He looks like a nightmare

okay here's the thing

how can free will exist

if genes affect behavior?

or you can affect behavior by messing with part of the brain?

if you jam a rod into my head at the right spot, you could probably make me a liberal

Oh boy...

this has happened to people in the past

do I really have free will if I can turn liberal by being stabbed the right way?

That’s like saying free will can’t exist because we can’t fly

Physical reality inhibits my free will. No.

No, because you can try to fly all you want. If I have the right genes or a rod in the right part of my head, I will cease to even want to not be liberal.

This is a lifeboat scenario that isn’t relevant. You don’t make philosophical conclusions by exceptions. You wouldn’t say, for example, humans have 6 toes because some humans have 6 toes.

An abnormally functioning brain is not an argument against normally functioning ones

Let's say I'm super based and redpilled identitarian right until the second I get stabbed. Now I'm suddenly liberal vegan satanist. Doesn't that imply at least some parts of the brain are involved in determinism?

It's not just malfunctioning though

Genes influence behavior in normal people, too

These are preconditions upon which will is built. You’re, perhaps accidentally, separating mind and body

I read an article that said a certain type of magnet could be used to make someone less religious/more accepting of refugees

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/news/brain-magnets-decrease-faith-in-god-religion-immigrants-a6695291.html

@Alexander Pechorin If there's preconditions, is the will entirely free?

I think I’ll keep my threat-processing ability, thanks

broke: they’re taking away your guns
woke: they’re taking away your brain

@Isabella Locke-MT That's a good example of what I'm talking about. If the parts of the brain can be modified to do something else, then clearly they were already determined to do something.

Of course, objective constraints of reality are never a denial of your freedom

No. Impulses and tendencies are not the same thing as will

What, then, is determinism? If the objective constraints are within your brain itself, is that not at least some form of determinism?

No. Determinism and free will have very little to do with emotions or tendencies.

Let’s define free will: “the ability to act at one's own discretion.”

That you might have an existing tendency towards one particular view or feeling does not deny your ability to act against it

Only an abnormally functioning, damaged brain would do that

Isn't that tendency, at least to since extent, determined, though? There's a distinction between choosing to react a certain way to stimuli that may or may not be present, and "stimuli" being present in the brain itself, which determine how one reacts to outside stimuli.

Your tendency to be hungry when you don’t eat is determined too. That is not, philosophically speaking, related to free will at all

Only the choice to eat or not eat

A better comparison would be the tendency to actually act on hunger, which would be a form or determinism. How can we say that our will is entirely free if the mechanism used to determine that will is itself held captive by certain tendencies?

https://mobile.twitter.com/spacedemocrat/status/1066542605020745728

You aren’t “held captive” you do indeed still have a choice regardless of the urge. And as you’ve claimed, “we can modify our tendancies”

The very fact that a tendency might exist and we have potential and capacity to recognize it and to modify it or alleviate it is enough, though even if we couldn’t modify it, so long as we could act against it, free will exists.

By what mechanism are those tendencies modified, though? At what point is the predictive power of the presence of particular allele high enough that we can say its presence is deterministic? Does it have to be 100%? What if it's 95%? Can we really say that our will is entirely free if there is only a 5% chance of breaking with the effect of a certain allele? If the Monoamine Oxidase 2 Repeat allele causes a significantly increased likelihood of aggressive behavior, how high does that likelihood have to be for us to say that the allele at least partially determined behavior?

Keep in mind that the issue isn't so much that the allele acts as a form of stimulus, the issue is that this particular stimulus is present within the decision making capacity of the brain itself.

@Isabella Locke-MT. So basically magnetizing threat processing (a healthy, natural occurrence) out is acceptable in their minds, but shocking the gay (unnatural and unhealthy) out of someone wouldn't be... <:really:453005408064241674>

Yep. As long as it suits their needs, they don't care if they damage brains.