Do you personally believe we truly have a choice in anything?

We're a product of genetic and environmental variables, but in the end aren't we just a machine that acts exactly as planned in reaction to our surroundings?

Everything about is could then therefore be pre-determined. Even though we believe we have freedom of choice, there's no such thing. It's just a facade.

What's your personal feeling on the issue?

I believe that free will is limited to your mental state. Nearly everything else can be taken from you or forced on you by others. Ultimately it is the individual that decides what to believe, like, dislike and what actions to take. While it is true that other people can influence you, they can not make the final decision for you.

Claiming that necessity and desire causes you to take certain actions is true. However, I don't think it causes you to change your beliefs.

Yes, I do believe in free will, and without it, life is pointless.

We all act on our memories and experiance. so that makes humans a slave to those 2...

life without free will is far from pointless. Look at ants. they poses no free will but every ants serves a purpose. so its not pointless.

Nothing is so pointless as to try and second-guess someone's motives. We believe we have free will, and that we choose our actions. And then it is only our actions that matter. Second-guessing whether or not this is actually choice or destiny is fruitless.

I think that free will does it exist, but it isn't really free as we pay for it every time we make a decision. And if we choose not to choose, that is still a decision we make.

Not everything is pre-determined, but there are possibilites of everything happening.

I have a feeling I read that quote from somewhere so excuse me if it soulds plagerised!

Of course there is free will. Where there is choice there is free will. I choose how I will behave and what I will do, when I will do it and why. If you choose to act on impulse without awareness of process or repercussions it is still a choice whether or not those actions are learned or instinctual reactions.

We have free will, if we didnt we couldnt commit suicide since it goes against everything that nature, god, religion, the environment and everything else wants out of us.

But suicide is considered an illness of the brain and therefore is not relevent in an argument pertaining to free will as that person would not, supposedly, have a choice.

Who says its considered an illness of the brain? Thats retarded. Its most definatly not. Because you can commit suicide for a 10000000 reasons. If I got bit by a zombie for example I would blow my fucking brains out. Thats a choice. If I am fighting in Iraq and I am wounded and I know there is a million dollar price on any living Americans heads by the terrorist leaders so they can decapitate me in public, better believe I am pulling the trigger on my own ass, or better yet grip a grenade and wait for a terrorist to try and grab me then BOOM to hell we go.

There is no choice in the mind of a suicide!

People can be driven to a point where they feel there is no choice. That doesn't mean there aren't other choices nor does it mean you can't have reasoning for a suicide. I can think of reasons to die.

Yes there is. Thats why we have people who ALMOST commit suicide. I knew a girl in highschool who hung herself. in the last minutes before she died and was blacking out she changed her mind and saved herself. She chose to live, AFTER she chose to commit suicide.

That does often happen. She's very lucky. Suicide is really another topic though, don't you think? I really don't want to go into it here.

everybody knows we have free will

Depends on how you want to view it, I think. I find it a very interesting idea how Dizzy says our actions are based on our experiences and memories and therein we are slave to them. I never quite thought of it in that regard. Interesting. Yet true in its own way.

I think we'd all like to believe we have free will. The human mind is stubborn like that and even I would like to insist such. Does that inherently imply the existence of such, then? If most of us have the inexplicable and persistent desire to assert our free will then that implies its existence to me. At the very least we all have a pretty damn good convincing illusion of free will.

A friend of mine's friend recently died. He had been a heavy drug user but he didn't die from an overdose, just years of abuse. My friend had to explain to her children why he had died.

This is how she put it: 'One day, Anon had to make a choice. He could either take the drugs offered to him (herion) or not. He decided to take them. Life is made up of choices and he took the wrong one.'

So yes, free will does exist. It's all dependant on the choices you make.

Eh... if free will didn't exist... why would the bible bother declaring that the choice is ours whether we should follow God's guidance or not? If free will didn't exist, then it would prove that there is some ultimate existence and that we're all slaves to something 'greater' than us. Think of it this way. If we didn't have free will, philosophy wouldn't exist.

Someone brought up causality but I say if you figured it out you're overlooking it.

It's the person whom decides if they have free will or not.

If they don't believe in it- they are not letting themselves be free.