Curious George
Veteran Member
You have defined freewill as impossible and then have asserted that freewill is impossible.I have two definitions for this term, but to avoid further confusion I will stick to one for now: The ability to consciously make choices in an unconstrained manner.
By unconstrained I mean not being forced to behave in any given manner by anyone or anything, not even your desires.
Just to put this in perspective: In Christianity, it is common to think that humans have a sinful nature and that it is possible, through free will, to act in a manner that is contradictory to it.
That you can't change the fact that you like chocolate is no problem at all. That merely means your free will is influenced by your tastes, which is not enough to say you don't have free will.
But can you choose to eat something that you don't like even if you don't want to ?
I would say that's not possible. To do something like that you would need to have a higher 'want' that supersedes your unwillingness to eat it. And even though one might say they can choose to have this higher 'want', we eventually get back to the problem of needing an even higher 'want' to do it. Do you see where I am getting at ? This leads to infinite regress, so the only solution to this is that we have to accept there is at least one 'want' that we haven't chosen and that every other 'want' derived from it.
When faced with two conflicting wants one can employ cognition in order to choose between the two.
The determinist will say that employment has no control over the outcome the indeterminist will say that cognition does indeed have control. They are both arguing over whether it could have possibly gone differently. If I dont want to eat something but i want to survive i can make the decision to eat something that i don't want to eat. I needn't have chosen this "higher" want. I just need a conflict for which a choice arises.
You are asserting that the want that prevails is "higher." This entails a value judgment which entails cognition. When we make decisions this is because our cognitive faculties have exerted some degree of control over an event. Not because they have exerted complete control.