Why does anybody do anything? Does free will exist?

[sweggeh]

Is it literally impossible to do anything without it having being predetermined in some way by your experiences, your genetics, your mental state, the environment and the situation. Free will doesn't exist.

If someone was to somehow find a way to calculate everything about you that psychologically that goes into making any decision (something which is impossible, not because that data doesn't exist but because it is impossible to retrieve it all), they would be able to know what you are going to do at all times. Therefore, is it really free will?

Then if free will doesn't exist, does good or bad really exist? Reward or punishment? Or are people just products molded by things they have no control or power over?

[Demon Lizard]

Even if free will does not exist, it still makes sense to try because we don't know what was predetermined. If you "choose" to do nothing because of feeling you have no free will, then sure you have the excuse that you weren't supposed to do anything. But I'd rather hope that my will was to do something good, and if you are able to bring yourself to that mindset (even if it were predetermined that you would) your life will be better.

It is similar to a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I guess technically it would just be a fulfilling prophecy.

[Dresta]

No & No.

The simple question of 'what control do we have of our thoughts and consciousness' gives you the answer.

Read this:

http://curtisgaleweeks.com/?p=438

It is only in relation to those around us that we can think consciously at all.


My idea is, as you see, that consciousness does not really belong to man’s individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature; that, as follows from this, it has developed subtlety only insofar as this is required by social or herd utility. Consequently, given the best will in the world to understand ourselves as individually as possible, “to know ourselves,” each of us will always succeed in becoming conscious only of what is not individual but “average.” Our thoughts themselves are continually governed by the character of consciousness—by the “genius of the species” that commands it—and translated back into the perspective of the herd. Fundamentally, all our actions are altogether incomparably personal, unique, and infinitely individual; there is no doubt of that. But as soon as we translate them into consciousness they no longer seem to be.

This is the essence of phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand them: Owing to the nature of animal consciousness, the world of which we can become conscious is only a surface- and sign-world, a world that is made common and meaner; whatever becomes conscious becomes by the same token shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal; all becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to superficialities, and generalization

If your thoughts, and your fundamental mode of thinking, is framed and guided by those around you, how can it be determined by you? how can it be 'free'