Free will is an illusion

I fear that a huge portion of Con's argument is based on a complete misunderstanding of my point. I never said we can't control our impulses insofar as succumbing to their influence, I simply stated that we cannot dictate what impulses arise in our consciousness in the first place.Further, I would agree that we do not ever "have control of our choice to act..." The reason most people believe in free will is because they feel as though they have the agency to act "reasonable, or impulsive." On the note of reason, I would ask Con what it means to act reasonable and where he/she gets the definition of reason from. I would ask why it is that he/she likes to act reasonably (or not) in given situations i.e. why is reason valued. Perhaps Con realizes their definition of reason grew out of unconscious processes. Perhaps, though, they feel that it is something they've honed over the years as a result of trial-and-error or learning from mistakes or anything along those lines. Still, I would ask what the genesis of those mistakes were, why Con considered them to be mistakes or learning experiences, and how he/she chose to apply the lessons learned to future behavior.Ultimately, if Con is honest with his/herself, they will reach one of two related realizations, or both: Once they trace back far enough the source of their conscious desires, they will realize that they grew from unconscious processes over which they have no control. The only possible causes of Con not reaching this realization would be a failure to trace back his/her thoughts and desires to a significant starting point or simply being ignorant of the fact that, at some point, there was a starting point over which they had no control. As I don't think Con is a person who tends to be illogical or ignorant, I feel this is a valuable thought experiment Another option would be tracing desires and wants and impulses back to a combination of genetic predispositions and upbringing i.e. nature/nurture. Since it is universally accepted by scientists that all we are is a product of nature and nurture, I would hope Con realizes that he/she had absolutely no control over either of these aspects of their development Though the philosophy community might be split among libertarians, compatibilists, and determinists, the scientific community is not. "You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons … although we appear to have free will, in fact, our choices have already been predetermined for us and we cannot change that." - Francis Crick "Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime - by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from?” - Sam Harris "The experience of willing an act arises from interpreting one's thought as the cause of the act. Conscious will is thus experienced as a function of the priority, consistency, and exclusivity of the thought about the action. The thought must occur before the action, be consistent with the action, and not be accompanied by other causes. An experiment illustrating the role of priority found that people can arrive at the mistaken belief that they have intentionally caused an action that in fact they were forced to perform when they are simply led to think about the action just before its occurrence." - Wegner & Wheatly "Our minds are designed to distort our perception of choice and that this distortion is an important feature (not simply a bug) of our cognitive machinery." - Michael Shermer Take the following example from Scientific American:At a restaurant recently I faced many temptations: a heavy stout beer, a buttery escargot appetizer, a marbled steak, cheesecake. The neural networks in my brain that have evolved to produce the emotion of hunger for sweet and fatty foods, which in our ancestral environment were both rare and sustaining, were firing away to get me to make those selections. In competition were signals from other neural networks that have evolved to make me care about my future health, in particular how I view my body image for status among males and appeal to females and how sluggish I feel after a rich meal and the amount of exercise I will need to counter it. In the end, I ordered a light beer, salmon and a salad with vinaigrette dressing and split a mildly rich chocolate cake with my companion. Was I free to make these choices? According to neuroscientist Sam Harris in his luminous new book Free Will (Free Press, 2012), I was not. “Free will is an illusion,” Harris writes. “Our wills are simply not of our own making.” Every step in the causal chain above is fully determined by forces and conditions not of my choosing, from my evolved taste preferences to my learned social status concerns—causal pathways laid down by my ancestors and parents, culture and society, peer groups and friends, mentors and teachers, and historical contingencies going all the way back to my birth and before. Neuroscience supports this belief. The late physiologist Benjamin Libet noted in EEG readings of subjects engaged in a task requiring them to press a button when they felt like it that half a second before the decision was consciously made the brain's motor cortex lit up. Research has extended the time between subcortical brain activation and conscious awareness to a full seven to 10 seconds. A new study found activity in a tiny clump of 256 neurons that enabled scientists to predict with 80 percent accuracy which choice a subject would make before the person himself knew. Very likely, just before I became consciously aware of my menu selections, part of my brain had already made those choices. “Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control,” Harris concludes. “We do not have the freedom we think we have.”I would also urge you to read about experiments (e.g. https://www.wired.com...) where it is shown that scientific brain scanners are able to know what you decisions will be before you *think* you make them.You bring up the example of the rock - I would be very curious how you associate standing still as a rock flies toward you with being rational. Nonetheless, if the event happens instantaneously before you are able to think, consider, ponder, debate, or analyze the situation, how can you consider it to be a free decision? I never said that one's body and mind are not in control of themselves or each other, I'm contending that given a particular situation (e.g. rock flying at face), one could not have willfully acted in another way.Yes, I do argue that we have no control over our emotions, but no more or less than any other processes that govern our lives. "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.” - Arthur Schopenhauer “You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm...You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.” - Sam Harris “We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.” - Anthony Burgess Have a great day!