How can you make choices outside your personality?

Question

Whatever you learn becomes a part of your personality, but if you can't choose what shapes your personality, and your personality decides how you make choices...then freewill is an illusion. Explain to me how you can make a choice beyond what you know? I can't not know something and then be expected to make a decision based on what I don't know.

Just accept it people, freewill does not exist, (but you still gotta take responsibility for your actions). Now this doesn't really prove anything except that good and evil are just natural reactions. We're not so above the animal kingdom. Just give me an example of freewill, and I'll prove you wrong (not being arrogant).

The aborter has something in her personality that thinks it's okay to abort. Maybe she's liberal or maybe her situation is dire. Whatever...but she didn't choose her personality. What if she was raised as a right-wing Christian?

If we have limited boundaries then how is that freewill? Freewill is the ability to make ANY choice. At least...that's how I define it.

Circumstances beyond our control decide who we are, decide how we decide. If I can't decide to be a serial killer or a saint then I wouln't call my ability to choose freewill. We only do what makes us feel alive. If contributing to society makes you feel alive then great, but not everyone feels alive by contributing to society.

It wasn't your choice [gjstoryteller] because something in your personality made you question religion since your parents were crazy or whatever. Your personality chose, and your personality was forced on you by your parents. Every cause has an effect...you think if you were raised in a upper-class suburban neighborhood with super nice parents, you'd become a Wiccan based on knowledge you would not possess? C'mon think about. Causility exists, not freewill. Well unless you think freewill is the limited ability to choose.

Very easy question [Nikki]. People do not have the same level of strength, and we never choose to have strength, it's forced on us via art, good parenting or just good friends. So if you can't choose who loves you, what art inspires you...then freewill at best is the limited ability to choose. You say there's no excuse if interventionalists come into our lives, but person interprets the motives of interventionalists differently. An interventionalist like Jesus or L. Ron Hubbard can be completely ineffective at the fault of no one. GOT IT?

Alright [Maus], you're not really making a choice when you respond to stimulus. If I deliberately got up early to see the sunrise then I'd be making a choice. I'm not sure how to explain it, but it's a reflex of ours to look at things that grab our attention. "Oh, there's a house burning down...I will choose to look at it." It oesn't work that way. I mean do you choose to blink your eyes?

[Maus], everything you said just proved my point, but animals just convey their surroundings, it's part of our instincts. You're saying that freewill exists as long as we're not making a conscious decision? That's kind of irrelevant, but we're on the same page when you said, "You can't have freewill and a personality, because all the boundaries are created by your personality." Thanks for your input.

Answer 1

> Whatever you learn becomes a part of your personality,
> but if you can't choose what shapes your personality

That's a rather large item to take as a given. What we *assimilate*, I would say, becomes part of the personality, but we have the choice on what to assimilate. When presented with information, we get to choose whether to accept it or reject it. Certainly, this is based off of prior information, but self-awareness allows for self-examination, so that the prior information can be vetted for accuracy.

While I agree that we are not above the animal kingdom (sentience does not negate the fact that we're animals), I don't think that this negates the concept of free will. We are more than simply slaves to our DNA or our socialization; we make choices (conscious or not) to take actions.

I wonder, though, how you can argue for self-responsibility for actions with a lack of free will. Without free will, what prevents an action from being "society's fault"?

Answer 2

Freewill does exist. You're just confused. The mind can't comprehend anything beyond it's knowledge. And where there's freewill, mind doesn't exist, because it's the mind itself that creates all the boundaries. Hence mind can't understand freewill.

Say you're on vacation somewhere and you wake up real early in the morning. You go to the beach and just then, the sun starts rising. Do you make a choice of whether you look at the sunrise or not? You might make a choice of whether to wake up that early to see it, but you don't choose or not choose whether to look at the sunrise. You simply look at it because it's beautiful. There isn't one single person on this earth that wouldn't look at the sunrise if they were alone on the beach. And that's got nothing to do with their personality.

PS Hence you make a choice to look at the sunrise, but it doesn't involve your personality. I hope I made my point across.

Prove me wrong.

