You could have said, I chose to have coffee because I liked to try coffee instead of tea.
There is no need to add “free will” in that choice or decision. Free will is just an artificial word to frame an event for no intelligible reason.
Hence, “free will exists, or everything is determined” is a vacuous issue which doesn’t exist.
Having urges or preference is just a way of reflecting your reasons or justifying for the choices or decisions in your psychology later. They are not really part of your actions, choices or decisions.
You could have said anything why you chose or decided to do something, and they will all be as equally effective as saying it was “free will” which forced the actions due to they are all from your psychological disposition, or other folks framing and making up the reasons for their own motives to punish you, persuade you, or make you to believe in something.
There is no right way to be 100% clear, or be objective on the verdicts for the cause of your actions if it were free will or so many other reasons which could have caused the action.
There is if we are talking about what the correct metaphysical model of reality is.
This is one of the most difficult areas of philosophy, and one of the most important. If you don’t agree, why are you bothering to have this discussion? Your own attempt to sweep it under the carpet indicates you think it does matter.
I am expecting good arguments against my argument. It is not about agreeing or disagreeing. It is about “is there good arguments against mine?”
If there were good arguments against mine, then yes fair enough, we will accept it. If not, then perhaps it wasn’t a valid problem which needing more clarification, on whether there are genuine problems for discussion or not?
I don’t agree. Our urges drive most of our natural behaviour. They are not just post-action justifications. We eat because we are hungry. Hunger is not a post-action justification. That would be an absurd thing to claim.
There is no right way to be 100% clear, or be objective on the verdicts for the cause of your actions if it were free will or so many other reasons which could have caused the action.
This is irrelevant. We are discussing the nature of reality, and it is rarely, if ever, possible to be 100% objective about metaphysics.
I don’t understand what your argument actually is. You seem to just be dismissing free will out of hand. Perhaps it would help if you set the whole argument out, with premises and reasoning and conclusion, like I did in the opening post of this thread.
It is not dismissing free will blindly. There are traditional arguments and ideas from Nietzsche and Heidegger, the problem doesn’t exist.
It is about finding out, which ideas are correct or making sense.
Intention is a state of mind or brain, it can be a physical state. It is a commitment to perform an action, which enables you to control your behavior. When you perform an action without an intention to perform it, you don’t have control over the action and so the action is not freely willed.
And in order to have control over the putting of a high value on something, I need an intention to put a high value on something. Otherwise the putting of a high value is just my unchosen preference/desire.
Hunger itself is not. But saying that it was hunger which caused your eating, is clearly your judgement and reflection from your mind.
That is exactly the reason why it cannot be only “free will”, which caused your actions. There are many other possible reasons one could bring out for an action, and they are all as credible as “free will”.
“Can”? Can it be a non-physical state?
Then you are assuming your conclusion. If intention is a physical state then we just have an infinite regress of previous intentions. No free will. But I see no reason to accept that everything is caused by previous physical states, and I am offering an alternative model which explains how free will is possible. Why should I accept determinism, when it is so subjectively obvious we have free will, and it is physically and logically possible? Why would I believe my free will is an illusion when I don’t have to?
But why can’t what you are calling “intentions” be valuations of different possible futures? You call it “intention to turn left”. I call it “assigning a higher value to turning left than any other action”.
Your version, if you define intentions as prior physical states, leads to determinism by definition. Mine doesn’t. Why should I accept your definition? What’s wrong with mine?
And in order to have control over the putting of a high value on something, I need an intention to put a high value on something.
But what is the point in adding this extra step? What is the difference between placing a high value on an outcome, and having an intention to make that outcome happen? It’s different words for the same thing, but your words are defined in such a way as to make determinism inevitable, and mine aren’t.
You are begging the question.
All animals eat. Most of them can’t reflect afterwards about what made them eat. They eat because they are hungry. Humans are no different.
That is exactly the reason why it cannot be only “free will”, which caused your actions. There are many other possible reasons one could bring out for an action, and they are all as credible as “free will”
Free will doesn’t mean we have total control of our actions. There are all sorts of factors at work. Determinism says we have no free will at all. I am saying we do have free will, but that it comes in many different degrees (even amongst humans).
Hypothetically it could be a state of a non-physical mind.
