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Originally Posted by Ian To decide something is to choose. That which is non-conscious does not choose as any action is simply the playing out of physical laws. |
You could define a free will decision to require conscious thought, and that is certainly part of the folk definition of free will, but it is arbitrary. Whatever mechanism is proposed to account for libertarian free will could come in two flavors: conscious and nonconscious.
The problem with requiring all free will decisions to be conscious is that you'll be sad when you learn how many decisions you make nonconsciously or semiconsciously, but would like to be decisions that you made freely. Now they cannot be free.
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They don't need to be free. Nay, we don't want them to be free. Just think how tedious it would be if when walking from A to B we had to consciously decide to put one foot in front of another every step of the way.
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And this problem is easily repaired by allowing for free decisions to be nonconscious. Otherwise you just admitted that you've never walked anywhere freely. Even if you claim that you made an initial free decision about your destination, you've lost any control over whether your body in fact walks to that chosen spot.
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What definition of "decide" do you have which allows a human being operating wholly according to physical laws to decide, but which doesn't allow other things operating wholly according to physical laws to decide?
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It would have something to do with having a brain that uses memories and environmental inputs to calculate decisions. It's simply a question of definition.
~~ Paul