Let's Talk About Free Will...

[Leksandar]

You said in your very first paragraph that everything we do is a choice. Even in your coffee shop parallel, your decision to be in the coffee shop to begin with is still a decision. No one is holding a gun to your head telling you that you have to be sitting in that coffee shop. Your mind doesn't just shut off, with the exception of the receptors that will eventually lead you to the coffee shop.

No one's holding a gun to your head, but the choice you've made isn't something you as some kind of holy, self-sufficient being has decided to do from thin air. You're just receiving information from your surroundings and processing them into choices. “You” have no say in the matter. It's just cause and effect. What I'm trying to say is that a calculator shouldn't be punished for the numbers he or she receives, and that we shouldn't eat other types of calculators just because they calculate in different ways.

For your comparison to someone choosing a business degree, you once again missed the entire point. They chose their degree. They didn't just pick a degree out of a hat and go with it.

They chose the degree because their surroundings demanded it. If we were to go back in time and put this business degree person into a dark room with just the necessary food and water, and then let him out as an adult and ask him what kind of degree he wants – do you think he would pick the business degree?

Not only that, but they didn't also just follow some invisible path to become rich. In fact, most rich people, I would wager, are rich due to their own efforts and not because they just fell, wondrously, into a huge pile of money.

These efforts come as a consequence of their upbringing, their surroundings, their culture etc. Also. Someone owning a mine doesn't earn money because he has a mine he has worked hard for. He owns money because people work in the mines. Even though it's his mine; would you really say it's fair that he gets more of the money than all the miners added together just because the miners have no other choice but to work for him? I mean, since everyone's supposedly born equal. I could go farther into how insanely mistaken you are here, as I guarantee you there are just as many people who work hard and aren't rich as there are hard working people who are rich, but I believe this to be enough.

Your analogy about the holocaust is just stupid. What in the world does that have to do with free will? You're trying to compare that to the mass murder of animals? So basically you're comparing Jews, Gypsies, and other minorities to animals? There's a difference between animals and humans. For starters, animals aren't people.

That's just semantics and not an argument, and please don't pull the sentimental minority card on me. I'm not comparing Jews and gypsies to animals. I'm comparing human kind in general to animals. Since there is nothing to separate us from animals, the lack of a nerve system and consciousness separates us from plants and bacteria, there is in my opinion no difference between killing a human and killing an animal.

Again, your main flaw is just that you seem to ignore the fact that people have the innate ability to think and make decisions.

This innate ability, which animals also have by the way, is just the ability to process information received from your surroundings. Thinking is just playing with the influences you've received, not picking original thoughts out of thin air.