Determinism vs Free Will

[Squawk]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

If you truly believed we all had no free will, you would view this conversation as meaningless: each of us would already be biologically predisposed to agree with you, or not. In a deterministic outlook, how does one categorize that inherent urge to spread your internal physics to others?

I don't personally believe this conversation is meaningless, but I suppose I would never have had it if I hadn't spoken to my friend about it. There is a causal chain which links back to that prior event. Its' memory popped into my mind when I was thinking of what thread I could start on here, which was also part of a causal chain. The thing about free will is it requires that thoughts can 'come out of thin air' and become physical actions, but there is currently no physical evidence or scientific theory which can support that as far as I'm aware. The urge to spread ideas I would say is a psychological trait, but when you get down to the nitty gritty perhaps psychology can be reduced to physics. For example, when we are using a computer program such as a word processor we see a piece of paper on a screen containing text, but underpinning that are binary code operations in the computer's processor.

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

In any situation my reaction can be a myriad of possibilities, but being a reasonably sane person would narrow them down to ones of my benefit.
Those few are further narrowed by the society I live in down to at most two or three.
So it's modified free choice unless I'm at the point where I'm mad as hell and hand grenade time.

Sanity and social norms certainly moderate our behaviour. But I think the deterministic argument is saying that everything moderates our behaviour, to the extent that ultimately we don't have any choice.