People tend to miscomprehend freedom as an act that is performed according to our will without any form of constraint or predisposition.
If this was the case, freedom would not exist since our whole life experiences predisposes us to unconsciously exercise our freedom of will in certain ways.
Here is an amusing example:
I'm 12 and I want to try using a big person's hammer for the first time. My annoying little brother is beside me (as always... sigh).
In mid-air, as I swing the hammer towards the nail, he yells (right in my ear): "You're going to hammer in that nail and because I knew this before it happenned, you didn't decide to hammer it on your own".
In this example, the lack of causality is evident and the amount of LBAF is enormous (LBAF: Little Brother Annoyance Factor)
The parallel can be made with the mind. It's not because we become cognitively aware of our choices fractions of seconds after some brain activity that seem to be decisional that we didn't "will" it, for all we know, this activity is the gist of willing.
Furthermore, there is no indication that our cognitive experiences do not mold our subconscious behaviours, so much that this subconscious activity naturally corresponds to our actual will.
Clearly, it is not sufficient to break a misconceived definition of will in order to claim that freedom of will does not exist, with the argument used, one would also need to prove that this subconscious brain activity is incoherent with our conscious activity.
People tend to miscomprehend freedom as an act that is performed according to our will without any form of constraint or predisposition.
The problem I have with statements like that is that such statements tend not to provide an alternative meaning for freedom that most people would accept.
It seems better to say that most people comprehend freedom in a fashion that's some combination of incoherent, self-contradictory and trivial.
IE, it's better to say people comprehend freedom as you say but such a comprehension doesn't make sense if you look at it logically.
One thing you might say is that the concept of free and unfree choice makes sense in informal human concept of control and blame - those who freely choose things we don't like get blamed for it, saying people should be free is saying their behavior should be regulated by informal, unconscious interactions rather than formal, rules-based systems.
If this was the case, freedom would not exist since our whole life experiences predisposes us to unconsciously exercise our freedom of will in certain ways.
Here is an amusing example:
I'm 12 and I want to try using a big person's hammer for the first time. My annoying little brother is beside me (as always... sigh).
In mid-air, as I swing the hammer towards the nail, he yells (right in my ear): "You're going to hammer in that nail and because I knew this before it happenned, you didn't decide to hammer it on your own".
In this example, the lack of causality is evident and the amount of LBAF is enormous (LBAF: Little Brother Annoyance Factor)
The parallel can be made with the mind. It's not because we become cognitively aware of our choices fractions of seconds after some brain activity that seem to be decisional that we didn't "will" it, for all we know, this activity is the gist of willing.
Furthermore, there is no indication that our cognitive experiences do not mold our subconscious behaviours, so much that this subconscious activity naturally corresponds to our actual will.
Clearly, it is not sufficient to break a misconceived definition of will in order to claim that freedom of will does not exist, with the argument used, one would also need to prove that this subconscious brain activity is incoherent with our conscious activity.