Does feeling free mean we are free?

Your browser does not support inline frames or is currently configured not to display inline frames.

People think they have free will because they feel free. You feel free when you are drunk though you are not. A drug is affecting your mind. The main argument for free will, the reason so many who should know better can't discard it, is that we are led to think that we seem to be told by our experience that we are free. We seem to feel that we have different options and that nothing programs us to choose one of them and not the others.

Even if we do have free will we cannot know it. Believing something and being right does not constitute knowledge but luck.

Feelings prove nothing. If I feel that Jesus is God that does not make me right. You can be programmed by nature to feel free. And we are for we simply cannot be free.

Even free willists know that we can feel free and not be free like when we are mad or when we have a lucid dream that seems very real and when we are making decisions in that dream for even they agree that these are not decisions or choices for most of the brain has been closed down. Dreams prove that free will is only an assumption. When that is all it is then even belief in free will cannot entitle us to believe in rewarding and punishing. It can only entitle us to give what might be a reward or punishment depending on whether the person is free or not. An animal has no free will yet when you take your dog’s bowl off the floor in order to put his food in it the dog will know that his dinner is coming and he will follow you around and watch you and beg for his food and lick his lips in anticipation. The animal intends to have the food and acts this way because he has a goal in mind – his dinner. When the animal can behave like that it is madness to say that the fact that we think and decide what we feel before we do something means we are free and have free choice. There is no difference.

We only have one thought at a time and this thought is caused by what we think or what happens in the previous moment. In fact, when you understand the argument that we can’t be free because we only have one thought at a time you see that the feeling free stops. Then you feel that you are not free. Feeling free happens only when you forget that your decision is caused by one thought and you recall the thought and the process of thoughts and the motions of the will that led to the thought that caused the decision. If you assume for a time that you are not free and become aware of each moment your will moves as an individual moment and wave your arms about you will experience the sensation that everything you are doing is mechanical and is just happening according to some program and the feeling of freedom disappears. When the sensation is so changeable how can you be free? If feeling free makes you free then if you are free, you will feel free all the time. Free will shall be in your mind and will be a faculty in it. A faculty that can no more be changed than pretending you don’t have an arm will make your arm disappear and ease to exist because it is a part of you.

To believe that you can switch from free to unfree by changing your attitude or suspending the sensation of freedom is dangerous. You could turn unfree and commit murder and still be innocent. It could be abused but only if you believe in free will for you will only be doing that if you believe in it. If you do not, then you will prefer to nurture your good side for it determines your future and blesses it. Luckily, we are unfree all the time.

Experience seems to show that we are free. Thinking and feeling form the process from which the decision is made but all these things have the one motive: gratification of the self. This gratification which accompanies all that we consciously do is the reason we think we feel free or that we do what we want. It is not evidence that we are free because it has to do with pleasure not with the will though it drives the will. It is not the will. We do not care about good and evil but only about self-gratification so that does away with free will in any meaningful sense though religion lies saying God made us free to decide if we would be evil or good.

The feeling of freedom comes from the fact that our brains have not decided yet what to do. It is not coming from a sense of real freedom. Many philosophers hold to this (page 8, GOD A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED Keith Ward, OneWorld, Oxford, 2003).

Thinking and feeling form the process from which the decision is made but all these things have the one motive: gratification of the self. We know that we can't possibly be in bliss all the time and sometimes we want to suffer so that we can later enjoy life better. If you are in pain and get better you end up in euphoria with the relief. Until we get the relief we get the gratification that comes from fulfilling our desire to suffer. Gratification accompanies all that we consciously do. It is the reason we think we feel free or that we do what we want. It is not evidence that we are free because it has to do with pleasure not with the will though it drives the will. It is not the will. We like to feel as if we are in control even if we are not. The thinking and feeling do not prove that we produce the decision but they are just the way the programming that will result in the decision works.

We know that we can see and we cannot deny that. We can sense the will but its freeness is not something that can be sensed so the freeness can be denied. We have no mechanism for sensing it apart from feelings and feelings can be wrong. Religion says that free will is a certain fact. It is forced to say that because if it is just an assumption then it cannot claim that there is any evidence for God for that hypothesis requires that free will exists. So it has to be positing some psychic sixth sense that tells you that the will is free. It has to fall back on psychic powers, a concept it frequently regards as abominable and satanic.

Religion is Reasonable says that the reason free will cannot be an illusion is because it would be impossible for all of us to be under the illusion all the time (page 25). But it is not a serious illusion in a sense. It is not like seeing visions of pink elephants all the time. It is only a feeling and most of us have feelings that could mislead us. Don’t we live under the illusion that many evil things are good all the time? Don’t all agree that evil doing is a symptom of delusive thinking? The arguments of religion against determinism are wafer thin and serve only to show the weakness of their position.

