Free Will

What is free will? Does it even exist? How is it important to you as a person, and what you do?

I've made a brief video on the subject and I hope you'll all check it out.

Comments

[SpitFlame]

Also, our entire legal system is predicated on the assumption that we have free will, religious or not. Even if free will isn't real, not believing in it en masse would be a really impractical thing to do and would probably entail some freaking bad consequences.

On another note, you should seriously read The Brothers Karamazov if you like philosophy. It has themes of free will in it and I personally regard it as the greatest achievement in literature.

[D48]

...Yeah, no. Nothing dispels this argument quite like the science of psychology and manipulation. With a tiny number of exceptions who are literally classified as having a mental disorder for this, people basically never use reason for decisions, especially the big decisions you are talking about. I'm not willing to try to present the facts here because I'm not confident in my ability to do so effectively, especially considering people literally write books on this topic because there's so much material, but I strongly recommend reading Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) writing on the last election because he did a great job presenting this with clear examples of the science in action. I know he's got a book coming out on it at the end of the month which might be a good way for you to get up to speed on this, although I personally don't feel like it's going to tell me anything two years of his blog posts didn't so I'm not going to buy it.