Advocates of Free will. Now's your chance

Of course, if you have ceased to believe that "self" is anything more than a useful, yet ultimately illusionary, model, then the concept of "free will" is pretty incoherent. But I don't expect that to go over well here. Heh.

 

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You'd be surprised Max Action - there's a lot of Buddhists and stuff here...

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the idea of free will for me, depends on is string theory and it sucessors solve the uncertainty principal. If uncertanty truely exsists, then free will might exsist. if uncertainly doesn't exsist, then I see no method through which free will can occur.

in direct response to the post on page one about the game of eightball, the quote suggests that the players has limited options based on the situation within the game. However, that is assuming that the person has decided to play the game by the agreed apon rules. If they don't, then another world of options opens up, with it's own limitations and repercussions.

Ever day that you wake up, you first have to decide to live before you can do anythihng else. This decision is usually not a conscious one, but it still must occur.

 

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River-wind, so good you wrote this! I've never understood how physical indeterminism could solve the problem of free will, but maybe now you can explain it to me. What I don't understand is how the existence of genuine random processes could help us with the problem of free will, ethical responsibility and the like. Could you please elaborate on the connection between physical randomness and, say, moral responsibility (a concept that essentially presupposes free will)? Thanks.

 

I too look forward to River-wind's comments.
Maybe we as human are that randomness or uncertainty and in being so are truely free willed.

Say the centre of free will is in fact a centre of randomness. which we are.

Another thing that I wanted to mention, a converstaion I had whilst counseling a friend.
I asked him when he asked his wife a question was she fully free to answer yes or no to the question.
or
was she answering the way HE wanted her to.
he pondered this question for a while and I think discovered something about free-will.....

 

Proteus42: Moral responsibility does not presuppose free will; if we believe that a person who is punished for their crimes is less likely to commit them again, that can be described as a tendency rather than a choice.

Some determinists believe that punishment for criminal behaviour should be more severe than it is, for this reason.

 

This is true. If punishment is a means to build up certain dispositions in the punished person, then the question of free will doesn't arise (at that stage). Still, moral responsibility presupposes free will because if there's no free will, then there's no moral responsibility (and X presupposes Y if X is not possible without Y).

 

Now, one direction is fairly easy to see: if all events are completely determined, there's not much point in talking about free agents and their free will. If everything is determined, there's no free choice. So if there's free choice, things can't be completely determined. But this latter statement is nothing but a paraphrase of the previous one. The question which I'd like to get some answer to from River-wind is this: If there are genuinely indeterministic events, how will this fact explain free will? This is a completely different question and needs an independent line of reasoning.

I can only hope River-wind won't let us down. From his concise post, I got the impression that he had a firm theory as to how to derive free will from modern string theory or the Principle of Uncertainty. Alas, we can't do anything else now but wait!

 

Well, if uncertainty doesn't exsist, then everything must be deterministic, from what I know of physics. A roll of the dice would be fully dependant on factors prior to the roll, which in turn are wholly dependant on factors prior to that. If there was no such thing as quantum uncertainty, then you could, before the die are rolled, determine with 100% accuracy using simple math what the final roll would be. Take into account the strength of the throw, the spin placed on the die, any wind, smoke, etc in the air, the surface rigidity and texture of the surface that the die roll along; the angle of the throw, the angle of the surface, any curvature of the surface, so on and so forth.
However, current physics suggests that you can't know all that, because there are certain things that you cannot know. The definition is that you can't know the direction, speed, and location of a particle all at the same time. Therefore, it is impossible to map the entire scene surrounding the dice roll. You can know 66% of the needed information (two of the three particle information variables), but 33% of the needed information cannot be determined effectively.
However, there is a good chance that that remaining 33% is still deterministic - in fact, given that you can either know direction and velocity, *or* direction and position *or* velocity and position, it would appear that all three factors are most certainly deterministic. We just don't have a way to measure them directly.
Now, more modern theories might be able to explain the underlying principals behind the three factors we are looking at - they could possibly define the causes of V, D, and P. While we still may not be able to know V,D and P, we may be able to determine the background for those values, and extrapolate those values through calculation.
I don't know where this stands, however - given the difficult nature of testing these theories, we may never actually be able to utilise this functionality - it may end up just being a philosophy based on untested scientific theory.

Now, if it turns out down the road that there is something about cosmic strings or whatever is the basis of the universe that is truely, in all definitions of the word, random, and uncertainty is a fundimental part of the universe, then it would allow for the possibility of truely random occurances. This would allow for the possibility of free will (I'll make this connection further down).

