Is choice the same as free will?

An unknown author at montalk.net proclaims,


"In truth, a causal chain is finite; it begins and ends with choice. Freewill is the only true cause; all else is purely effect. Thus, freewill is both beginning and end; causality merely mitigates and facilitates freewill by creating consequence from choice."





http://www.montalk.net/metaphys/70/freew鈥?/a>





I'm not sure I agree that everything begins and ends with choice. But still, I find these ideas interesting. What do you say? Is choice the same as free will? And does everything begin and end with choice?|||"...a causal chain is finite; it begins and ends with choice. Freewill is the only true cause; all else is purely effect. Thus, freewill is both beginning and end; causality merely mitigates and facilitates freewill by creating consequence from choice....





"Without multiple choices, there is just causality."





The other answer says, "He didn't say that EVERYTHING begins and ends with choice. He said A CAUSAL CHAIN begins and ends with choice and it does but his contention that this makes free will the only cause does not follow."





Oh, but that is what we are talking about--humans, in the process of causing and of being caused. "Without multiple choices," says the author, "there is just causality." Free will, i.e., the freedom to choose including the choice not to choose, is the ethical beginning and end for humans; but the physics continues. If I choose to turn left instead of right, there are still consequences--the traffic I must choose to maneuver through, which would have been different if I had turned right, gone forward, or just stopped altogether.





If someone put a gun to my head and said, "Kill that kid standing on the corner, or I will kill your mother," I would choose not to kill the kid. My mother's murder is on him, not me; I will not have the murder of a child placed on me: 1. he has no right right (and invokes every legal and moral wrong upon himself) for putting a gun to my head; 2. if he wants the kid dead, its up to him--leave me out of it, but I will try to stop him or anyone from killing anyone when I have the choice; 3. but killing the kid to save my mother is not the way to stop someone from killing someone else.





So I have the choice not to do anything except to let him make his own choices--to kill the kid, to kill my mother, to kill me, or to give up in frustration because I won't go along with his plans. In the life of humans, everything DOES begin and end with choices. It is only in the world of physics that it never ends, because we learn in school that physics is eternal--matter becomes energy, energy becomes matter, and all energy and matter eventually cause-and-effect everything else.





My only responsibility is to put moral value on the cause-and-effect of my own actions. A meteor or a deadly cloud of gas cannot choose not to be a destructive force; but I can choose; and I can choose to be the cause of my own ends, even when for whatever reason I am forced to choose.|||He didn't say that EVERYTHING begins and ends with choice. He said A CAUSAL CHAIN begins and ends with choice and it does but his contention that this makes free will the only cause does not follow. He totally ignores the role that perception plays as well as the fact that a causal chain is what generated the choice in the first place|||choice can exist without free will but not other way around|||You have to disambiguate the word "choice" -- it can mean "option" or it can mean "the act of choosing." When the author states "creating consequence from choice" he means consequence from the act of choosing.



An option can exist without a chooser, and thus without freewill. But the act of choosing cannot exist without both a choice and a chooser, thus it does require freewill.



Furthermore, the chooser needs to perceive the choice. Without perception, one blindly stumbles into whichever option is best supported by prior causal factors.



Thus for the expression of freewill, there needs to be a chooser, a choice, and the perception of the choice.



The moment of choice is indeed preceded by a prior causal chain, but that chain ends at the moment of choice because instead of continuing on in its deterministic manner (which is the definition of a causal chain), progression suddenly becomes nondeterministic, thus the causal chain ends.



Once a choice is made, however, a new deterministic chain arises that seems to connect smoothly to the previous one, but only in hindsight. Thus the past looks like a single line of cause and effect, but the future is probabilistic. The latter becomes the first through a process of quantum wave function collapse, which requires an observer and hence perception.



If choice does not begin and end causal chains, then what does? Another physical cause? No because that physical cause, and the supposed beginning of the new causal chain, are part of the same chain since there's no demarcation between them. The only way to interrupt determinism is through a nondeterministic break, and the latter is identically a freewill choice.



=== edit: response to yours ===



You wondered, "Maybe everything is one massive, complex causal chain, which never began, and will never end." The one field that most rigorously addresses your question is quantum physics. In a nutshell, reality is piecewise deterministic, aka stochastic, meaning it consists of deterministic segments interrupted by nondeterministic breaks. So while it's a complex causal chain, this network is interrupted by acausal nodes.



I think a satisfactory resolution to your question can be reached by reading and studying all you can about these nondeterministic breaks. Here are some key topics related to quantum indeterminacy:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_ind鈥?/a>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty鈥?/a>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_vari鈥?/a>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_th鈥?/a>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_functi鈥?/a>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretat鈥?/a>