I've been stewing for a while on what "free will" is and whether or not we actually have it. The best definition I can come up with for free will is "the ability to make choices freely", but I doubt that's a sufficient definition because I've never quite had it explained to me by someone who believes it's real. But the thing about the "free" part in free will is that freedom, in any other context I can imagine, only has meaning when it's understood to be with respect to something else. So when people are "free" to drive a car, it means that there aren't any physical or logical restrictions that prevent them from doing so. When people have "freedom of speech", it means that they have no legal restrictions on what they're allowed to say. When you're "free to do a thing", it always seems to mean "there are no _____ [insert quality here] limits preventing you from doing that thing." So like, if we have freedom to make choices, what quality does that freedom have? In what sense does that freedom apply? It can't be a physical freedom in all possible situations, because we can't "freely choose" to lift elephants, or jump to the moon, or give ourselves amazing spider powers. We probably also don't have psychological freedom in all possible senses either, because everything we think appears to be the result of prior experiences or physiological responses to stimuli. We can't "freely choose" to like or dislike particular things; the first time you try a particular food or drink without knowing what it tastes like, your reaction is based entirely on what your senses tell you and how you process it. We can't "freely choose" to understand or not understand particular concepts; when presented with some piece of information, our minds will either make sense of it or not make sense of it, depending entirely on what the information is and how we process it. These processes can change over time, but at the core, how we think and feel about things seems entirely contingent on whatever those processes happen to be at whatever given time. So can we "freely choose" how we process things? I doubt it, depending on what's meant by "we" and "things". When we make choices, "things" generally refers to the options we're evaluating. So we can choose a "thing" to do in any particular situation. But is that choice free from the influence of anything else? How we can establish what "things" to do is limited, if nothing else, by what we can conceive of doing. We can't "freely choose" to draw a square circle because there are logical restrictions preventing us from even imagining to. And once we have a set of what actions we can conceive of taking, we further narrow the list of "things" to do down to things that are favorable. How we do this can depend entirely on what we're doing at a particular time, which in turn depends on what situation we find ourselves in. What's considered "favorable" can be as fundamental as eating or reproducing (i.e. the famous 4F), or as trivial as what flavor ice cream to order. So what is the agent that is choosing the "things" in the first place? The way "we" make choices is, most likely, the result of the physiology and psychology of the brain, and its memory and recall of prior experience. "We" seem to depend entirely on what our brains are capable of. The brain is a machine whose job it is to process information and build models of reality, and if those models are accurate, the brain can then predict what that reality will do by referencing its model. In any given situation, the brain calls on what other experience it has of similar situations, and considers what it can predict about what will happen as a result of any of the "things" it can choose from. It seems that "we" are so at the mercy of what our brains do, that they may as well be one and the same, and neurology seems to indicate that they actually are. To say that "we" "choose" "things" "to do", if evaluated this way, is to say that "brains draw on prior experience to select actions which have predictably favorable outcomes and execute them to the best of their capability". Which doesn't sound super "free" to me. No matter how I slice it, it appears that the choices we make are always within limits, and those limits are either external and can't be influenced by our actions, such as physical restrictions; or internal and automatic, such as logical restrictions or our tendency to choose that which is favorable over that which isn't (which in turn may be a physical restriction, as our evolution requires it). Do we have free will? Can we freely choose what to think and how to act on it? Probably not. (tl;dr: I have a lot of extra liquor and need to drink it before it spoils)
I was torn between Anubis and Fenrir as the one true doggy god. You only get to be a candidate if you can defeat both of them in mortal combat.
Every time I drink something with blue dye I get green diarrhea. Just thought I'd share that with y'all.
The more episodes of Spiral I watch, the more I FREAKING LOVE IT. Also... Spoiler ALL OF THIS SONG. ALL OF IT. It's like the Spiral version of Ace Attorney's 'Cornered'