Intention could also be a non-physical state, but what does it matter? Instead of an infinite regress of physical intentions you’ll have an infinite regress of non-physical intentions.
You can call intention valuation but what does it change? Istead of an intention to create an intention you’ll have the problem of a valuation to create a valuation - an infinite regress of valuations.
It is the difference between having your preference and intending to create your preference. If you just value something because you have a preference without intending to create that preference, then your valuation is not freely willed.
But I am not saying it is a non-physical state. I am saying it is a non-computable valuation. And you cannot have an infinite regress of those, because they are non-computable.
That would only be true if the valuation was computable. Non-computability breaks the chain. That’s the whole point.
But if the preference in question is for a specific physically possible outcome then that is an intention to create your preference. Why would you intend any action other than what you place the highest value on? You are using the concept of “intention” to create an infinite regress, and then claiming the regress is inevitable. It isn’t. It is only inevitable if we accept your concept of an intention.
We are specifically talking about valuing physically possible futures, not any old “thing”. Consciousness models the world, models different possible futures, and assigns non-computable valuations to specific futures. There is absolutely no justification for then inventing something called an “intention” which is additional to the valuation. There’s no scientific evidence for any such thing, and no logical reason why it is required. The only reason to insert it into the model is so you can insert your conclusion into the premise of your argument.
Do you understand what “begging the question” means in philosophy? because I have now explained this to you several times, and in response you just commit exactly the same fallacy, over and over again.
Your argument starts with this premise:
(1) Every time we act, that action starts with an intention to act. This intention is a previous state of the system (physical or non-physical).
This premise assumes determinism is true. It is only a valid premise if you accept determinism. Why should somebody who doesn’t accept determinism accept this premise?
I start with this:
(1) Every time we act, that action starts with a non-computable valuation (a high value on the specific action in question). This valuation is NOT a previous state of the system.
Why is your premise any more valid than mine? Your only answer is to say “every valuation must be preceded by an intention”, which just re-inserts your question-begging premise.
Humans can reflect and project why they ate, and some of them project they chose to eat because they have free will. Of course no one talks about other animals free will, because it is obvious that free will doesn’t exist without the intentional projection.
Where does human free will come from? Is it from your mind or some external elements in the world?
How many degrees is free will and how many degree is determined by other factors on your choice for having coffee instead of tea? Who decides amount of the degrees?
OK. It does not follow that they don’t have free will.
Plenty of people talk about other animals having free will. It think worms and flies have free will.
I refer you back to the opening post, which describes my answer to this in detail. For me “free will” and “consciousness” (and “wavefunction collapse”) are different names for the same process. So your question is a false dichotomy. Free will IS your mind. Everything that is conscious has free will, because they are the same thing.
Simple answer: That is a question of how intellectually, emotionally and spiritually developed a person is.
Full answer: Competition-Resolved Collapse | Two-Phase Cosmology
After the Embodiment Threshold has been passed, collapse unfolds as a storm of micro-collapses inside the subject’s specious present. This storm is the ongoing process that sustains embodiment.
Each micro-collapse (ci) is a local stabilisation of entangled alternatives. The hazard rate (which explains when the world collapses (driven by attention and value)) for a micro-collapse is:
lambda_i(t) = lambda_0 * [1 + alpha_V * V_i(t) + alpha_P * P_i(t) + alpha_A * A_i(t) + alpha_C * C_i(t)]
Competing micro-collapses share overlapping support in Hilbert space, and the realised one minimises the inconsistency functional (which path the world takes (the one that causes the least “logical pain”)). :
F[ci] = | <Psi| O_ci |Psi> - V_ci |^2 + beta * D(rho_SE || rho_S (x) rho_E)
The dynamics across the specious present follow a rate-modulated stochastic field, defined by the master equation:
rho_dot_S = L_U[rho_S] + i * sum( lambda_i(t) * (M^i * rho_S * M^i_dagger - 0.5 * {M^i_dagger * M^i, rho_S}) )
This equation represents the structural completion of the model: it shows how the standard laws of physics (L_U) and the subject’s internal valuations (lambda_i) combine to create a single, unfolding reality. This “master equation” is the final rule that combines it all into a moving picture of reality.