That is determinism/uncertainty. Now, quantum stuff.
It is possible, in quantum physics, for anything to happen. While most possible things do not happen (such as you blinking out of exsistance, and suddenly finding yourself on pluto) due to a very very low probability, it is all considered possible. the universes smallest energy packets, called quanta, can pop in and out of exsistance at seemingly random times. even very small sub-atomic particles can do this (keep in mind that energy and metter are the same thing, just in a different form. Quanta popping and matter popping are largely similar phenomenon, just different) This influx or removal of energy or matter in the universe can have a fair effect on how things turn out. Just a month ago, it was shown for the first time that quantum flux can effect how protiens fold under controlled conditions. maybe 99.9% of the time, they form one way, but there is that .1% where there is enough disturbance to the proccess caused by the quanta popping in and out that the protien folds itself differently than normal. This Randomness has an effect!
However, again, if VSL or string theory or whatever, can determine how or why these quanta pop in and out of the universe such that they can be predicted, then we have lost that facet of randomness. It will again be that everything is deterministic - quanta only pop in and out in certain circumstances - predict those circumstances, predict the quanta/particle 'popping', predict that .1% misfolded protein.

Now, to connect randomness to free will.
Let say that physics in the next 200 years figure out that string theory is dead on, and that string vibrations can be determined. future quanta/particle popping is fully predictable, based on the current state of stirng vibrations, so protien folding is 100% predictable. From there, molecule movement in the environment is fully mappable, molecule movement in cells is mappable, cell matter and energy transfer is mappable, so on and so forth.
You could then trace a persons molecular, atomic, subatomic, and even quantum states, and predict his or her future based on that mapping. This is based on the idea that the human brain makes desisions based on prior expirience, something which certainly appears to be true. Kids touch something hot, they learn not to touch that thing again. All desitions made would be based on the current location of matter and energy in both the person and their situation - the die example above will have been mapped fully.
Taking things back a bit to the big bang, you have a thing, really small, with everything in it, including space itself. this isn't a dot in the middle of space, this *is* space. There is a disturbance, and the thing explodes, spewing out space, time, matter and energy. At first, everything is a flat sheet, fairly uniform. however, small discrepancies in how the matter and energy spread out causes it to clump together into what later become planets and stars and galaxies. The location and the spin and the size of everything that exsists now, if we assume the string theory/predictability thing above, was determined by the presence and distrobusion of matter and energy before. back at the begining. The big bang occured, and the location of everything then leads, step by step, directly to now. The earth, the people on it, all determined by the distrobution of matter then, no randomness, no uncertainty. Things happened they way they did because of the starting set of variables.
Your body was determined by that first instant. your parents were determined by that first instant. your birthplace and our expiriences through life were determined. not by some magical or godly force, but by what was, and how it was. Your behavior, determined by your DNA, your childhood, your parents, (your nuture and your nature combined), is the result of your past, and determines how you act in the future.
you and your entire life, were set from the begining. You still have the ability to make choices, but those choices were already set-your actions are based on what already is, so yuor life was laid out by the spread of matter in the begining of time.

However, this doesn't answer the question of how matter became non-uniform in the first place. In order for clumps to occur, there has to be (in a deterministic universe) smoething which caused that non-uniformity. If string theory, etc can explain this, then fine, if not, then the question of randomness and uncertainty still remains.

Now, to free choice. If randomness doesn't exsist, then while you can still make choices, those choices are determined by past events, and can be mapped before they occur. therefore while you have choice, it could be considered that you don't have free choice. You can't learn the mapping and purposely go against it; your desire to break out of the mapping wouold be, in fact, part of the map, so removing yourself from it would be part of the map to begin with.
So even without free choice, you still have freedom - you can decide to sit around or to work hard; even though the choice is determined, it is still yours to make.

If randomness *does* exsist, however, if quantum popping and uncertainty are truths of the universe, then nothing can be fully mapped. You can't, with 100% accuracy, predict the roll of a die or the folding of a protein. In this case, your choices cannot be mapped by even a God-like being; you, in this case, have true free will. You can decide, based on either prior history, to follow a deterministic path using the same rules of biological thought (nature and nurture), or you can decide to move away from that, and take hold of randomness to allow for choices which would otherwise fall outside of your available options.
Free will in this universe isn't a guarentee, it's just now an option, by the inclusion of full random possibilty.


