Essay on Soft Determinism

Nancy Holmstrom’s account of soft determinism makes it simple to understand how free will and determinism can be compatible due to an individual’s experiences and decisions. Combining the environmental factors that influenced my decision to attend the University of Kansas, my decision would fall the middle of Holmstrom’s continuum but slightly to the side of free

There is much debate over the issue of whether we have complete freedom of the will or if our will caused by something other than our own choosing. There are three positions adopted by philosophers regarding this dispute: determinism, libertarianism, and compatibilism. Determinists believe that freedom of the will does not exist. Since actions are events that have some predetermined cause, no actions can be chosen and thus there is no will to choose. The compatibilist argues that you can have both freedom of the will and determinism. If the causes which led to our actions were different, then we could have acted in another way which is compatible with freedom of the will. Libertarians believe that freedom of the will does exist.

For example, if I should happen to walk down the street to get food, the mere action of my movement can be explained by the fact that my being hungry has caused me to walk down the street and move my legs, and to keep moving my legs at all I need food. Thus, the body is in need of nourishment, and from laws of nature and laws discovered by science the body does in fact need food as a consumable source of cellular energy to promote life in a system such as the human body. It is then to be deduced that if a definite law of nature caused my acting, then I must be in accordance with scientific laws, and no other alternative except that law has to be the one that I shall act on. If this is so, one cannot do otherwise than obey the law. Thus, our freedom of will is absent due to the compelling laws of nature and their innate causal behavior. Now that Holbach has clarified this, he moves on to say something on the nature of the human mind’s will, or more specifically its acts of willing. Holbach states that the will is a modification of the brain (Holbach 462). And it is from the brain, which makes one act in accordance with certain desires or impulses that act on the brain or mind that are outside of one’s control. A stronger desire, or motive as Holbach calls it, may suspend a former desire, so that you are in fact always acting on your strongest desire due to the fact that you want to be content or happy with your choice, and this desire determines your will. For

There are those who think that our behavior is a result of free choice, but there are also others who believe we are servants of cosmic destiny, and that behavior is nothing but a reflex of heredity and environment. The position of determinism is that every event is the necessary outcome of a cause or set of causes, and everything is a consequence of external forces, and such forces produce all that happens. Therefore, according to this statement, man is not free.

In the instance, the man kills himself due to reasons whose immediate impulses are internal but those impulses were formed due to some external causes. One such external cause might be that his daughter was kidnapped and the kidnapper called and said that if the man did not shoot himself by sun down today, then his daughter will be killed. But if the man kills himself by sun down, then his daughter will be safely returned to her mother. So in this case the man kills himself due to an internal impulse which is generated by an external cause. And in the instance where someone comes and shoots him, the cause is external as well. So in neither of these cases man is free. In the first instance when the man kills himself, he is bound by his love for his daughter and therefore does not really have a choice and in the second instance, he does not have any choice either. The conclusion is that choice does not really exist and even if it existed, it would not mean existence of free will. And complexity of the brain’s thought process when reconsidering a first impulse should not be confused with free will either.

Before we can discuss the issue between Baron d'Holbach and William James we have to know the definitions of the items the issue is about. Free will according to the Encarta encyclopedia is "The power or ability of the human mind to choose a course of action or make a decision without being subject to restraints imposed by antecedent causes, by necessity, or by divine predetermination. A completely freewill act is a cause and not an effect; it is beyond causal sequence or the law of causality." So according to this statement freewill is the ability for humans to make

Hard determinism claims all the actions of human beings or consequences of events are determined by external conditions, with such conditions satisfied there will be no choice of the results available any time. Spinoza, the philosopher who stood for Hard determinism was convinced that no free wills were available for anything in the universe. Those “Free will” existed in people’s mind were built on illusions, since they had ignored the actual causes to them. The hard determinism could apply to everything we neither might encountered in the past nor in present time. But I think the laws were found or formed by ourselves since the evolutions of the human societies in thousands years, it 's not correct to say that no choices are ever made by ourselves. And the key point is that most of the causal laws were found through scientific methods, but sciences has enhanced our power on predicting and even changing the progress that will result in a different end by discovering more causal laws as time passes.

An individual with “Free Will” is capable of making vital decisions and choices in life with own free consent. The individual chooses these decisions without any outside influence from a set of “alternative possibilities.” The idea of “free will” imposes a certain kind of power on an individual to make decisions of which he or she is morally responsible. This implies that “free will” would include a range of aspects such as originality, moral value, and self-governance. However, in life, individuals may not be free in making decisions. The aspect of freedom could entail remarkably a high status action and achievement in an individual’s life whose attainment could be close to impossibility. Often, people make

The word freedom is often associated with the idea of an unfettered liberty to select from a range of alternatives coupled with a sense that our actions will not affect our natural state.

My second notion of free will requires that an actor is able to decide between different possibilities of actions that lead towards different futures. Robert Kane calls this concept ‘a garden of forking paths’; every action leads to other actions that again allow for alternatives of action (Kane, 2005: 7). If an actor could not have done otherwise, he would not have had free choice. Even if he did not choose to do otherwise, he could not have done so. Free will seems to require the power to do otherwise, or our actions would

Free will is the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion. Do we, as human beings, have a freedom of choice? There have a lot of debate about whether our conscious choices are really just an illusion created by the brain. The way we understand human behavior and the reality of understanding moral precepts "that form the basis for so many of our social and cultural institutions", is the outcome of this specific debate. In the "yes" article, Modell argues his stance in the subject by talking about "The Feeling of Agency Is an Illusion Created by the Brain". Agency is the cause. Modell believes that we are never the agency if our feelings, but we are responsible for our interpretations of those feelings. Though we cannot control the feelings, we can control our interpretation of those feelings.

Freedom of the will is the choice between first order desires which creates a will. It is not limited by freedom of action, it is rather a question of whether it is a will we

The ability to choose and make choices does not make us freer. In fact, the opposite is true. The more choices we have, the less free we feel. Too many options, too many paths, too many alternatives makes us feel cornered and confused. We don’t know which is the best and remain frozen and undecided as a result. This was the point of Barry Schwartz’s TED talk. He wanted to explain that more choices does not equal more freedom.

     Before one can properly evaluate the entire debate that enshrouds the Free Will/Determinism, each term must have a meaning, but before we explore the meaning of each term, we must give a general definition. Determinism is, "Everything that happens is caused to happen. (Clifford Williams. "Free Will and Determinism: A Dialogue" pg 3). This is the position that Daniel, a character in Williams’ dialogue, chooses to believe and defend. David Hume goes a little deeper and explains in his essay, "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding of Liberty and Necessity," that determinism is this: "It is universally allowed, that matter, in all its operations, is actuated by a necessary force, and

Although there are numerous definitions as to what freedom mean based upon individual perspectives. Freedom can be defined as _________________ People might be limited by some constraint so freewill may not be completely "free" but the thoughts about possibilities are unlimited and the way in which people get involved in such possibilities is not an aspect that can limit freewill. In Sartre essay titled Existentialism and Human emotion, he points out that from the moment we are brought into this world, we take on the role of responsibility for all of our actions. It makes me think about what the term “free” truly refers when people use it. There aren’t any external benefits that humans can base the way we live. Regardless of whether someone gives you a choice or not, you still have the ability to choose. That is the one and only innate ability any one person possesses. Sartre says, we must be accountable for our actions because it’s ours and no one else’s. I doubt that God would want us to choose to take responsibility over one action over another because we think it’s in our nature to do so. If life was all about handing over our responsibilities to God or to another, wouldn’t you think we would be a less motivated society, without intentions to