people have free will

CON: "A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings"- Sam HarrisIf we are puppets, who is the puppet master? God? But Sam Harris is an atheist. CON: Free will implies no constraints.No, free will does not imply no constraints. Having free will does not mean we are omnipotent. It means that, within certain constraints, there are still choices we can make that are not determined by outside factors. One could argue that people have less free choice than they think they have. People can be manipulated or forced. But we are not manipulated or forced all the time. There are still plenty of things we can choose freely.CON: Meaning if you are going to be judged for your free will it would imply that you made the choice from a grounded perspective without the path of least resistance making that choice for you!Sometimes we make a choice that goes against the path of the least resistance.CON: free will is an ambiguous concept. That is why Sam Harris leads off with "I believe this is what people are thinking when they say Free will. Went on to give his definition and then explained why that concept of free will is an illusion.We are not going by the definition of "free will" by Sam Harris, but the definition I gave in the first round. The definition of free will should be strong enough to allow for accountability, but not so strong to make it an impossible concept. There is a reasonable concept of free will that does this. Essentially, free will is just all those decisions we make that are not forced by outside influences. What is considered "outside" depends on our notion of identity. The fact that our decisions are a consequence of a sequence of events in our brain does not mean that these decisions are not free. We ARE that brain activity, so brain activity is not an external cause.CON: To say you have free will would mean that you made that choice while seeing the "Big Picture" Your CEO analogy will help me explain what I mean. The CEO does not see the big picture (nor could he) So each choice that was made came from a process of judgement's that caused him to hire whomever. If he knew that so and so alcoholic would be showing up to work drunk he may have not hired him in such a hurry!In my opinion, the CEO does see the "big picture". But he cannot see every single detail at every given time. Yet, we do hold a CEO responsible for what happens to the company. For some things he will be held more responsible than for other things. But this is OK. If one of the hires is an alcoholic, perhaps he SHOULD have known it. Did the CEO ask for reference letters? An alcoholic probably had similar problems at previous jobs. So a CEO may not have chosen for an employee to show up drunk, the CEO could have made choices that would have prevented this from happening.CON: I cannot think of a choice made without previous causes that actually made the choice for you.A choice may have previous causes, but these causes are not external. It is ME who is the cause of the choice. You may observe this choice as a result of a sequence of activities in the brain, but that IS me. You are just witnessing ME making a FREE CHOICE.CON: Give me an example of free will.I just made the free choice to respond to your arguments.CON: I think the word we are looking for is discipline! In order for a drug addict to choose to quit drugs he has to be compelled. However if he indeed had free will, he would not be addicted.Addiction certainly limits a person free choice. But some people have chosen to quit the addiction and some of them were successful. Yet others decided they do not want to quit. Addiction is like a cage. You can still make free decisions, but fewer of them. CON: I think the concept of free will is like the idea of "Sin".I don't think so, but we can keep religion out of this. Actually, even within Christianity there is controversy whether free will exists or not. Some will say that God knows everything and there can not be free will, others say that people have free will to go ("sin") against God. I will not using any arguments from God or from the bible.CON: I will borough from Sam Harris. He addressed Dennett's compatibilism argument for free will. Where free will is compatible with the truth of determinism. His example was if a murderer kills purely from his desire to kill and not influenced by a hijacker. Then that is all the free will you need. But from a moral and scientific point of view it seems to miss the point. Where is the freedom in a desire that has been molded through events that he is completely unaware of! "People identify with a certain channel of information within our conscious minds. They feel that they are in control and they are the source. This is an illusion!"I agree with Dennett and think that Harris is missing the point. But again this is mostly a dispute about the definition of free will. Harris seems to think that we should be aware and able to control of every single chemical reaction in our brain in order for us to have a free will. Such a definition would be unreasonable. To some extend, we CAN control the chemical reactions in our brain, but we cannot control or be aware of the movement of every single atom. All Harris has to do is change his naive definition of free will. It is more logical to adept his notion of free will, then to completely throw it out of the window.