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Comment by julienb_sea | Hacker News Reader

We don't exhibit complete control over our thoughts, that is provably impossible and anecdotally obvious when reflecting on errant thoughts we have experienced.

Free will is about behavior, not thoughts. Our free will is demonstrated by our ability to consciously choose whether and how to act when presented with thoughts and emotions.

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Anyone who has had a panic attack or suffered from a social anxiety will tell you that you cannot always choose behaviour. Sometimes you simply cannot get your body to do what you will it to.

Ha, it's like Hume said. If your actions and thoughts depend on past events and biological and environmental stimulus, they are not free, they are conditioned, they are a reaction to past experience. And the alternative would be random actions, and random is not free, it's random.

That makes a good distinction. Is he taking one side or the other though? Seems to me like deterministic != free, and random also != free. So maybe nothing is free?

Depends on definitions. If we consider "free" someone completely self determined, independent of anything outside itself, unconditioned, yes, then there is no-thing that is free.

But you may define "free" differently.

Color, the scent of a flower, music, a delicious meal, beauty, struggle, love, meaning, free will. These things only exist in your mind. If objective reality exists at all, it is of vanishingly small importance.

> Our free will is demonstrated by our ability to consciously choose whether and how to act when presented with thoughts and emotions.

This is nonsensical, because choice is a thought before it is an action, and we accept that we do not control the comings and goings of our own thoughts.

Well, does someone who can't control their thoughts really control their own behavior? Is there any basis for thought/behavior that science knows of, that is not physiological? Scientists have never put out a press release saying "we've discovered that there are non-physiological processes called 'will' that actually make you even more in control than previously suspected". It's always the other way around - they find that things we used to assign to "will", are in fact caused by something else.

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