I’m happy to engage you in this, but please realize that I have no intention of being adversarial.
We are born with brains that store an immense amount of information based on our experiences. If I’m only doing what my experiences have programmed me to do, then how can truth as an absolute exist? You would have your truth and I would have mine. If absolute truth doesn’t exist, aren’t you saying that the statement that absolute truth doesn’t exist is absolute truth?
If free will is an illusion, then how can anyone be held accountable for their actions? Aren’t they just doing what they’ve been programmed to do? Why have prisons or the death penalty or political parties?
Without free will, love doesn’t exist.
Without free will, hate doesn’t exist.
My experience can cause me to either approve or disapprove of someone’s actions or even their person, but I have to choose to love or hate someone.
People have chosen to love or hate another person completely contrary to their own self interest. This is much deeper than a “computer program” that only promotes self.
Your tagline tells me “Do not let them make you “care” !”
If free will is an illusion, then how can I do that? Won’t I just respond with my programmed reaction? I would have to choose to let them make me care or choose to not let them make me care.
Life, Liberty and the PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.
Humans (and animals as well) are like a heat seeking missile. But instead of seeking heat we’re built and programmed to seek HAPPINESS. So we are single minded Happiness seeking missiles. Every decision and action each one of us takes is because we think that it will make us happier (or less unhappy) in the long run (and for some the long run can extend into an afterlife).
There isn’t a single definition of happiness that applies to everyone. Each one of us gets to determine what we THINK will make us happy. And that determination is made by our rational and emotional brain that WE WERE BORN WITH and that might have changed as we grow up. WE HAD NO CONTROL OVER THAT, we didn’t get to choose.
Though each one of us has our own sense of what makes us happy, certain needs like, hunger, thirst, shelter, etc. we all share and want to satisfy. Others higher in the Maslow Pyramid tend to be more personal and are dictated by our “hardware” and what we have learned over the years.
We are made up with physical and emotional sensors that define our “state of happiness” at any point in time.
Now if we happen to find ourselves in a state of relative “unhappiness”, what do we do? Well we try to pinpoint what’s making us unhappy. Maybe you’re hungry. if so, your brains starts to go to work to solve that problem. If you’re a baby you instinctively (preprogrammed) start crying and suddenly food appears. So you learn a valuable “cause and effect” relationship that might come in handy next time you’re hungry. Once you learn to talk, and you’re hungry, your mom may have a talk with you and tell if you hungry you should ask her and not cry and maybe to teach you that lesson she wont give you food until you ask for it. So another lesson in cause and effect is learned. As we grow older more and more of these cause and effect “realities” (how the world works) are learned.
So in essence what we are is a happiness seeking, cause and effect pattern recognition machine. We store in our brains thousands of cause and effects data points and put them to use when similar situations arise. But sometime we also experiment with new ones.
So whenever we decide on a course of action to pursue happiness (which is a constant), ie, EXERCISE OUR WILL, what we’re doing is searching our memory bank for past situations similar to what we’re facing in the present and determine what course of action caused a desirable effect and judge whether that might work in today’s circumstances. If we decide it would than we “WILL” ourselves to do the same, if not we may try something else, even something totally new. All of this deciding is done using the “hardware” we were given at birth, over which we had no control.
Now, not all of us were given hardware that are as rational as what I just described. Many of us tend to rely more on emotions than rationality. In which case, if hungry, an emotional person unconcerned about consequences may just walk into a grocery store and steal what he wants and run away.
Bottom line is this. Free will implies that we are not dependent on the “hardware” we were given. That anyone of us, regardless of hardware is free to make any choice and is not bound by his makeup.
As I showed above, people use the brain they were given to arrive at the choices they make, based either on rationality or emotions. There’s nothing else for us to use, unless you fabricate some nonexistent, undetectable, figment of imaginations.
I’ve gone long enough (too long). But if you apply this model to the questions you asked me you will find the answer. If not I’ll answer them in another post.