Free will: the most under the radar contentious topic

Over the years I’ve talked about free will with a lot of people and I’ve come to realize that not believing in it might be one of the most unpopular positions you can have. It’s a topic that’s right up there with religion and politics when it comes volatility. People have extremely powerful feelings when it comes to free will.

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Free will comes with moral responsibility. So it’s important for the legitimity of the justice system for example.

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Free will doesn’t really make any sense to me. An atom/molecule doesn’t have free will, but when you put them together in a special configuration, that object/organism, which is just a specific configuration of atoms, can decide what it does?

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Its definitely easier to understand but it’s not absolutely necessary. Like if someone had done something wrong and was likely to do wrong again it would make sense to separate them from society. It’s interesting to think about what the world would be like, specifically the justice system if we collectively rejected free will. Things would definitely be more oriented towards rehabilitation.

I was watching a Christian minister trying to reconcile god a free will. He basically just defaulted to Calvinism.

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For Marxism, which inspires a very active type of sociology here in France, there exists a social unconscious that disrupts the human subject’s self-presence.

In this paradigm, there is a tendency to greatly excuse delinquents. It seems to me that this is not the same approach in the United States

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It is not lol 15151

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Free will ?

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This term is used everywhere by everyone with out even knowing what it is.

I don’t know what it is that’s free will :blush:

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I think you said ( or someone here said) that you were a fan of Robert Sapolsky. I am reading his book ‘determined’ I had a moment the other day reading it, where i realised I am not a lone driver who lives in my head, but that the entire environment effects me. Its the first time i’ve truly doubted free will and it was a very relaxing feeling.

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I try to avoid extremes so I choose determinism and free will. Compatibalism. My schizophrenia tells me we’re all robots to a higher being. In my own life I believe I have no free will, but philosophically the rational part of me is at odds with this.

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I think free will is a paradox. We have free will yes, but factoring in that everything has a specific and sometimes unknown chain reaction. We do things freely, but knowing there are consequences to everything. So our choices are based on consequences. So really, consequences rule us,

Bob dylan once said

No one is free.
Even the birds r chained to the sky.

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Quantum foam gives us free will imo