Quote:
Originally Posted by Dhomochevsky
It rests on the definition of what 'you' are.
Many religions and other spiritual directions have the idea of a 'soul' that is somehow more than the body.
It resides in the body and steers it (I get the image of a mecha...), but is a seperate, yet invisible part. 'You' are a soul, the body is merely a vessel for your intellect.
In this thinking, if the body decides what 'you' do, of course there is no free will any more.
But isn't this really baseless? The existence of a soul is just as far out there, as the existance of a god.
If 'you' and your body are the same thing, this problem does not arise.
'You', the system that is your body, comes up with a choice and this is then a free choice, no matter how it got created internally.
tldr:
It is only a problem if you believe in separation of mind and body.
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This strikes me as strange because accepting the premises of determinism already implies belief in a purely materialistic universe. The idea's very nature makes it such that there is little to no room for any kind of "soul" to exist within its framework. As such, I'm not sure how objecting to the existence of the "soul" somehow invalidates the claim of determinism.
Under the framework of determinism, the concept we perceive to be self consciousness would amount to nothing more than an illusion of free will. Human "choice" and "autonomy", for example, would simply be a sum of genetics and environmental influences. In other words, before a person is born, his/her life is already predetermined by genes, the individual dispositions of his/her parents, and the environment the person will be raised in. This is where free will becomes an illusion. If our fate is already predetermined down to the activities of every single neuron in the brain, can we still say in honesty that we are truly in control of our own actions? The way I see it, there is simply no room for a third voice or a "soul" to exist within this model.
Now, just to note, this discussion is, by nature, a thinking exercise, so it doesn't matter if the ideas brought up are neither practical nor realistic as long as they're logical. We're all aware of how these ideas can't be carried over into scientific community, but it's an exercise in dissecting and evaluating ideas, so there's that.