Nobody gets their act together and sharpens up because some random person tells them to eat less. And the obese are way beyond the point of that type of thing being effective. I remember when I was depressed to the point I couldn't get out of bed, and people would tell me to just choose to cheer up. This bull**** model of human action only does harm. People with mental illnesses do not get better from being told to "just choose to change." They do get better when their brain chemistry is altered in deterministic ways (drugs, ECT, etc), or when their thought patterns and emotions are assumed to be a deterministic system (cognitive, behavioral, and cognitive-behavioral therapies).

I can explain how a piece of mass can have volition, I can even create a piece of mass with volition. It's not that hard. Being able to explain every detail is not necessary if we know how every component works. Magical ghosts do not appear when you combine multiple deterministic components into a whole. You cannot have an indeterministic object that is wholly composed of deterministic objects.

And I am saying nothing about reality, there is no reality. But there is as much reason to suggest free will in a gas tank as in a brain. Volition is not "special," it is a simple mechanism for behavior. It isn't a "reality," it's a descriptive property of a physical object.

If I'm running a program on Windows XP, I don't need to decompile it to know something about how it runs. It's running on XP, therefore its capabilities are restricted to those allowed within the XP API and feature sets. Something running in a chemical medium cannot have properties that transcend, much less violate, chemistry.

No, you are arguing for elan vital. That is literally what free will is.

I'm sorry for your previous condition, but you are not everyone and your case is not the general logic. Most people with psychological problems functions have mild cases and yes "sharpening up" with a little effort can help a ton, esp in the case of obesity where fat cells themselves are a large part of the problem (regarding the cognitive functions yes).

Well, when you in addition assume that everything is deteministic then the conclusion becomes inevitable, if a tad unsuprising.

Which again, means nothing for or against free will. In addition all regular models break down at some point anyway.

I haven't argued for free will, I have argued that you are using models in areas they are not even close to mapping.

But we might as well break this off, because it is really not a fruitful debate anymore but we are both merely rehasing what has been said before. I'm sure the subject will come up again at some point, maybe if something new has entered the picture we can pick up again then.

I'm gonna try a very brief and condensed version of a carlos post and just say that free will is the consciousness manifestation of QM and that we're all just QM agents.

And I'm gonna say that when you write a short post like that, people actually read it (though I don't think your right).

Yeah, I figured something was off all the times when I took the time to write longer posts: people's lack of patience and comprehension. People usually stop reading at the first sign of something that's disagreed upon and then the whole damn post is quoted, and even then it's misinterpreted three quarters of the time. It's just not worth it.