The Free Will Process

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I was thinking of Hume's famous quote that the, what is it? Reason will always be the slave to the passions. And that kind of brings us back to the free will process. We have to consciously say, what do I want? What's wrong here? And we don't know. It's like the creator who doesn't know how to solve the creative problem. But then there's an incubation period in which we go think about something else. Then because we've primed our non conscious mind to do work by saying,What do I wants? It starts to return suggestions that we can consider and perhaps adopt. This is just the compatibilist philosophy definition of free will

It’s become fashionable to argue that free will is a fiction: that we humans are in the thrall of animal urges and unconscious biases and only think that we are choosing freely. In Freely Determined, research psychologist Kennon Sheldon argues that this perception is not only wrong but also dangerous.

Shermer and Sheldon discuss: definitions of free will, determinism, compatibilism, libertarian free will • dualism • reductionism, materialism, predetermination, and epiphenomenalism • Christian List’s three capacities for free will • AI, Star Trek’s Data, sentience and consciousness, ChatGPT, GPT-4 • how what people believe about free will and determinism influences their behaviors • the case for hard determinism • brain injuries, tumors, addictions, and other “determiners” of behavior • emergence • symbolic self • System 1 vs. System 2 thinking • Experiencing Self vs. Remembered Self • subjective well-being and happiness.

Kennon M. Sheldon is professor of psychology at the University of Missouri. He is one of the founding researchers of positive psychology, a fellow of the American Psychological Association, and a recipient of the Templeton Foundation Positive Psychology Prize. He lives in Columbia, Missouri. He is the author of numerous scientific papers and scholarly books, including Stability of Happiness: Theories and Evidence on Whether Happiness Can Change; Designing the Future of Positive Psychology: Taking Stock and Moving Forward; Current Directions in Psychological Science; and Self-Determination Theory in the Clinic. His new book integrates all this research into a popular trade book Freely Determined: What the New Psychology of the Self Teaches Us About How to Live.