hahah well that really sucks for me then :/ thanks for the comment anyways haha

Interesting, I don't know about free will itself but I can tell you that at a certain level of reality there is strong evidence to suggest determinism is not a tenable assumption - look up bell's theorum. I dont know the implications of that for the macroscopic world but it would be interesting to see what sort of speculation (within academic physics community) has gone on for that topic.

Hi Tiffany, sorry if this seems slightly long.

If I rewound back time, repeated the exact same experiment, given the exact same configuration of atoms in your brain, your current mood and personality and character, would there be any chance that you chose the carrot instead? If so, what changed? Is it just quantum luck? — tiffany

I think the core issue with the free will debate is that you assume a mechanist philosophy where everything can be described as mechanical and then quickly notice that our higher level vocab (folk terms et al) quickly feel out of place. Which is why compatibilist philosophers see free will as a type of language game and it is the underlying physical processes that allow an action to be possible. The stuff about your heart might be said to be impeding your will since you are physically aware it is. Someone who lacks a will might not notice their personality has altered or their actions are being restrained.
And they (the compatbilists) do have a point (even if I do not necessarily agree), it's easy to control your personality on demand. I can act differently depending on the people I'm with (like I can behave differently at a work function than I am with my family or boyfriend ect). You don't need knowledge of biology, chemistry physics et al to complete these actions. The stuff about your heart you posted seems that you have knowledge of it impeding your actions or ability to have full control of your personality. A lack of free will would show ignorance of these issues.

In free will experiments, people are demonstrating their free will by consciously volunteering to do with the experiment anyway. Someone without the ability to do this due to brain injury or whatever could be describing as lacking the same freedoms others have.
So when when you assume everything is mechanical you can't ever get any sort of freedom (whether it be compatibilist or metaphysical) because you only have mechanical descriptions including schotastic (random) events.

In dreams, we are merely spectators of actions we do. — tiffany

Dreams seem to be a good example of conscious control, since you can separate the parts you did not volunteer to to the parts you do volunteer to. EG: in lucid dreams you can voluntarily complete acts which is contrasted with the dreams where you don't.
You might be interested in reading about Wilder Penfield's brain experiments for more on this.

I don't think I can distinguish myself from my mind, or my personality. Am I in control of myself? I can be, for all practical purposes, if I concern myself only with things in my control and exercise discipline and intelligent judgment.

We're required to make choices in life, and it's possible to consider which choice is better than others by evaluating consequences, circumstances, means and ends, and make a rational decision. Therein lies our freedom, such as it is.

My stand is that we have little control over our personalities and our own actions. — tiffany

You’re conceding to something by saying “little control” rather than “no control”.

I can agree that we have partial but not full control over everything which we are at any given time: there’s genetics, there’s environment interacting with the former, and there are all the previous choices whose outcomes have accumulated into one’s present mind and character. At any present moment, we hold no control over any of these (here considering time travel to be fiction) This, however, is not to then conclude that one is devoid of responsibility for who one has become, hence is, and for who one will further become.

Regarding responsibility and metaphysical compatiblism:

To be clear, I’m interpreting responsibility at its most general to be, in short, the metaphysical ability to respond to givens—irrespective of whether these are physical or metaphysical (like responding to laws of thought by concluding a contradiction to be an error of reasoning, rather than a true contradiction; etc.).

No form of responsibility can logically occur in the complete absence of freewill. Hence, no form of agency. Hence, no form of “I” or “thou”; no praise; no blame; no authorship to actions, choices, and the resulting effects; etc.—therefore, no such thing as ownership of one’s own mind or personality. In the complete absence of any type of metaphysical freewill, it would logically all merely be just one more link in an infinite causal chain or web of causal chains—this where causal determinism is endorsed. No starting source for this causal chain can be and, hence, no responsibility for anything whatsoever can be logically ascribed.

This metaphysical topic of responsibility is a thorn in the side of both causal determinism and causal indeterminism as both are most commonly understood today—for neither accommodate such a thing as metaphysical freewill and, thereby, any viable causal mechanism for responsibility.