PS PS That's exactly what I'm saying, dude. You can't have freewill and a personality, because all the boundaries are created by your personality. If you were making a choice to look at the sunrise with your personality, you would be thinking the whole time "oh the sun is rising, wow, it looks beautiful, I'm wondering if I should look at it or not. well it really does look beautiful, maybe I'll look at it." That right there is the boundary. You just made a choice to look at it with your personality, but one part of you is still wondering whether you should turn your back to the sunrise. That acts as a boundary.
But you're not thinking when you look at the sunrise. That means that all the boundaries are gone. There's no doubt in you if you should look at the sun. That's freewill.
You said, explain to me how you can make a choice beyond what you know. So you want to KNOW how to do something that you don't KNOW. How is that possible? You can't expect anybody to explain how to make choices outside your personality, because if anybody did, then that knowledge would become your personality, and you still won't be able to make a choice outside of personality.
Do you get what I'm saying?

Answer 3

abortion, prove its not free will.

And....i will say that if some people had grown up in different circumstances they MIGHT not have become serial killers or whatever.....but every choice we make is OURS, its our own choice to take the easy way that everybody else takes or become a working member of society. Live and contribute, or give up and do whatever, i dont want to call lazy people Losers, but thats what you become if you dont contribute to helping out society.

ok.....here's an example of something then i'm gonna leave this Q. alone. why do some people overcome alcoholism drugs, personal addictions and some might die because of it? i dont believe pity helps people really, like for me to say 'his parents were alcoholics, oh that guy had a hard life and now he does drugs.' theres no REASON to be an alcoholic or a druggie, dont you agree? so if i have a friend, which i do have one that is on drugs and i just feel sorry for him and his circumstances that wouldnt help him at all. he needs an intervention from friends and family to get him into rehab. so i guess having friends to intervene would be a big Plus too, good question.

And one more thing, i think Everyone has an interventionalists if they believe in God and Jesus, so nobody has an excuse for anything. okay i'm done this for real! :)

Answer 4

I was raised in a Christian household yet 10 years ago, made the conscious decision to pursue Wicca. It was my choice and my choice alone. No one instructed me to do it and no one influenced me. I simply read material on the subject, found that it rang true, and began the journey.

Personality can be changed. Everything can be changed. It is simply a matter of will and passion.

I was raised by a mother who was a psychopath and a father who was a coward. By your logic, I should either be dead or in a locked psychiatric facility with a permanent Haldol drip. I am not. Through great will, passion and a pure desire to be unlike the people who raised me, I became who I am. By my own design. I took an indescribable amount of courage to do this.

The Hindus have it right. All of this is illusion. Consequently, we are the creators of our own reality. Problem is, most do not have the courage or the will, free or otherwise, to change.

Answer 5

Personality is not a fixed entity. It can be changed. It takes self-awareness and learning a few skills, but it can be done.

We have self-consciousness. And we can either run from that or embrace it and use it to our advantage.

We don't choose what happens in our formative years, but we can unlearn some of the decisions we have made based on faulty information.

The only reason we interact with each other is out of the optimism that we can change.

If you truly believe that we cannot be changed, why ask the question? What difference does it make?

Answer 6

Glad to see I'm not the only nihililst around. Sirrah, it is good to see someone else who understands the fundamental theory of computation.

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And for those about to make the arguement, "But I make choices all the time!" A choice does not prove free will. My computer makes choices all the time. It has a certain state (the currently running program[s] for example), inputs (what I type, loaded files off the hard drive, etc) and based on that state and input, produces an output.


x equals three.
if x equals 2, do this, else, do that.

[computer does 'that'].

That's a choice. It's entirely deterministic. So if a choice proves free will, then my computer has free will.

Answer 7

I love all animals. I've had puppy, cat, hen, snake, fish, bunnies, a squirrel, a little one raccoon or even a few bugs. I uncover all of them intriguing. Of direction I've now not had them suddenly, I do not are living in a zoo. I've had them over time given that I was once a child. I do not consider I are compatible with ease on this persona factor. I do not know what it approach, regularly a number of bs.

Answer 8

we're all equipped with a general sense of right and wrong, its called the natural law. freewill is not an illusion, it is being able to choose from right or wrong, or from a list of things. if you dont know something, you still have the freewill to go with it or stay to your limited boundaries.

Answer 9

Nikki, how do you figure abortion proves there is no free will?
You choose to abort the baby.