Why do I do things even when I don't want to? That is, why do I waste time on the internet when I know I should be studying for exams? If I know I should be studying, why aren't I?

I would distinguish the question why you do things you should not do from the question why you do things you do not want to do. Both are interesting, but the first one seems easier to answer. It's just that sometimes you don't want to do what you should do. That may happen for various reasons. Maybe you don't know what you should do or maybe what you should do involves helping other people but you are selfish. And even if you recognise that there is something you should do for your own good you may just not want to do it. I know that I should floss every day, but I don't do it because I don't want to. The second question is harder to answer. How can you do something you don't want to do? Of course maybe someone is forcing you to do it, but that is not what you have in mind. Nobody is keeping me from flossing, and suppose now that I really do want to floss, because I really do want to take care of my teeth, but still I don't do it. This is weakness of the will. The...

Do we always make the choice we want to in a given situation? My professor said that for better or for worse, we always make the choice that we wanted to make in a given situation. My professor gave the example that a drug user decides to use again because he decided he wanted to, irrespective of whether the choice is detrimental to his health or not, it was his choice. I argued with another example that a person who decides to walk to the store to buy milk does so by choice. But, if he begins to daydream about a final exam he needs to study for and then he forgets why he was going to the store, did he make the choice to not buy milk? Would you say that he made the choice to daydream about his exam? How does one get out of this conundrum?

Nobody thinks that you always want whatever happens to you. I really didn't want to stub my toe earlier today (not even subconsciously), and I think that you can daydream without wanting to. But these are cases where we don't choose. The harder question you are asking is whether there are any cases where we do choose, but what we choose is not what we want. Well, take the reluctant drug user. He chooses the drug because of his addiction, but he also wants not to take the drug. Still, some philosophers say that he must have wanted the drug more than he wanted not to take it. But others say that insofar as what happened was determined by his addiction, it wasn't really a choice but more like the daydreaming case: something that happens to the addict but not something that he chose. And yet others would say that taking the drug was a real choice, but the reluctant addict nevertheless wanted not to take it more than he wanted to take it. Coercion and weakness of the will tie philosophers up in knots.

My question is about the free will problem. I hope it is not too stupid or anything. Many philosophers seem to argue against free will like this: "Either everything has a cause or not. If everything does have a cause, then it looks like you have no free will, because the chain of causes leading to your actions began before you were born. And if not everything has a cause, if in particular some of your actions are uncaused, then that doesn't seem like free will either. It seems just like a random event." This is from what Peter Lipton wrote in another question. I don't understand why if it is true that not everything has a cause, it must also be true that an uncaused event must be a "random" event. Suppose that a Cartesian "soul" caused an event, but there was no prior cause for the soul's causation of the event. That doesn't seem like a random event, it seems like an event which was caused by the soul, but which was not caused by anything else. To me it looks like this would be compatible with free...

In your scenario, the soul caused an event, but nothing caused the soul. But presumably the cause of the event is some configuration of the soul, perhaps a decision it made. Well was this decision caused or not? If it was caused, then there still doesn't seem to be any free will in the frame; and if that configuration of the soul was uncaused -- just came out of the blue -- then that seems random and again not compatible with free will.

I have a question/argument that straddles the free will debate, philosophy of mind and evolution. I hope it is not too bad. Suppose all of our actions are determined by the conjunction of natural laws and the history of the world and thereby we are deeply misguided in our view of ourselves as free, autonomous beings. My question is then, from an evolutionary perspective, why would we evolve to have this illusion about ourselves? Wouldn't philosophical zombies with no consciousness be simpler entities and thereby more likely to evolve? If consciousness does not really have any causal efficacy (in the libertarian sense), why do we have it?

It is difficult to see why a zombie couldn't do all the behavioural things we do, and indeed just as efficiently and effectively as we do. But that wouldn't show that consciousness could not arise through evolution, since it might be that we do what we do with the help of consciousness. But maybe consciousness doesn't even help us do what we do: it's just a by-product of the way we do what we do. But even in this case, it might arise through an evolutionary process, just like the lub-dub sound of a beating heart. But suppose now that consciousness does play a causal role in the way we do what we do. Is there any reason why the specific consciousness of ourselves as a free agents might arise through natural selection? Well (and here I am just speculating) maybe a creature that feels in control tends to do better in the world, and that feeling of control leads naturally to an idea of free will, even if it turns out that the idea is ultimately incoherent. This takes us back to the by-product...

