Re: Reflections on Free Will and Proposed Perfect Knowledge of God

Psychological determinism. It's (1) hard to defend from evidence; the
unpredictability of people is something we're forced to account for
every day that we interact with others, and (2) free will entails a
degree of self control. If you can't see anything desirable about
having some degree of self control, I don't think I can get you to see
it. If you're really nothing more than a other-controlled,
predictable mechanism, I'm not interested in being one of the others
who controls you.

David

On Jan 31, 7:04 am, stevendaryl3...@xxxxxxxxx (Daryl McCullough)
wrote:
David says...

I've recently seen some definitions of "free will" which seemed to
miss the point--from my point of view. Here's what I mean by "free
will."

proposition E = "I'll get up at 8."
proposition C = "E and not-E are both possible"

C is what I mean by "free will."

(1) C.
(2) God knows everything.
(3) God knows C.

In short, either I don't have free will, or God doesn't know when I'll
get up tomorrow morning.

Why is that notion of free will worth having? If I always do what I
want to do, I'm predictable to anyone who knows precisely what I
want, but would I want to sometimes do what I *don't* want to do?

If at unpredictable times I drop to all fours and bark like a dog,
then that makes me unpredictable, but in what sense does that have
anything to do with "free" or "will"? I think most people would
view it as a mental disorder rather than an exercise of free will.

What would bother me is to *want* to do something but to find my
body doing something completely different, such as walking off a
cliff. When my body does what I want, I don't see any reason to
complain. So why should anyone want to have "free will" in the
sense of being unpredictable? If I want to be unpredictable, I
can always use a random number generator to decide what to do
next.

--
Daryl McCullough
Ithaca, NY

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