[Jaden]

Originally Posted by Irenicus

I'd argue that, given the sheer complexity of the environmental argument, and just how much we frankly don't know about it, it's a little hasty to be declaring that the principle of Occam's Razor favors the environmental side. At what point does the chemically-predetermined brain stop, if at all? At what point does the randomness factor start? At what point is randomness isn't truly random but is neurologically guided towards a certain spectrum of possible decisions? What should we call that randomness in the spectrum? Do we actually get to make a decision within that spectrum -- and call it free will? Many questions abound...and I'm not even touching the actual science of the brain, which is beyond my expertise and, I'd say, most everyone here. Occam's Razor is fine as a principle to eliminate overly complex hypotheses, of course, but the less we know about the other hypothesis that the principle supposedly supports the more the principle is undermined.

Then there's just a little irony with supporting the chemicals-control-everything-we-do side of the argument with logic, a tool explicitly born of the human conscious mind -- and a system which does not acknowledge inefficiencies inherent in the natural environment, human physiology included. Of course, I will admit outright that irony isn't a valid argument in philosophy, and that's why I'm not a philosopher.

Yeah, I guess so. The way I see it is that the situations where the alleged free will comes to play can be broken down to making some kind of decisions. And our brain is so awesome, it can further break those descisions down to binary ones, weigh the options and make a choice based on only 'environmental factors' as you cleverly grouped them.

And all those factors are indeed near inifnite and hard to grasp. Maybe if on top of them we possessed some kind of esp-like power of free will, it wouldn't even be that strange?

Rather, I worry that nowadays it is fashionable in the same manner that Freud was fashionable to declare everything under the sun -- perhaps I should say everything above the atom -- to be all about the chemicals. It says more about the society we live in more than the abstract notion we discuss, I think. Kamui wrote earlier that whether metaphysically free will exists or not, in our everyday lives we assume its existence for convenience, and all is fine, more or less. I was inclined to agree with him, but this new notion of chemicals-own-us, this sort of philosophical side product (if one is negative, one could say "waste product") of scientific advances can have...unintended side effects...on our way of thinking about ourselves. Say, Democracy works because we assume a person to be a singular, autonomous entity, entitled to certain rights; but what if a person isn't a single entity but a nebulous, non-autonomous organism guided by the chemicals involved and easily manipulated by the amount of ritalin dosage given...?

Machines as we might be, we do require motivations. If we're part of the environment that defines how we turn out, we should be inclined to improve that environment and indeed ourselves. People won't fall into despair just because philophers are unable to find the meaning of life, surely.