Simple Muscle Movement - Original Writing

The first statement seems to not make a whole lot of sense right off the bat. You would think that if someone wants to do something but does not do it then they are not choosing their greatest desire. How does your brain tell you what you want? Do you have any control over what your brain says you want? According to what this argument states we do not

Instead believes that it is not that God knows what you will do before you do it, leaving you no ability to choose freely. Instead he argues you exit within time. He also argues that God can want things to happen in two very different ways. Necessarily and contingently. Meaning God creates things by making them to happen necessarily and contingently.

Inwagen starts his article by providing the reader with definitions to the main topics that he will be discussing and arguing for or against. Although inwagen does not provide the reader with a clear definition of freewill, the definition can be taken from the way he presents his scenarios and arguments. After analysing Inwagen’s article, what In my prespective

The selection that I read and analyzed was William James’s The Dilemma of Determinism. This is written in a way to help us understand his point. He wants to “Prove that freedom of the will is true” (Pojman and Vaughn, p. 406). Meaning that in order for us to have free will we must be free. To him it is important that not only that we understand his view but that we should also take on his view and act upon it as well (Pojman and Vaughn, p. 406). If we as people can say that we believe in possibilities, and that we can make possibilities real, and that we have a choice in making the possibilities real then we in fact are acting out indeterminism. His arguments and reasoning is based off of two things. One being that “when we make theories about

Van Iwagen begins to start to solve this mystery by depicting life as garden of forking paths. The past and the present is a straight road leading to many paths, which are all possible futures. When someone has a decision to make with more than one possible choice this person is figuratively facing a fork in the road. This person has free will if more than one option is actually feasible at a given time. One does not have free will if only one choice is feasible, even if more than one choice seems to be attainable. For example, if someone was in a locked room but they did not know the door was locked they believe they have the free will to exit the room when they do not. Therefore some of the time what appears to be a fork in the road actually is not, and there is only one path one is able to take. From this, it can be concluded that there is a correlation between free will and morality. People often say “you should not have done so and so.”

The arguments presented by D’Holbach and Hobart contain many of the same premises and opinions regarding the human mind, but nonetheless differ in their conclusion on whether we have free will. In this paper, I will explain how their individual interpretations of the meaning of free will resulted in having contrary arguments.

Nagel offers the scenario of someone having to choose between a peach and slice of cake. If you choose the peach, it will be beneficial to the weight you were trying to lose, but the cake seems much more appealing so you take it. Later you tell yourself that you could have choice the fruit, but yet you did not. There is no way to entirely know if you would have picked the peach because we cannot go back in time. Your desire for cake (or past experiences) outweighed the needs for a peach. You did not make a choice, it was already

When analyzing the free will/ compatibilism argument, one must choose the argument they agree with the most. In my case, I chose the compatibilist vs. Libertarian free will case, which will provide to broader cases, one with a determined outcome made by some sovereign “god” (Compatibilisim), and the opposite end of the spectrum the idea that nothing can be predetermined (Libertarian). These views contrast on arguments of free will, being that the compatibilist has free will to make decisions that are predetermined through god, where the Libertarian would disagree with that logic and say, how can someone make a choice if his actions are already determined through god.

Many believe that it was not choices but destiny that decided their fate. There are examples of why that is believed. For example, when the letter Friar Lawrence sent to Romeo didn’t reach him and because of that, he had killed himself before Juliet had woken

However, Cone writes about the factors that happen internally through our unconscious. Scientists have proven that we decide what to do before the action reaches our consciousness. For example, Dr. Murphy gave his class three-essay options to choose from and I choose the second option. However, my brain already knew what I was going to choose before I consciously knew and that leaves us with the main question, was it free will? Personally, I would like to believe that I chose this option freely but how Cone wrote in his article, our ability to choose is sometimes decoupled from the actions themselves.

Baron d’Holbach and William James suggest opposite viewpoints concerning the existence of free will. d’Holbach claims that in any given situation, people always choose a course of action they deem to be most beneficial to them. Since their judgment of potential benefits stems from natural, unchanging laws, free will is simply a misconception caused by the great complexity of the variables involved. William James concedes that natural laws may narrow the choices a person considers, but argues that choices with multiple, equally beneficial outcomes render a person’s decision a matter of chance--and therefore free will. Furthermore, he defines the existence of regret as indicating an unfavorable outcome. According to determinism, however, this

contained, and set me back at the door of this hall just as I was before the choice was made. Imagine then that, everything else being the same, I now make a different choice and traverse Oxford Street. You, as passive spectators, look on and see the two alternative universes,-one of them with me walking through Divinity Avenue in it, the other with the same me walking through Oxford Street. Now, if you are determinists you believe one of these universes to have been from eternity impossible: you believe it to have been impossible because

Whether we have free will is widely controversial. The absence of a universal definition poses a primary problem to this question. In this essay, I shall base my argument on a set of three conditions for free will: 1) that the actor is unconstraint in his action, 2) the actor could have acted otherwise and 3) the actor must be ‘ultimately responsible’ (Kane, 2005: 121) for his action. After I have explained them, I shall apply these conditions to three scenarios that cover most, if not any, circumstances that occur when taking choices. The purpose of this essay is to show that if my conditions are true, none of the scenarios is based on free will and thus we do not have free will.

If you were to take determinism as a true representation of life, then that would mean choosing the BMW was already meant to occur and the Honda was never really an option for you. This view may be a little tricky to comprehend, as it is hard to grasp the whole idea of it. Nagel expresses his view on this topic, stating that if determinism were true, there would be serious consequences. Diving in to this view, we can argue that every event is already determined in advance, leaving no room for possibility anywhere. If for instance, your friend Bryan were to borrow your clothes without permission, there would be no point of blaming him for his actions since it was already determined he would do such a thing.

Although Strawson claims that we have no say in our mentality because of heredity and events that happened before we had any choice in them, Fischer had a good analogy to show that we still maintain choice in our life and our decisions, “when you play the cards that are dealt you (in a certain distinctive way), you can exercise a robust sort of control” (Fischer 2005, pp. 23). Although there are events and influences that occur to us in our life outside of our control this does not take away our ability to think and act freely. Sure these events may affect us in some sense, yet everyone is dealt some kind of card. As individuals we have the opportunity to use those cards in whatever way we want. Thus, although we may have experiences we did not personally choose, the way that this event affects us mentally and as a person is completely up to ourselves and our conscious. Because of this we have the power to choose how we are mentally speaking, which then returns to us our moral