As for moral judgment, I'd say that it doesn't matter is the universe is deterministic or not. In both cases, you have choices, and you have results from those choices. Whatever you pick, you could be choosing something determined by your past, or you could be choosing something altogether different. Either way, you are *choosing* it. So, IMO, you should choose with purpose, and the method of choice is of secondary concern.


BBhead: if a person punished is less likely to repeat the crime, couldn't it be that they decide that the punishment that they suffered was worse that their life without the fruits of whatever crime we are discussing, and therefore they *choose* not to repeat the crime? I'm not stating that a built in chemical/biological pathway is not used to make that choice, and I'm not precluding the idea that the choice doesn't occur in the conscious mind - it still seems like a choice to me. They could always repeat the crime, they choose not to, via whatever method.
Or do you define "choice" as something which must take place in the mind; a decision making prossess which must be activly engaged in by the person in question?


edit: proteus: I hope this was satisfactory!

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alot of hype to live up to. What all the above boils down to, RE: your question of how free will can exsist in a deterministic universe is the following:
If everything is determined, then your actions are already set. however, this does not preclude you from making choices. The choices you make are based on your hisory, are detemrined, but they are still things that you can consider, and select from a list of possible options. So while *free* in such a case would be questionable, *will* is not. Your will, however, would also be determined, so your choice will occur as expected.
you still get the enjoyment of deciding. Those who use determinism as an excuse to sit around and do nothing, because they can't change anything, are in fact, determined to so that (if determinism exsists). I don't feel happy when I sit around and do nothing, so I *decided* to be active, and do anything and everything. Without an omnicient awareness of what i'm "supposed" to do, I will decide that I will do what makes me and those around me feel good. And by making that choice, if determinism exsists, I have filled my determined role of being an active person. I decided to fill my role, and I decided what my role is, even though it may have been written in the tea leaves billions of years ago. I'm creating my determinism as I go.

 

No offense intended, but I don't have much faith in River-wind's theory. I have to suspect that the people saying that they are greatly looking forward to it are gently teasing, although I'm too new to the board to read such nuance with any accuracy at all.

So I'll just ramble about a tad and see what happens.

The language about "solving the uncertainty principle" strikes me as someone who has based a theory on a smattering of science headlines combined with some good pot. (Not that there is a damn thing wrong with theorizing on good pot: you just need to feed it more than buzzwords.)

I'm also a bit skeptical of a theory that comes from someone who places a dubious daily pre-waking "decision to live" within the domain of the will.

Having our decisions be based on some kind of quantum randomness, while throwing unpredicitablity into an otherwise seemingly deterministic universe, does little to provide a foundation for a meaningfully "free" will. Something more is needed (don't ask ME what!).

(Of course, if we do live in a deterministic universe, our "consciousness" is little more than an emergent property-based illusion, and there is no classically free will, then we may as well call the blindly cunning facade of a will that we possess "free," rather than save the label "free will" for a category of being that cannot exist here even in principle.)

Also adding to my skepticism, I wonder how we could tell the difference between true randomness, and patterns or deterministic events that are simply beyond our current, or even possible, abilities to identify. I don't see any possible way at the moment, but maybe someone has some thoughts on this.

All that said, it would kick ass if Tree-hugger, er, River-wind came up with an approach I have not considered. I'd be smiling from ear to ear as I ate my words and revised my reality model.

With bated breath, yet a skeptical eye, I wait.

:bugeye:


edit - added parentheses for clarity

 

Hmm, he posted as I did! Now I don't have to wait after all!

Edit: Having now read it, I'm (predicatbly?) more than just a little bit fuzzy on how the brain can "take hold of randomness" and craft it into a free will.

More input on this vital step please!

 

River-wind:

With respect to crime and punishment, what I was saying is that a lack of free will does not make punishment ineffective.

More generally, if you believe in the Big First Cause as the only determining factor in the universe - that is, the appearance of randomness is there because we are rendered unable to predict by a physical law, but there is still a fact of the matter about how things are, then free will is still an illusion even if it is the final conclusion of our investigations. Whether or not something can be accurately predicted in advance is only a symptom of its deterministic nature, not the root cause.

If, on the other hand, it is truly random, it's difficult to see how that suddenly falls under our control, unless it means that we are actually able to control the random aspects by the force of our will.

 

I largely agree with your first post - we seem to be in agreement on a number of things. My idea of what would be needed to provide for free will is even more conveluded and complex than the above. That fat post up there is only determining that randomness allows for the possibility of free will - by destroying a fully deterministic universe, you destroy determinism as a universal code.

