Internet bots are blurring the lines of who is real and who is not.
Not sure how the image of God makes us the same as a cell phone. There could be an analogy between how God made us, and now we are making cell phones with elementary AI.
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If your choices (which are actions) are not free then everything you are follows from things external to you. And that would mean that the responsibility for your actions is also external to you and then the philosophical problem of evil would exclude the existence of a good all-powerful God. That is after all the theological point of the idea of free will.
Free will does not mean a freedom from influences or a freedom to determine events. But free will most certainly means self-determination ā making some choices about who we are from which our actions derive. Without any freedom in any of our choices there is no such self-determination. Everything we are would then be a product of external forces. So the question as I have outlined in my previous post is how can we be the cause of our choices and yet our choices be free. This is impossible in a system of causality which is exclusively time-ordered.
A person cannot act without being caused. Not only are we contingent beings but we act in response to things. The issue is whether a personās choices are entirely determined by what we are, because if so then they are not free, and we are but one domino in a chain of events. There is no free will within a system of causality which is exclusively time-ordered.
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Iād have to agree. Looking at it from the whole makes more sense than wondering how the parts could have been assembled to produce the whole.
Would always have said the same. But Iāve started looking at the possibility that matter/energy and consciousness as incommensurables might be equally basic. What works for predicting the behavior of energy and matter may have no bearing when it comes to consciousness. It isnāt that Iāve become convinced this is true but neither am I convinced that consciousness can be derived from or built up from matter and energy. I think either side of that argument needs justification but it is the assumption that consciousness must be derivable from matter/energy should be the default position that I reject.
@Isaac_Bernabe_Duarte @heymike3
Thus I believe in free will within a system of causality which is not time-ordered. We have free will because we become the person embracing the reasons for our choices. Thus it is our will because we become the cause of those choices. And the choice is free because it is not determined by what we were. This is not the time-ordered causality we have in modern science, but philosophers have not been likewise been confined to such an understanding of causality. One of the first discussions of causality by Aristotle described four different kinds of causality only one of which is the time-ordered sort.
But if we look at the world in terms of time ordered causality alone as we do in the scientific worldview, then what would we expect to see if the free will I have described does exist? We would expect there to be events which have no cause in the pre-existing conditions which determine what happens. And this is exactly what we do see in quantum physics ā some events have no hidden variables.
I havenāt been able to follow every word in the thread so I might have missed your response to what I said earlier:
āThe action is caused. The issue is whether a person can act without being caused.ā
I am the cause of snapping my fingers, and I am capable choosing any natural or real number.
I do not become a person in doing this. I was a person prior to the act. And the act is perfectly determined by me.
I am not going to repeat myself when you only have to go back one post to read my response to this.
We are creatures of habit, so not all our actions are an employment of free will. Why do you say snapping fingers or choosing a number? Another might have said smiling or clapping their hands, and if you do these now then is free will or just a response to what I said. Or is it that you donāt do them because you are habitually contrary. The evidence tells us that we can be a little naĆÆve about which things we do are a matter of free will ā our brain already deciding what we are going to do before we are aware of what we are going to do. So free will is not as straight-forward as you suggest.
Thanks. Somehow I missed the notification.
All Iām saying is that I can do that. Not always. But it does happen.
No logical conundrum as you previously claimed.
Denial is a very poor answer to the reason why so many people do not believe in free will. The point is that this reason why so many people do not believe in free will does have an answer. Yes our subjective experience of free will is rather obvious and I consider philosophical rhetoric denying such a basic human experience to ultimately be a direction of philosophy which is pointless ā useless in dealing with the human condition. But this doesnāt change the fact that people do think in this way. My answer to a claim that they donāt have any such basic human experience is that free will is neither uniform nor universal and thus it is quite possible that they do not have much/any free will. As I frequently explain sin and habit tend to destroy our capacity for free will and refusing to believe in free will could well be one of those habits.
For example, one such cause is heat ( a bombardment of molecules and radiation as well as an absence of anything which rapidly conducts the heat out of your body). In liquid helium, I doubt that any intention to snap your fingers would be realized and I wonder if you would even manage a thought for that matter.
Yes, there is irony in that. Then they shouldnāt object and hold anyone responsible who vandalizes their car or breaks into their home, for example. They should just shrug and say āOh well, que sera.ā Maybe itās a subconscious (or not) desire to exclude themselves from any ultimate moral responsibility.
I intend to snap my fingers and it objectively happens. Or I can choose a number. Not rocket science.
Who is in denial?
āWe have to believe in free will, we have no choice.ā I.B. Singer 
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It could be that our terms and reasoning about this have been muddled by bad philosophy.
I am quite clear that the ability for a person such as myself to freely act and choose is limited in scope, but it is possible.
People who ignore the diversity of thought on a subject and refuse to understand the difference between reality and the way they choose to understand it may not be considered to be in denial until they acquire an education. But people who refuse to acknowledge the scientific evidence and insist on mind numbing simplicity in dealing with a question are definitely in denial.
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Basic human experience says the opposite, but I understand ā you had to say that, you had no choice. XD
Sounds to me like you are the one who is in denial of what it is to be a personā¦ made in the image of God.
God is a person with freewill, right?
the question is
that the computational theory of the mind, the moral paradigm, converts the results of our actions into the last piece of the previous cerebral domain, which frees the individual from guilt under the excuse of the determinism of his actions and the theories that mix that with quantum conventional thing that if it is admissible for the current scientific community, they give the mind a limiting condition as it is a probabilistic theory, so perhaps it reduces the limits of the mind in terms of optimization, let us remember that quantum computers are inexact and worse still, very weak before noise, at least normal quantum computers, computational theories of mind reduce the individual to the character of an object, a very complex but indistinguishable one from a rock, that is, it can be hurt without any moral consequence, just as there is nothing wrong with kicking a stone, tends to nihilism and therefore to the exaltation of hedonism as the ultimate good and is deeply amoral in my opinion and It is unacceptable, that is why I put myself in the hands of the only current scientific alternative, the Penrose Hameroff hypothesis, however rare and improbable it seems, although we exist and are alive, something that in terms of probability is much more unlikely than the existence of this structure, which is a single thing not a system like our body that in terms of probability is much rarer, any alternative that gives us back human dignity, the meaning of life, and the guilt of our actions will be well received.
Actually, we never do anything that we do not want to do. It may be the lesser of two extreme undesirables, but it is still what we want to do instead of the more undesirable option.
And then thereās this ā all we need to want (check out that subtitle 
, an apparent oxymoron 
): Desiring God.
The meaning of life is to become Godās children through the atonement provided through Jesus, covering and erasing our guilt. God wants, no, demands that we become like little children. (Do you know any little children that think their lives are meaningless? No, that is taught or learned from the world.)
Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.
Mark 10:14-16
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Yes, you are right, but how do I come to atone for my sins? If these do not exist because of my inability to decide, the fact that the ability to decide is very important for the meaning of life, I do not know if you are capable of seeing it.