/lit/ - Literature

>>12304142
>To most people free will means that you can deliberately chose between option.

Exactly, like most debates this ultimately boils down to how things are defined. If we clearly define the things we are talking about, much of the debate goes away (maybe transforming into a debate about the definitions). When I say that I have free-will, I mean that I am the one making my own decisions. This is entirely compatible with determinism: even if my decision was pre-determined, it is still me who made it. Maybe we can debate the nature of self/ego (Is there even a definite "me" making the decisions?), but that is an entirely different debate from the freewill/determinism debate.

The debate arises when free-will is implicitly set against determinism, for example, when it is treated as something magical and beyond universal law. Occaisonally it is cast more scientifically (e.g. Libet experiments) in which people are argued not to have free-will because they aren't aware of having reached a decision when brain readings show that their brains have already decided. While experiments like that are interesting, they nonetheless still show decisions are made internally. Even if I'm not aware of them, the decisions were still made in my own mind (just unconsciously).