As to the note about "deciding to live" in my original post- that comes ffrom a long history of suicidal tendancies in my childhood. For me, that choice of whether or not to live was much more pronounced. however, now that I am functional (no longer suicidal), I still see that as a choice one has. If you decide not to live, then all other normal action is no longer relevant. Eating, sleeping, walking, socialising is non-neccesary, as none of it falls into the catagory of being dead. So if you get out of bed and eat breakfast, it is because you have decided to live. In order to continue this state of life, yuo have to fuel your body, so you each. Most of the time, people don't think tothemselves "I need fuel to live, I want to live, so I eat", they think "mmm, hungery. food", but the result is the same. The choice was, however, made by the subconscious; in this case, more specifically, by natural instinct. The choice was still made.


An addition to the above in reguards to determinism and human thought- my feelings on human thought are based largely on depression study over the past 50 years. the presence or absence of chemicals in our mind plays a major, if not sole role in our decision making. By suplimenting the natural chemicals with ingestable drugs, such as Welbutrin, Ritalin, etc, you can not only change how a person feels emotionaly, but you can also alter the choice-making process. People become, in many way, different people when taking ADHD/depression medicaition. this shows to me that desicions are not made by a spiritual soul, but (at least 90%) by the physical and electro chemical state of the brain and the body it inhabits.
Not to mention that if you get somebody drugged up enough, they become completely unable to make choices at all. I would expect that any sort of spiritual exsistance to be uneffected by the physical presence of a certain chemical in the brain; so I determine that the brain makes decisions - it being a physical things, falls into the same deterministic state as all other matter and energy. (assuming determinism).
(this is a pre-emptive post to answer anyone who feels that you can't assume that choice could ever be deterministic because the soul makes the choices. I've had that argument before, and I don't see evidence for it. If a soul exsists, and it makes the desicions, it still appears to be working via the brain, which would appear to be determinsitc in a deterministic universe; Limiting reagent there is determinsm. Sorry for the slightly off toipic, just getting that out of the way.)

edit: ok, so the question seems to be as to the method from which the human mind can harness randomness to achieve free will.

It will take a while to explain my idea on that. I'll try and write something up tonight, but I'll start with this: the mind doesn't harness per say (I should have worded that section better), the mind is a result of it. The ability to choose comes from the fact that randomness and choice are possible. It;s a bit cyclical, so I really need to break it apart first.

 

Okay, let me get my opinion out here.

I believe that General Relativity has mangled people's minds with respect to what time is and how it works.

Time is a metaphor for the tendencies of things in one state to become things in another state. It is a form of thought that we developed because of its survival value.

The popular following of General Relativity, particularly with reference to time as "the 4th dimension", has given people an idea that the universe somehow simultaneously exists in the present, the future, and the past, and that this temporal structure contains the entire arrangement of all things that ever has been or ever will. When they speak of the future being "written", they believe this because they believe that it's already there and has real existence, and that a being unfettered by our physical laws could flit over to the future and examine what will happen, come back and tell us.

Given that there is no real reason to believe this that I've found, I am surprised that so many people have adopted such a relatively bankrupt view of the world, since it does not allow for the existence of choice, which I am not so eager to abandon. There are two reasons why I generally believe in choice, other than its apparent common sense.

1) Human beings are capable of performing long series of nonsensical and avowedly pointless actions, which
- have no survival value
- have no relations to exterior patterns, and
- can be part of a chain of self-referential logic

What do you call an action designed to prove that you have free will? Let's say that you are sane, and have decided to demonstrate your free will by performing an action that has no value to your survival, is too consistent to be caused by the undirected physical forces of the world, and serves only as a demonstration of your free will.

You decide to go through the lyrics of "Ride the Lightning" by Metallica. Starting at the beginning, you roll a die, move that many letters forward through the written lyrics, form the resulting letter out of pickles, and check off the letter. When you get to the end, you will start again from the beginning. You will continue this series of actions until you have formed every letter in the entire song out of pickles. Your purpose in doing this is to prove that you have free will, and therefore the choice to be able to pursue this course of action to its distant, sour-smelling conclusion.

2) Living things are those things which have come about by chance that can avoid or withstand the buffeting of the universe indefinitely, where all other inanimate things are ground to dust and otherwise changed. Living things, therefore, are recognized partly by their ability to retain their pattern in the face of changing circumstances. Complex organisms become successful when they are able to manipulate their surroundings and force them into new patterns. When we reach the level of complexity that we see in human beings, their influence is far-reaching and leaves the world around them irrevocably changed. As such, I'm unsure why our agency is ascribed entirely to the Big First Cause, when it's not hard to imagine that things could have been otherwise. The fact that you can't go back and change things does not mean that they happened the only way that was possible.

