[Hank Kerchief]

I personally find the word "choice" distorts the nature of reality. Choice connotes picking options from a list. I call this the video game fallacy. In video games you have the impression of free movement, but in fact you are limited a every point by the list of inputs the game responds to

If your meaning of choice were the only meaning and not, as you point out, your own private meaning, it might have the limitations you suggest.

In "reality" choices are limited. One cannot choose to think about or invent from what they have no knowledge of whatsoever or have never heard of. One cannot choose what one does not know is available to choose. One cannot choose to do what is physically or logically impossible. They might say they have chosen to do it, but of course cannot. A choice presumes the thing chosen is possible.

I can understand why you might not like the word "choice," if you believe it has connotations which seem to have the kinds of limitations you suggest, but in philosophy, it has a very specific meaning quite different from that connotation. Another word might be used, like "selection" or "consciously assent to," as in, "human beings must select from all they can think of to do or say, which they will actually do or say," or "having thought of an action or thought, a human being must consciously assent to one before it will happen."

I don't think this reflects reality. There are in reality, opportunities for truly novel actions, truly new inventions, truly new things under the sun.

There is nothing about choice that precludes any of this. In fact, it requires the most rigorously carefully chosen rational thought to bring anything really knew into the world that actually works or is of any value.

Hank

[js1138]

Your substitution of "selection" and "assent" for choice only reinforces my objection. It's true that our actions and thoughts are constrained by physical laws and our intelligence. However constraint is not the same as limitation. What is possible is not the same as what has been previously thought of or done. We can do things that are not on the list.

Hidden somewhere in this is a argument for evolution, in case it hasn't been noticed. Life is free at many levels to do what hasn't been planned or previously done.