Is it easier to define "effort" than to define "free will"?

I'm looking for a decomposing of the concept of effort into a combination of more basic concepts. I'm not looking for mere synonyms.

On the contrary, refraining from sneezing may require effort.

are effort free?

But "effort" is tangible, you can actually measure it.

"free will is and illusion"?

And I like Boojatta's religious threads, so that combined with my urge to express myself, drove me to choose to reply.

choosing imply free will?

All the determinism argument says is that all choices have prior causes, not that you can't end up deciding one way or another.

"Free will" suggests that something magical happens that gives you choice (without prior causes determining that choice) -- its simply an illusion, because all choices have prior causes. Just because we are sometimes ignorant of those prior causes doesn't mean they aren't still there, determining what choices we end up making, often long before we even realize which way we are going to choose. Neuroscientists have put a lot of study into this recently and have found that often times our brain activity can predict what choice we end up making several seconds before we consciously decide one way or another.

We're more the product of our genes and our environment than we sometimes care to admit.

and don't think anything magical happens when some one uses reason and critical thinking. You seem to be advocating predetermination.
You want to say free will is only something that is a 100% conscious choice. I don't define it such.
We just see it differently, with different views of what is meant by free will.

In the free will vs. determinism debate, there are two incompatible extreme sides (metaphysical libertarianism and hard determinism) with a mushy middle compatibilist position in between.

It really boils down to this: do you believe people are able to take more than one possible course of action under a given set of circumstances?

do you mean every variable within that. Down to the electrons in their brain?
Again it's down to what we call free will?
If you do not see conscious thought as anything but the discharge of electricity in the brain, then free will is an illusion. But as I type this, I am searching for the words to explain my reasoning, while zeroing in on what I think. It is a different way to look at thoughts.
A completely deterministic model just doesn't hold up for me.

I mean, it always seems like we have multiple choices available to us at any given moment in time, and our thought process can seem chaotic and random enough to be original, but if you give someone the exact same set of circumstances (from past experiences to brain chemistry) there is really only one choice you will end up making at any given point in time.

What's most interesting to me, from a religious perspective, is that if determinism is true, it undermines many neo-Christian beliefs in "free agency." I mean, if we are truly "slaves" to our environment and genetics and are just "along for the ride," whether we end up choosing Christ as our Savior or not in our life-times is completely outside of our control. Those who end up choosing affirmatively have to have been exposed to certain Christian propaganda at some point in their lives, and they have to have the inclination (from prior experiences and/or brain wiring) to be open to a spiritual "awakening" if you will. Of course, it could just be that the Calvinists were right, and God chose who was going to be saved and who wasn't before we were even born (predestination) -- after all, if God is truly omniscient, wouldn't he know all ahead of time?

Which of course, begs the question, what kind of a "good" god would create someone just to damn them to Hell for all eternity, knowing they will never come to accept him in their life-times? Not any sort of god I would care to worship or believe in...

I just don't agree with it. Following where you are going we must truly understand randomness and sub-atomic uncertainty.
I don't think my thoughts are predetermined. Many contributing factors that are not conscious mind or completely outside me, yes.
But complete determinism, no.

I don't see that everything that has or will happen, has to happen in that specific way.

motivated me to kick the following two threads:

Can you turn off the laws of nature?

How do we know whether an event was spontaneous or caused by the laws of nature?

In future, perhaps I should post a reply like this and not myself kick the threads that I am linking to. A substantive reply from anyone who takes an interest in a thread that I have linked to is probably better than my kicking of my own threads.

I must have missed them when you originally posted them back in 2009.

what happened to the zombie? Just looking for his shuffling search for brains brought me to R/T more than once. Gone for good? Say it aint so ZH!

campaign, so I put one of my buddy's Crowley pics in my sig line for a while.

And probably repeating myself, but the story tickles me.

One of Crowley's biggest fans in Britain was the otherwise eminently logical, hard-headed Lt. Col. J.F.C. "Boney" Fuller. Fuller was one of the first advocates of building tanks, and had a huge influence on the strategy and tactics of armored warfare. He was way ahead of his time in that regard.

For years, Fuller corresponded with Crowley and apparently accepted even his most outrageous claims. Proving, I guess, that in some ways Fuller was dumber than even the most illiterate Bedouin - since Crowley shaved the head of an apprentice, except for two tufts of hair, and paraded him around the Middle East as a "living horned demon." With no success. The locals just laughed at him.

This was the same apprentice by whom Crowley - "taking the female part" - believed he would give birth to the Moon-Child, if they had sex on a certain magic rock in the desert. I think - I'm writing this from memory, being too lazy to go get the book.

The book is Patrick Wright's Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine. Unputdownable, at least for History Geeks.

Eventually, Fuller decided democracy was on the way out and made some other interesting friends - like Josef Goebbels, Heinz Guderian, Adolf Hitler, and English Blackshirt leader Oswald Mosley. He became one of Mosley's closest allies and, after 1939, a serious embarassment to the British.

http://www.amazon.com/Tank-Patrick-Wright/dp/0142001910

It seems to have something to do with free will. For example, if you are driving a car and see that you have come to a stop sign because it is not hidden and you are alert, but you slow down the car a bit without stopping, and if you are observed doing this and there is some penalty, then the penalty is based on the presumption that you did it of your own free will. If someone had been literally holding a gun to your head and uttered threats of death if you actually stopped for stop signs, then you probably have a strong argument against the presumption that, in failing to stop, you were acting of your own free will.

In contrast, if all people in some group are performing some paid work and each of them is wearing a standard uniform that the employer requires each to wear, and some but not all of the people in the group are sweating, then we would ordinarily presume that the sweating is involuntary rather than intentional.

For example: I am driving down the street and approaching a stop sign. A rude man holds a pistol against my frightened penis and says, "If you stop at that stop sign I'll blow your head off!" Since I want to keep the head of my penis attached to my body, I intentionally drive past the stop sign without stopping. In other words, I desire a result (keeping my penis), so I perform an action (driving past the stop sign without stopping) which I believe will create the conditions (the rude man is satisfied) for that result (keeping my penis) to happen. The rude man may still shoot my penis, but I tried.