 

River-wind, thanks for your not so concise reply.

If I understand you correctly, you're trying to make room for free
choices by appealing to true indeterminacy. If everything is tightly
packed in a causal network, then there's no room for genuine freedom.
I think you have argued successfully for that. What's more, we all
seem to agree on that very fact. But the original challenge was this.
Derive free choice as opposed to random outcomes from the fact that
there are random processes. Randomness is not the same as free choice.
Free choice, as one of the posters has remarked, is more than
randomness. An example is in order. The uranium atom emits alpha
particles in an unpredictable manner. If von Neumann was right, there
are not even hidden variables determining the process. Let's say
Neumann was right. Even then, the uranium atom does not exercise free
will when emitting an alpha particle, in spite of the fact that the
process behind the phenomenon is absolutely random. Pure randomness is
not sufficient for free choice. Now my question is this. How can you
derive human free will from randomness? By invoking genuine random
processes, you have made room for free will. But this is not enough.
That room will remain empty if you can't come up with a story as to
how those deep random processes result in free choices and free will.
Adding up randomness won't give you agents with free will, or so it
seems. Connecting random processes will give you more randomness, but
that is all.

There's an even more serious problem for your theory: randomness seems
to directly exclude free choice. Say you want to buy a car, and there
are two in front of you: one of them is blue the other is red. You
like both colours very much. So you decide to flip a coin, and if it
comes up heads you'll buy the blue car, but if it comes up tails
you'll buy the red one. It has come up heads, so you've bought the
blue one. Did you exercise your free will in choosing the blue one? I
don't think so. Exercising your free will ended when you decided to
flip the coin, and you have never chosen to buy the blue car (as
opposed to the red one). In fact, you suspended your free will and
invoked randomness precisely to avoid making a real decision. Do you
have any explanation based on the free-will-as-randomness theory how
this is possible?

 

Pickle exampple: however, in deciding to do something seemingly irrational, you may still be following a deterministic path. It may be that your feelings of frustration with the idea of determinism stems from a childhood and strictly checmial thing which drives your thought pattern toward a want for more freedom. The idea of not havign freedom is a potential barrier between you and a sense of real freedom, so you act to prove freedom to yourself. You then design the experiment based on previous exppirience, trying as hard as possible to be random by picking things which you know (pickles), but would normally not put in the situation you are planning to create (spelling words). Therefore your actions of spelling words in pickles to prove the exsistance of free choice was fully determined by your past and present situation, which were in turn caused by other surrounding events, and could be therefore, completely deterministic.

2)I'm not fully clear on your definition of living things. If this planet were gound into dust right now, we would be unable to survive. Our ability to live as things that are alive is fully dependant on non-living things - the sun, the air, the water, etc. Now if we tone down the example a bit, and just talk about environmental change such as a rainstorm vs a sunny day- smaller changes which fall into a set of extremes which life has evolved to survive, Then I would agree with you - life can be defined as an ability of a thing to shape its environment. We take matter and energy from our environment, and use it to build our own bodies. we are bending the presence of carbon and other atoms to form a structure which can sustain life as we know it.
However, cold-blooded organisms do not retain their own temperature pattern within a changing environment. They change to match their environment in that respect.
The scope of what you are looking at is very important when answering quesitons about the division of life vs non-life.

as to the GR and time thing - if determinism *does* exsist, then IMO all time is already determined. While it may or may not have "happened" yet is a different issue. If every moment exsists at once (we only expirience it one moment at a time, sequentially), then all things that will be already are. If time actually moves, and we are expiriencing it as it happens, things that will be already exsist in pattern - they may not yet be, but they *will* be. in this deterministic universe, it can be mapped, and it will happen.
If determinsm doesn't exsist, and randomness is a factor in how things work, then the issue of time gets more interesting, and important to the idea of free will. As the future cannot be mapped, the time cannot exist all at once, unless all possible time/occurance combinations exist at once (the multiverse theory). and we simply travel a path through the possibilities. Other wise (randomness exists and time does not all exsist at once) the time/space combination must be created with every instant. it exsists, and is a determining factor (to a certain extent) in what will come next.
When it comes to free will only the multiverse theory and the creation of space/time as we enter each new moment allow it. The two cases where randomness is not a part of the universe are already set such that no diviation from the set path is possible, even if you try to do something crazy to prove your freedom. Your proof is part of the path, and set from instant 1.