We know that we do not know how we are free and how we are able to do it if we have this freedom. Therefore no matter how free we might think we feel we could be wrong. The feeling is necessary to prevent fear and it is a good thing for to feel that fate controls you by pulling you one direction and another is a scary thing so you have to feel as if you can do what you want. But we can have the feeling and deny free will so denying it is not a sickness nor is it hypocritical. Some determinists say the simplest way to respond to people who tell us we feel free and are free is, “What do you expect when we always do what we want?” They are indicating that feeling is necessary for us to have a will but it does not make that will free or unfree. Yes from moment to moment we do feel we do what we want but the wants are perceived to be mechanical and unfree when you stop looking over the several thoughts and acts of will that led to the acts. So the feeling is actually accompanied by the feeling that you are not free though you do what you want. It is almost an ambivalent situation. If you notice that if you cannot do what is evil just because it is evil it follows that no part of your evil actions intended to be other than good under the circumstances. But you were wrong so you were insane when your mind became distorted to assume evil was good.

It is as certain as 2+2=4 that nothing can prove we have free will or even that we might have it. If religion denies that then it denies that 2+2=4 which is a dissent from free will for if reason makes no sense then free will is impossible to use for there is a connection between it and reason.

My basic mental component is consciousness. It works by being aware that it exists and that it can learn things through the five senses. What kind of machine is it? Nobody knows. A computer is sane not only when it does what it is supposed to do but when it is set up right to do that. A computer is insane even when it gives the right results if it is not right inside. The machine giving correct results does not prove that the machine is sane. When insanity can be obvious insanity why can't insanity masquerade as sanity so that even the insane person is fooled? Remember we do not see the mechanics but the results so we don’t know and the person only sees the results as well. Thus you don’t know if your consciousness is sane or not or if it has the same make-up as that other people have. You don’t have a clue. If it is insane then it follows that attempts to prove free will and stuff like God is a waste of time because anybody insane cannot have real free will anyway but only something that mimics it. To assume your consciousness is sane is an act of pride and is so basic that it follows that there is pride in all of us even those who claim to have no self-esteem – its there but it is just twisted. To judge anybody else at all is intolerant for to determine their real sanity or its extent is beyond your capacity. In this the political correctness people are right. Judging implies that intolerance and persecution and lack of compassion and violence are lawful.

The totally insane person can say a word. To make the word takes a bit of mental effort and they say the word right. That does not mean that they are sane to the extent that they are right. They may be right but they are still totally insane. You can seem sane and normal and still be as mad as they come. We feel so sane when we do evil and yet we are not. We can be so easily fooled. If religion wants its free will doctrine, it has to make out that insanity does not exist but is just a variant of the norm and so crazy people should go to jail.

If you feel free, if you feel you have free will, the feeling will vanish or at least diminish if you start listing the things you cannot choose. You are unable to choose that your child should get a terrible disease and die horribly.

Many philosophers assert that you have free will to intend anything at all but you may not have the resources to cause what you intend. For example, you may choose death for your husband but you may be locked up in the bedroom and unable to kill him, to make him die. Free will and freedom to act are two distinct things. But if you choose to do something and you can't carry it out you cannot be sure that you really chose it. We have all experienced times when we determined to do something awful and then when the chance came we didn't do it and we saw that we didn't really mean it when we chose it. So we didn't make a real choice. So you can be convinced you have chosen something when you actually haven't! You would need to see when you are free in order to be really free. If you think you are jailed, and don't know the door is open, you are still not free. It follows then that the more limitations you have on your freedom to act the less free you are. You cannot choose to fly then if you don't have wings.

You can feel you have chosen when you actually haven't chosen at all. So you can feel free and not be free.

Many philosophers hold that even if free will has limits we are still fully responsible and accountable for what we do. They say that if there is a free creature that by its nature can hardly move about its free will it is just as free as us though it looks like its free will is limited. They say it has all the free will it needs so there is no limitation as such. They content that it is to blame if it does bad and to be rewarded if it does good. With that logic a creature that can do nothing but will to eat has free will! Free will is supposed to be about having the power to choose different options. The more options and abilities you have the freer you are.

People who believe in free will should not be going as far as to believe it. At best they should deny it and at worst they should be saying they are open and claim that nobody knows if we have free will or not. In the latter case it would be safer to act as if we do not have it.

We could be programmed though we may feel free for we could be set to feel that way and to act free though we are not really free at all. Nobody is able to explain how free will works.

Inability to prove that free will exists, proves that the idea of sin, using free will to defy the will of God, is nonsense. It proves God cannot exist and is loathsome if he does. To honour God is to honour what is loathsome. It is a loathsome thing to do. Indeed the idea of God has made many people loathsome. When we reward a criminal with retribution, this is hatred for we cannot prove free will. We are punishing him not because we believe he has to pay with suffering for abusing his free will the way he has but because we feel he is free. To hurt a person because you feel like it, is hatred even if the person deserves it. God religion stakes everything on a feeling, namely that people have free will as a gift from God. It is totally absurd when based on such a pathetic insulting foundation.