You pose the options as (1) your choice was predetermined by the purely physical (atoms, laws) (2) your choice was freely made by your agentic self. Have you considered that your choices may be (pre)determined by psychological causes? That there may be reasons, conscious or unconscious, as to why a particular impulse arises in your mind and is allowed to issue in an action? Certainly I don’t feel as if my own decisions arrive unaffected by thought, feeling, unconscious association, etc.
I also wonder if your sense that “you could have decided differently” really derives from a feeling that the dominant causes leading to your choices are within your mind (and therefore relatively unaffected by external causes), rather than a feeling that your choices have no cause but an impulse of the will that is itself uncaused.
Yeah, that’s an interesting point. I would say that many choices I make are affected by psychological factors, which are probably reducible to atoms/laws (like chemicals in my brain). What I’m curious about is if my choices are entirely reducible to these psychological and other physical factors, chemicals in my brain, movement of atoms according the laws of physics, etc, or if there is any part of the choice being made by my conscious mind in a way that can’t be accounted for with the standard physical model of the world.
You pose the options as (1) your choice was predetermined by the purely physical (atoms, laws) (2) your choice was freely made by your agentic self. Have you considered that your choices may be (pre)determined by psychological causes? That there may be reasons, conscious or unconscious, as to why a particular impulse arises in your mind and is allowed to issue in an action? Certainly I don’t feel as if my own decisions arrive unaffected by thought, feeling, unconscious association, etc.
I also wonder if your sense that “you could have decided differently” really derives from a feeling that the dominant causes leading to your choices are within your mind (and therefore relatively unaffected by external causes), rather than a feeling that your choices have no cause but an impulse of the will that is itself uncaused.
Yeah, that’s an interesting point. I would say that many choices I make are affected by psychological factors, which are probably reducible to atoms/laws (like chemicals in my brain). What I’m curious about is if my choices are entirely reducible to these psychological and other physical factors, chemicals in my brain, movement of atoms according the laws of physics, etc, or if there is any part of the choice being made by my conscious mind in a way that can’t be accounted for with the standard physical model of the world.