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.
You are your biological body, in which your unconscious and conscious realms are produced from. You are not the big bang (if you subscribe to that). You are not your dad’s sperm, and you are not anything in between.
I am not a vague entity nor are you.
How so?
Yes actually the previous two comments from anon did…
you ignored a number of posts which talk about how the idea of “choice” is not necessarily at odds with determinism. it’s the choice itself that was determined, the choice still exists and is made…determinism just says that only one choice can and will be made. still a choice.
Well yes, I don’t think your arguments are very compelling. Yet, anyway. So of course.