear to be talking about identity.

Luckily I'm not trying to and neither is it necessary.You wish to define freewill as what you 'want' to do. So under that definition, if you don't rape the nun, we can conclude that you didn't want to.Similarly, if you smile at a child it was because you wanted to. If you didn't, then obviously you wouldn't.You are not asking why you don't want to rape the nun or why you did want to smile at the child. What is it that makes you think you do or you don't want to do things? Presumably you'll say that it is your mind and of course that's true; but it's a very narrow answer because it doesn't get to causation.You can only say that you are truly excercising free will if you have unlimited and absolute control of your feelings and emotions - a kind of Vulcan. If your feelings and emotions are pre-configured to make some things feel good and right and some things feel not fair or plain wrong you are not truly free to choose. So of course you are free to choose what to do but if your feelings about those things is pre-set, then it's a limited kind of freedom.Which is a very good thing indeed because it allows our society to work.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

The absurdum doesn't work here because the nausia you would feel if, for example, you attempted to eat a dogshit sandwich - or, I would hope, rape the nun - happens immediately and is involutary (but is a result of a few million years of evolution).Instead of the nun, try this."Dr A smiled at a child eating an icecream""Oh ... well good for him ... I guess ... why do you mention it?""Well, he had no free will in the matter.""Oh, you mean he didn't want to but couldn't help himself because she was so happy?""No, I mean that he didn't want to.""WTF, dude, WTF?"Empathy is involuntary for most people. I'm sure you could stop yourself smiling at the child if you put your mind to it and thought about it in advance, but your first impulse would be to grin.The Milgram experiments show how far we are prepared to overcome our feelings by excercising our freewill but all involved went through extreme stresst to be able to do what their mind told them not to do. If we had full freewill, our emotions would not apply such pressure, we'd be able to do the wrong thing without have a mental breakdown.Milgram experiment - Wikipedia Yet again, I am not saying that you lack free will, I'm merely pointing out the freewill you do have is not as free as you think. As you have now admited with the phobias.

You'll find that exact situation discussed here with the case of Fred.EvC Forum: Biology is Destiny?(He would be found Not Guilty, imo, but he wouldn't walk free - he'd be sectioned and treated as a patient but not a prisoner.}Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

It is perfectly reasonable to claim that you have freewill in the general, man on the Clapham Omnibus sense. Never said otherwise.But if the man in the Clapham Omnibus happens to be on his way to lecture on neurobiology of the pre-frontal cortex at the Royal London School of Medicine, you'd need to qualify the claim a little.

Nah, you'd rather be right. You'd tell him to get off the number 170 that you're both on at its terminus at Victoria then take the District line tube to Whitechapel.But of course, being a free agent, he may just choose to get off the bus at Victoria and take the Buckingham Palace tour instead. We just can't know......

It would be a weird and interestingly useless, but nevertheles iconic omnibus that confined its operations to within confines of its name.Plucky attempt though

Can someone remind me why we care what the man in the street's definition of free will is? We normally expect a bit more rigour than that.When and why did we get so limp?