Quote Originally Posted by Sasaki Kojiro View Post
But the word "choice" has always referred to what I described and what you call the illusion of choice. It seems abstract to me because it doesn't acknowledge the complexity of the mind. Would you admire a van gogh, or say that he didn't really paint it, his arm was forced to?
I don't think so.... Generally the mind has been considered a discerning faculty which performs a decision making process, choosing between multiple options.

It's essentially a semantic disagreement, but I don't get your insistence that free will must be unbound. That would require omnipotence, yes? And presumably no sense of right and wrong, else our will would be bound by our conscience. It seems to me like you add up all the external forces that push us around, and say that despite them, we have free will. But that if our brain has a definite process by which it decides things, we don't. The freedom in my free will comes from our ability to do what our psychological selves want--and your description of that as unfree boils down to "we have to do what we want, so we don't choose it".
I think you are mistaking the ability to express our Will, and its Freedom. Let us be clear, "Freedom" in any context means "to be unfettered" To be free is to be unconstrained. Now, the Will if it is truly Free must be uncontrained and able to make choices in spite of external pressure. Now, the expression of the Will is something else, I can exercise my Free Will and decide I want to fly, but I can't carry through that Will because I don't have wings. Of course, man continued to Will this, wholly against his nature, and thence built himself wings.

So the Will is Free but the Action isn't. Freedom of Action is a preserve of the Divine, whether man has Free Will within himself is a seperate question. Is the distinction I am making clear, now?

Now, the Will can allow itself to be bound by, for example, morality and be held accountable for such a decision. However, because the Will is Free such notionally binding, or rather submission, is voluntary.

Now, if the decisions the Will makes are actually bound by the environment, rather than influenced by it, then the Will is un-Free because its choices are make independent of it. Essentially, the Will is commanded by the system to want a certain thing. With Free Will the Will merely aquiences, it is never commanded.

My complaint with your system is that it boils down to, "We have to want what we want" rather than, "we choose what we want".

Isn't that how it was described originally? "I don't need to work because it's all determined anyway" is an expression of fatalism right? Because it can matter if you work.
Not really, its more like, "whether I work or not has been determined, so I don't have to think about it". Such a situation as you describe happens when someone who actually has Free Will gives up and becomes fatalistic. Remember, all my objections to the way Determinism impacts society come from a Free Will perspective.