Posted: Nov 28, 2016 2:15 am
Oh, it's easy to 'explain'... after the fact.
Here's the wonderful (and funny) situation, lads and lattices:
The guy freely choosing (rationally) from among realizable alternatives cogitates for awhile, and says, "rationally, I'm going to do this".
"Oh, wait. To prove I have free will, I'm going to do that, instead. No, wait..."
Samuel Beckett wrote a fine little absurdist dramatization of this, involving two fellows named Vladimir and Estragon. Do you see what the problem of 'rational free will' is, yet? Doing nothing is always the rational choice in freedom.
Now, after the filosofeezers have written up their little monographs on free will, with big words like 'compatibilism', and so on, the only heavy lifting that seems to have been done is moving lots of words around.
archibald wrote:The idea was that others would join in, by attempting to counter the 'more choices than a fly' scenario, not that I would prevail.
Well, there you have it, Arch: The fly doesn't have the choice of doing nothing, of inhibiting action. If the fly's action is inhibited, it is inhibited by the action of neuro-inhibitors that suppress the action of the neuro-transmitters. See? If we think about people as collections of molecules, we have something more interesting to think about than 'free will'.
If you could look at the server logs, you'd see this post developed organically, rather than being planned out from the start, and yet it hangs together, does it not?
Nobody with anything really going on upstairs is going to pretend to confront the philosophical question of free will head on, because it's like talking to the wall. We'll be fine if we can just incorporate a little more irony in our discourse, and inhibit the action of talking about ourselves. Yes, we are the authors of our posts, but isn't that kind of obvious?