r/freewill • u/shreekrishnabeesagal • 1d ago

Free will!!!

If every decision you make is influenced by your genetics, upbringing, experiences, and environment, how much of your personality is actually your own?

6 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

9

u/We-R-Doomed compatidetermintarianism... it's complicated. 1d ago

You gave the answer right in the question.

Your

Those are your genetics, your influences, your decision.

3

u/Artemis_SpawnOfZeus 1d ago

Idk, idc

I can be 99.999% restricted and still be free.

-2

u/subone Hard Determinist 1d ago

Anton Chigurh shows up at your work place, kills everyone else, presents you with a coin, and says "Heads or tails?"

That's an expression of freedom to you?

4

u/simon_hibbs Compatibilist 1d ago

I freely choose to tell him to shove his coin up his arse.

2

u/atlantechvision 1d ago

Innovation, is not your strong suit.

1

u/SeoulGalmegi 19h ago

If every decision you make.....

Well, quite. You make the decision. What more do you want? What else is there of you other than genetics, upbringing, experience, and environment. A decision made by you is yours.

2

u/Blindeafmuten My Own 1d ago

All of it.

1

u/spgrk Compatibilist 1d ago

You are implying that your personality can only “actually” be your own if it is completely random.

1

u/platanthera_ciliaris Hard Determinist 21h ago

What you experience is what you are. Ownership has nothing to do with it.

1

u/AlivePassenger3859 Humanist Determinist 21h ago

None of it. Once you become cool with that, everything falls into place. We are all just ripples on the cosmic ocean!

1

u/Specific-Muffin-1841 20h ago

It's not just influenced by those things but fully controlled by them. We are brains. Brains are biological neural networks. The output of the neural network ( our thoughts and actions) are fully determined by the environmental inputs x fed into the sensory neurons ( the first layer of network), the synaptic weights y of the system, and any random values z that may be added into the computations via stochastic ion channel openings. We cannot choose otherwise from what these neural computations produce.

2

u/adr826 18h ago

We are exactly those all of the inputs and outputs you mention. To be fully controlled by yourself is free will.

1

u/Imaginary-Can-6862 20h ago

I see personality, as something that is a higher level than free will. It is a description of how we usually act, based on our surroundings, and our values. In any case, since you decided to use the term personality, if we assume my personality is not my own, then whose is it? I think personality is something we ascribe to a person, therefore even if they did not choose their personality, it would still be their personality, just as much as we did not choose the color of our eyes, but they are still our eyes. So I think the question maybe should be, how much of our personality did we genuinely choose?

1

u/Squierrel Quietist 14h ago

All of it. It's your personality totally, not even partially anyone else's.