I have a question regarding destiny and free will. I have never been able to decide upon a solution to satisfy my search and stumbled upon this site and decided to see if a trained philosopher would be able to do the problem justice. Do we, in fact, have free will or do we not? There are two views I can think of that would both say that we do not have free will, while the general belief is that we do have free will and that what we do are products of that free will. Assuming belief in a higher all-knowing power exists, then doesn't it make sense that this being would know the future and therefore your actions are predestined simply by the knowledge this being contains and that there is no way of straying off the path that is known for you? The second belief is a more scientific belief in which no higher power is of existence, yet it is undeniable that quantum mechanics exist and that particles all have a set of laws they follow and that whatever started "everything" whether it was the big bang, or...

It is very difficult to see how free will is possible. The problem your second view raises looks like the problem of determinism. If everything that happens in the world, including all human actions, are determined the laws of nature, then it is indeed difficult to see how we can have free will. Now maybe the laws of nature do not completely fix every event, but only the probabilities of various events occurring. Indeed this is the standard understanding of quantum mechanics, which you mention. But even this 'slack', this element of indeterminism, does not seem to leave any room for free will. If my body just happens to go one way rather than another by chance, that is not me acting by my own free will, since I am not in control. The first view you mention is rather different. This is the thought that we have no free will if God knows everything we will do. In my view, this idea of foreknowledge is less of a threat to free will than determination by law. For even if someone knows exactly...

If we were to assume that human beings have free-will, then should we also assume that other animals have free-will? If not then at what point in the evolutionary process can we reasonably place the development of free-will?

Since philosophers disagree about what free will is, this is not a straightforward question to answer. But one attractive idea, due to Harry Frankfurt, is that free will requires that an animal have 'second order desires'. First order desires are desires concerning things, like food or a good book; second order desires are desires concerning desires, like the desire to desire to go to the opera, or the desire not to desire cigarettes. The idea is that having free will has to do with having a certain harmony between first order and second order desires: the animal wants to want what it wants. So if this is along the right lines, then only animals capable of these sophisticated second order desires can have free will. And maybe only humans are animals like that: other animals have first order desires, but maybe not second order desires.

I am having trouble with the classic problem of free choice vs. determinism specifically in the sphere of human responsibility. While I often recognise that there are external factors that can and do bring people to act in various ways, I also find myself impatient with those who are unwilling to admit to a certain degree of responsibility. My problem seems to be that I recognise both not just as possible, but true simultaneously. Philosophically speaking, can this be so?

At the most general level, it is difficult to see how free will is even logically possible, whether determinism is true or not. For if determinism is true, then everything we do follows from the laws of nature plus the state of the universe before we were born; and if determinism is not true, then there is a random element to what happens. Neither of these possibilities seems to leave room for free will. That was the bad news. The good news is that the fact that our actions have external causes is entirely compatible with their also having internal causes, in the form of our beliefs and desires. My consumption of the banana split was caused in part by the presence of that item on the menu -- an external cause -- but also by a desire on my part. If I had not had that desire, or if my desire to lose weight had been stronger, I would not have eaten the banana split. So insofar as the existence of internal causes is enough for us to hold someone responsible (as we often suppose it to be), then...

If freewill is being the sole author of your actions and there is never a point in life in which you are not influenced (i.e., chemical reaction, previous experience, genetic predisposition, bias, preconceived notions, instinct...), then can one really be the author of their action and exercise free will or is hard determinism the only plausible answer? -Eduardo Alpizar

Even if determinism is incompatible with free will, a claim of hard determinism might be false or misleading. It is false if the world is in fact indeterministic. It is misleading if determinism is true, but free will would be impossible even if it weren't. That is, it may be that our ordinary concept of free will is like the concept of a round square, a concept of something that could not possibly exist. If so, it is misleading to put the blame on determinism.

If quantum indeterminacy is true, it proves that we do not live in a deterministic world. But I seem to have trouble with the notion that indeterminancy give you responsibility for your actions and decisions. For example, I am walking into a store and I open the door. There is someone behind me. I can hold the door open for them or I can keep on walking. If quantum indeterminancy is true, than I have the possibility to do both. But am I truly the author of the decision or was the decision ultimately made by something which I had no control over? And is it intelligible to say that the former is even possible?

I'm with you: I don't see how indeterminacy helps with free will. That's what makes free will such a tough nut: we seem to lose either way. If everything is determined, then it looks like we don't have free will, because we could not have done otherwise that what we do. If not everything is determined, then this might mean that some of our actions have a random element, but then these actions hardly seem ours: they certainly don't seem to involve any more free will than under determinism. It's heads or tails; if it's heads, we lose; if it's tails, we lose; so we just lose.

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