It may be easy for some to brush this logical necessity of causation under the rug by brandishing all awareness of responsibility as illusory. Yet so doing, when rationally appraised on its own terms, leads to a rational unintelligibly of everything that is, just as much as Zeno’s paradoxes of motion do. In part, this is because everything that is is known via the lens, so to speak, of agency and its response-ability. As one example, the very claim that “I/you/we/they know/presume/opine/etc.” is one of agency endowed with response-ability to some given. In this example, the response is that of knowledge, or presumption, or opinion held for which the given agency is understood to hold a metaphysical authorship.

It’s important to here distinguish agency, and hence responsibility, from any indeterminism wherein effects are understood to be random. Though the metaphysically free choice is not deterministic and can thereby be understood as indeterministic—i.e., not deterministic—no responsibility can logically hold when actions and choices are metaphysically random.

Notwithstanding, the very same presence of responsibility, or agency, likewise logically requires the presence of specific effects determined by specific causes—i.e. the presence of some type of non-ubiquitous causal determinism. For an agency to act or decide anything, the activity needs to have determinate outcomes of one form of another if responsibility is to in any way remain valid. Hence, if X is responsible for Z, then X a) must have itself held a causal role in the outcome of effect Z—with the causal role somehow stemming from X and not merely being one aspect of an infinite causal chain—and b) this causal relation between X and Z must itself be in some way determinate, hence fixed, thereby leading back to X as the source of responsibility for Z. Otherwise, again, no responsibility for effect Z can be logically ascribed to agency X as the reason for Z’s being. This to keep things simple and not address a requirement for a relatively stable causal determinism in the environment one makes choices within.

This is a summative paraphrasing of David Hume’s argument for metaphysical compatibilism. An argument whose validity I acknowledge.

We don’t assign responsibility to a wind-blow rock’s resulting into an avalanche because the rock is not a causal source of the outcome, no more than is the wind which blew it, or the global atmosphere which caused the wind to so move, etc. We assign responsibility to everything from Fido digging holes in the backyard to our political leaders’ effects on our collective wellbeing due to the presence of a non-ubiquitous causal determinism interacting with a non-deterministic causal mechanism which we term “free will”. (Unfortunately, there’s a far greater probability that Fido recognizes he did something he shouldn’t have done when chastised for digging holes in the backyard than that our political leaders ever recognize that they are capable of, and thereby culpable for, errors.)

In short—and here overlooking the causal mechanism of the physical world we inhabit—if we’re to in any way be validly responsible for anything, including our own being, then some form of metaphysical freewill must hold presence … and, along with it, some form of causal determinism—one that is at the very least applicable to freewill caused choices and their resulting actions as effects.

I believe we are not in control of our actions is our dreams. — tiffany

This statement gets at a contradiction in your thinking: Who is directing the dream you are having if it is not you? Aliens? It has to be you.

The thing is, (in my supremely humble opinion) we mistake our conscious mind for our "being". Our conscious mind (the you that thinks she is reading this) is obviously only one part of our being, and the WHAT and HOW of the critical things that happen in our heads is not made available to the conscious mind--mostly it's just the results of the mind's operations. You don't know how, for instance, your brain went about concocting the post your wrote. I don't know how my brain is concocting this one, but, at least several parts of my brain are telling my ten little fingers what to do, without my conscious attention. I'm reading it for the first time. Literally.

So it seems like we aren't in charge, but only because we have limited "who we are" to too small a piece of the action.

Now, it is also true that genes and experience have a lot to do with what we think, and how, and that we had no control over the language group we were born into, who our parents were, who their ancestors were, what socio-economic status our parents had, and a bunch of other stuff. That part is determined.

But as you grow up, you start taking on more responsibility for who you are and what you do, and at some point society says, "OK: that's it. From now on you are 100% responsible for what you do. No more of that 'oh, dear, she was just a minor' business. It's about age 18-21, in most places. From now on, if you shoot a cop, you'll probably hang or spend a long time in prison. The court won't accept any arguments about how the stars, your diet, television, or bad school made you do it. The Judge will say, "it was YOU Tiffany; so guards! Take her away."

Crank, u went to the point. Of course we are in control of our actions. I think people who not believe that want to go away from taking responsabilitues of her lives and keep themselves in a negative victim mindset. Not good.

I think everything that's happening is the exact result of all the things that have happened in the past. — tiffany

In a Newtonian universe, I'm sure this is so. But these days, even scientists don't think things are quite that simple. :wink: The most obvious and pertinent example I can offer is chaos and complexity theory, which considers systems that aren't predictable, for one reason or another. The existence of such systems in the universe seems to counter the predictability you expect?

