So you don’t share the two convictions presented at the very beginning of that introduction? If not, what specifically about those convictions do you not hold to?
A choice is not impotent, it results in something very real. It is a choice.
I don’t subscribe fully to determinism but I don’t disagree with it either. My position on it doesn’t matter.
O_H, could you say more about your view here?
How is it a choice if you couldn’t have chosen differently? And, “my position on it doesn’t matter” indicates a kind of fatalism that aligns itself with the view that choice is an illusion. But maybe I misunderstood what you’re saying there.
I agree that will has no essence and is not an essence, and that will requires a world and a body.
Can will be rewritten or done over until the will is better? I think it can, personally.
If determinism is true I have no problem with conviction #1. Whether I believe in it or not is irrelevant.
For Conviction #2.
“This leads to the second conviction, which contradicts the implications of determinism in nature:
We consider ourselves to have a free will, based on the experience of not being compelled by our
reasons to arrive at a certain decision. Furthermore, our decision doesn’t force us to initiate the
action we decided for. At last, even while performing an action we decided for, we can stop that
action or complete it, which demands a permanent confirmation of our decision to act. Searle
denotes these three experiences as gaps in the course of acting and takes them as an indication for
gaps in the course of cause and effect, which usually determines nature. The gaps we find at the top
level, which includes our conscious process of decision-making and action, must be found likewise
at the lowest level, otherwise they are just an illusion: „If freedom is real, then the gap has to go all
the way down to the level of neurobiology.”
- I don’t agree that we consider ourselves to have a free will based on the experience of not being compelled by our reasons to arrive at a certain decision. This is ridiculous. Why make choices that are not compelled by our reasons? If we do act “on autopilot” or rather, unthinkingly so to speak, we still did so on our free will. I don’t see how changing our mind matters in this debate as well either.
A choice doesn’t require to have the will, desire, or biological makeup as well as experiential influence to choose differently given an identical situation (which is impossible, nonetheless,) but it does require the ability to make a preferred action in a given situation.
That depends entirely on how you define ‘choice’.
You are in a room with 3 doors. The door that you open is determined by your past experiences. If you consider ‘choice’ to be the set of options before you then you have ‘a choice’. If you consider ‘choice’ to be some final result or destination then you don’t have ‘a choice’. The expression ‘you can’t get there for here’ applies when you are looking at the doors. Based on your past experience, two of the doors are inaccessible to you.
Practical application : Mental functions are exploited by magicians and mentalists to do entertaining tricks. These tricks are based on standard human assumptions, reactions and distractions. It is often difficult to do the same tricks for adults and children. A child may not be distracted by the same effects as an adult because they have not yet learned a certain reaction. Similarly a trick that works on a child may appear to be obvious to an adult.
Free will is critical to some of the moral arguments in religion. It doesn’t make much sense to punish someone with hell or reward someone else with heaven if their actions were determined since the beginning of creation. Religion uses free will to load people full of personal responsibility and guilt.
So if determinism is true it’s true and if it’s not it’s not? Umm, I agree. 
With determinism, our choices are compelled by our reasons, and our reasons are likewise compelled by other things. It is all compelling, all the way through. It doesn’t matter if you have “reasons”. The inside/outside distinction that many compatibilists think is important, is philosophically negligible. A deterministic universe doesn’t stop at some arbitrary threshold. If everything is determined, then everything is determined.
With hard determinism there is no such ability.
I already addressed this, simply because the preference is determined subconsciously or unconsciously doesn’t mean it isn’t your preference.
Right. No choice - according to determinism.
I mean it’s not limited to some arcane religious debate. WW3’s dismissiveness of the problem suggests to me that he doesn’t understand the problem.
It does, actually.
At this point, I’m with WW_III
So what is this “you” that is somehow different from its predetermined history?
By the way, I’m just trying to make WW3 understand the position of hard determinism. I’m not selling hard determinism, just as Searle wasn’t selling compatibilism.
Right, so if everything is determined, certain things are accredited with the determining it. If the causal laws of physics pass through your body in which affect you and your organic structure creates an action based on it, for all intensive purposes you are accredited with making that choice, thus determining it, thus you have free will.
Who said they were different?
Are you really satisfied with that? False accreditation of agency to some vague entity that science has never discovered and has no function?
They have to be different, otherwise pretermination is true, which is incompatible with any kind of choice at all. At least, that’s the obvious logic.
That statement just totally ignored everything previous to it in the discussion.