How Competition-Resolved Collapse closes the multi-agent hole
Once the Embodiment Threshold has been crossed, collapse is no longer a single global event. It becomes an ongoing process: a dense, overlapping storm of local stabilisations occurring within the specious present of embodied agents. Each micro-collapse is a resolution of nearby physical alternatives under valuation, prediction, attention, and coherence constraints. This process sustains the continuity of experience and action for a subject.
The problem that CRC is designed to address arises only when more than one such subject exists. If conscious agents are genuinely real, and if their valuations matter, then situations inevitably arise in which two or more agents assign incompatible values to the same unfolding physical situation. One agent intends one outcome; another intends a mutually exclusive outcome. If collapse were driven independently by each agent’s valuations alone, the theory would permit incompatible realised worlds – private realities with no principled mechanism forcing agreement. That is the multi-agent hole. CRC as defined here is deliberately minimal. It exists to close this structural inconsistency, not to explain meaning.
CRC closes this hole without introducing a new force, a coordinating intelligence, or a hidden global selector. The key move is simple but non-negotiable: when agents interact, their micro-collapse processes become entangled. Their valuation-weighted collapse hazards no longer operate on disjoint physical supports. Instead, overlapping regions of Hilbert space are jointly constrained by all participating agents’ valuations and predictive structures. At that point, incompatible continuations are not merely in conflict at the level of desire or belief. They are in conflict at the level of representability. A continuation in which both incompatible valuations are simultaneously realised cannot remain dynamically coherent, because it would require the same shared physical degrees of freedom to stabilise in mutually exclusive ways.
CRC resolves this by treating collapse as a competition among overlapping micro-collapses. Each candidate stabilisation carries a cost, measured by an inconsistency functional. This functional penalises two things: mismatch between the physical outcome and the valuations applied to it, and breakdown of coherence between the agents and their shared environment. The realised micro-collapse is the one that minimises this combined inconsistency. Importantly, this is not a vote, a negotiation, or a moral arbitration. No agent “wins” because it is stronger, more numerous, or more important. The outcome is whichever continuation can be jointly stabilised by the entangled system of agents and environment with the least representational contradiction. The others simply fail to stabilise and are not realised. This is how a single shared world is maintained. Agents remain free to value, intend, and predict independently. Conflicts are not prevented. But when those conflicts concern the same physical degrees of freedom, only outcomes that can be jointly embodied survive the collapse process. The shared world is not imposed from outside; it is the residue of what multiple embodied perspectives can coherently sustain together.
CRC therefore does exactly one thing: it ensures that multi-agent reality does not fragment. It does not explain why particular symbolic meanings arise, why certain patterns feel significant, or why some coincidences strike us as meaningful rather than accidental. Those phenomena occur after the closure CRC provides, within the space of stabilised shared reality. In other words, CRC closes the door on solipsistic branching, but it does not seal the building. What follows, once a shared world is secured, is a further question: how symbolic systems, shared myths, and authorised interpretive frameworks modulate which micro-collapses are preferentially stabilised within that world.
I was not saying they don’t have free will. My point was that they mislead others claiming that their action was based on free will, when it was based on some other factors such as preference, reasoning, customs, fear or advice or unknown factors by psychological projection.
There is no objective way to prove an action was based on free will or millions of other possible reasons, or unknown reasons.
What are the evidence and grounds for that claims?
Sure. This is an interesting claim. But it seems lacking the compelling grounds for the claim. Why should anyone buy that view?
I have never seen anything resembling free will in my mind or others mind or in the world. Why suddenly my mind and consciousness have to be free will?
Who is the intellectually, emotionally and spiritually developed person here?
Are we still talking about the possibility of free will here?
Can I assume that’s not really what you’re talking about, since you specified that it can be physical? Sure, hypothetically, but not really?
Intention to create a preference would have to precede the preference. Preference: I prefer chocolate ice cream to lemon ice cream. Intention to create preference: I intend to create my preference for chocolate ice cream to lemon ice cream (because currently I don’t have this preference; for example, I currently prefer lemon ice cream). If it is not possible to have an intention to create a preference (because the preference is in some sense already contained in the intention), then the preference cannot be intended and therefore freely willed; it just appears without being intended, there is no infinite regress and no free will either. That’s what I think most likely happens.
This premise assumes that free will is true because a freely willed act needs to be intended, that is, determined by an intention to perform the act.