Yes, I think this is the best approach to this issue. My hand starts moving a quarter of a second before I consciously will it, because my non-conscious mind already made the decision. I find it easier to consider that "I" am a multi-faceted being, these 'facets' including my conscious mind, my non-conscious mind, any bits of the mind the preceding terms don't cover, and my body. All of them are indivisibly linked, and all of them, taken together, produce "me".

So,

Do we control our minds and personalities?

Seen in the context I just described, this question is confusingly phrased. :chin: :wink: Our minds are parts of ourselves; our personalities are attributes or reflections of our minds (the whole mind, not just conscious awareness). If your question means "is my conscious mind in control of the rest of me?", then I think the answer is no. All of you is 'in control' of you.

In a different sense, nothing controls you, not even you. I mean to say that you live your life being you(rself), not controlling you(rself).

In a different sense, nothing controls you, not even you. I mean to say that you live your life being you(rself), not controlling you(rself). — Pattern-chaser

That is a good way of putting it.

There is neurological research that strongly suggests we do not have free will. Our decisions are made in our subconscious before they reach our conscious minds, and our conscious deliberations are just an illusion created by our minds.

The explanation comes from this course I recently listened to.

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/exploring-metaphysics.html

The funny thing is I heard the argument in the early 2000s, from a friend who is a theoretical physicist. Turns out they are friends, as the professor mentioned my friend’s name in regards to calculations on time dilation at the core of Jupiter.

The professor also brings evidence of quantum mechanics into discounting free will. The universe is not viewed as strictly deterministic from our point of view because the quantum nature of our reality is probabilistic, only collapsing into an outcome by observation, but we do not choose outcomes so much as get pulled along.

Is this in someway a Sarte " condemned to be free" issue?

Maybe the scariest thought is that we are in complete control of our lives. And we willingly, out of fear of freedom, find comfort is willingly giving up that freedom to those "conditioned responses you talk about"

Is the real issue that we have complete free will - and are just too weak or scared to believe it ?

Is this philosophy around determinism just another "false faith" or if you are a Camus fan a type of "philosophic suicide"

I almost want to agree, because I noticed contradiction between person's achievements in education ( knowledge not chosen but installed by others) and the same person's inability to logically and reasonably build their personal life, relationships with others, the closest people and family. In fact everything, besides education, may go wrong or very dificult way, that if one was that intelligent those things would be attended to differently and results would be a lot more satisfactory.

I think that we are our minds and personalities. I don't buy the view that we are something separate, ghosts-in-the-machine, a soul that rides around in our head behind our eyes and steers us as if we were meat automobiles.

The way I see it, we are the inner process that's running in each of our nervous systems. That inner process does seem to be self-modifying as it's running. Its inputs don't just include products of the senses but also at least some of its own states.

I guess that I'd define free will as freedom from external coercion by anything external to ourselves (as outlined in the preceding paragraph.). If I behave freely, it doesn't have to mean that I'm behaving randomly. It seems to mean instead that my decisions and actions are the result of my own desires, motives and cognitive process. I wasn't coerced into acting as I did by any external force.

The questions: "Does free will exist" and "Do people have free will" are VASTLY different questions. You seem to be asking the latter. Your question was "How much control do YOU have over your emotions and actions" and if you are to ask that then the answer is that you must have agency. Why? This is because you put "you" in the question. In order to answer this question, you have to define consciousness (you) and any definition of consciousness must include physical sensations. To illustrate, picture in mind your own subjective experience right now. Now take away all the senses. Is there still a "you" left? I am inclined to say no (although Buddhists and Zen monks will disagree and their case is not dismissable but I will not consider it here). Consciousness comes about as a result of physical interactions in the brain and so consciousness AS A UNIT has free will yes. This consciousness can always be broken down to smaller and smaller bits until there is 0 agency left which is why the answer to the question "Does free will exist" is no however if you consider consciousness as a unit by inserting "you" into the question then yes "you" have free will. It's sort of like asking "Does heat exist". The answer is no: an atom only has kinetic energy but if you say "Does this system have heat" the answer is yes because you are considering the system as a unit.