this isn't the post I promised earlier, I'm still working on that one.

edit: proteus: goodd questions. I'll be sure to address them in the following post. I have an answer for the second question, and it is the same as what I mentioned above- randomness isn't something that the brain uses for free will. Assuming that randomness exsists, and always has, life would be required to deal with it to survive. As such, randomness is an inherent part of our physical being, and would have effected our evolution such that conscious randomness may be part of our basic design; even if only as a function of counter-acting random events in our attempt to control our external environment. It could be that evolving in a universe with random occurances would allow for the possibility of a living thing to have the ability to exert free will. We may or may not exert free will as living beings, but randomness would allow for the possibilty via evolution. again, I'll get more into it in the post later.

It seems that you guys are expecting me to show that if randomness exists, free will *must* exsist. I most certainly cannot do that, as it can never be truely shown, without being able to travel through time as an outside obverser, that free will exsists at all. I think that randomness can allow for the possibility for free will, and almost requires it as a survival mechanism - something that a universe devoid of random action cannot provide. Important to remeber, though, is that in a universe where randomness exsists, determinism can exsist as well - the effectivness of using deterministic methods for predicting future events, however, will be drastically reduced as the effect of randomness increases.

 

This discourse is rather interesting,

Could free will be more a sense of free will than an actuality?
A way of testing this theory of randomness is to ask the question; If I put a piece of plain white paper in front of you can you truely mark it with a pencil in a truely random manner?
Another point worth noting is that we humans are very capable of being unpredictable in our behaviour. Some times we even deliberately try to be unpredictable. The only person aware of any predictability is the person concerned and not others.There fore predictable to the person doing it but not so to external witness. Maybe it is this perception of the unpredictability of others that gives us an understanding of free will.

 

Unpredictability is indeed related to our conviction that there is free will. But it's not enough. Haphazard behaviour doesn't create agents with free will.

What is missing from this discussion is a distinction between events, on one hand, and actions, on the other. Those who want to derive free will from e.g. random physical events confine themselves to the realm of events and try to reduce actions to physical events. As free will is inseparable from performing actions that are done by agents, which in turn is inseparable from rationality, whoever whishes to solve the problem of free will through such reduction has to solve the problem of agenthood and rationality, too.

Another distinction that is also missing is that between cause and reason. Events can cause each other and an event is explained by giving its causes. "Why did that lightning happen?" "Because electricity gradually built up in the clouds and when it reached a limit, the air couldn't insulate the two poles anymore and the electric potential collapsed through a huge spark. "The explanation gives causes in the case of events. But when we ask a question about even such a profane action that opening a window, "Why did you open the window?", the answer is not causal: "Because the room was too hot and I thought maybe opening the window would cool down the air a bit." Actions are explained by reasons (interactions between intentions and beliefs) and not causes. When you explain an action through its causes you actually explain the event related to the action not the action itself. Actions are parasitic on events but there's a considerable gap between them.

 

As I have mentioned before and feel the need to again, at all times we as humans have a choice whether we play the game of life (causality, reaction etc) or not. This is the fundamental aspect of free will. to decide to not live or be part of the chain of events so to speak. By having the ability of saying no to existance we have an ability to be masters of our lives.
I feel this simple choice to go on or not to is what makes the difference between determinism and true freedom. Becasue we always have that option.
"To be or not to be" is the question and answer together.

 

I think these distinctions have been left out quite sensibly; we wouldn't want to fall into question begging.

It is quite plausible that we are being totally duped by our "common-sense" perceptions that we do indeed make reasoned decisions, and act freely. If this is even a possibility, then we cannot simply accept, going into the discussion, that these are real distinctions at all; doing so simply assumes the conclusion that you favor.

The choice between suicide and continued living is just as up for debate here as the choice that a horny caveman makes between blondes and brunettes. Just because it seems profound and fundamental to you does not in any way mean that this choice, apart from all others, is free from a deterministic interpretation.

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As a semi-unrelated aside, I think all would-be philosophers who wish to ponder human nature would be well advised to seriously read up on evolutionary biology, and not just the dusty old Bibles of Western philosophy. For obvious reasons, it's a much more useful framework for making sense out of the data. Stop treating human minds as something mystical to be sussed out with navel-gazing, and remember that our "minds" are biological computers formed by natural selection, sitting in the skulls of apes that live in complex social groups.

Ooga booga.