You can induce desires. You can make yourself want to do something even if you before that didn’t want to do this thing. This is how you learn and this is how you make your ambitions higher. This is how you raise your standards, fix yourself, develop a greater ambition, and make decisions to no longer want to do stuff that brings you negative consequences or outcomes.

 

Why did Free Will suddenly become whether or not you got control over what you desire or love? You stated at the beginning of your ‘Why Free Will Doesn’t Exist’ video that it was concerning whether or not you could’ve done otherwise. What about inducing a desire or talking to yourself to want something that you don’t want, like in changing your desire? It is not impossible. You only cannot change whether or not something is good for you. But you can pick to not want to do what is good for you. This is what irresponsible people do all the time. It is not you are either forced to do something or you want to do it. If you were externally forced to do something, that is, you were pressured to do something by external factors and forces, then you didn’t have free will here. But if you forced yourself against what you would’ve naturally selected as your normal, default, or not pressured course of action, then that is the real power of decision making and willpower. This is not a case of absence of Free Will. You can also have control over your desires and what you really want. For example, the Jedi learning not to fall in love (which is always claimed to be something that occurs beyond your will or choice). The Jedi padawans are susceptible to fall in love all the time, but after enough training they develop the ability to not fall in love against their will or to not fall in love at all. They control their desires, urges, impulses, what they want, their emotions, and their feelings after they have trained enough to reach that level (when they are at least full Jedi). This is not the scientific definitive evidence for this fact, this is just an example for clarification of the idea to stimulate your imagination that the idea that it is possible through enough training to be able to control what you want and what you desire, and make your wants and desires totally under your control and subject to your own Free Will is not impossible to be true. This is also the basis of raising your standards and refining your ambition to direct it toward the epic quality of life that you are supposed to not settle for anything lesser than it. Or shaping yourself so that you start desiring and wanting a quality of life that is always increasing or not less than the best quality of life possible for you.

Those who claim that Free Will is an illusion are totally ignoring the power of decision making. If we have no free will, we wouldn’t have to make a decision about anything. Everything will just be occurring to us instead of we aim for them. To decide something, you are supposed to determine inside of you that this is what you will be doing. If there is no free will, actions will happen regardless of decision making. You will be just heading toward something with the decision about it already calculated and picked at the level of the unconscious without you forcing any action to be taken, and consciously you will be just observing you acting according to a decision that was already took unconsciously. This is not what happens in reality. There are times when you are forced to do something whether you like it or not for reasons that make it not up to you to pick whether to do such an action or not. For example you are extremely thirsty and finally you came across a glass of fairly cold water. You will witness your hand moving toward it and you drinking the water whether you like it or not, whether you determine that this is the right course of action for the next moment or not. This isn’t how all our lives are supposed to be. When there is no actual necessity to choose something, chances are, you will not exert any kind of effort unconsciously to make a decision about it. The decision about it will be almost entirely arbitrary. If you are hungry now, you will get ideas about what to eat and how to obtain it from a predetermined source unconsciously, but when you are full, you will be expected to exert an induced effort to even try to consider whether or not to lick some ice cream. Here you will say is it worth it? Am I too full? At least taste the thing. It is okay if you get some help from the unconscious mind. Like you are asking your unconscious mind to give you its opinion whether or not ‘we’ should proceed and grab the ice cream cone. But this doesn’t mean that you don’t have free will in here. You started it. You suggested that licking the ice cream at the moment is something that is debatable on your plate now. You might totally ignore or overlook the ice cream and not give a chance to your unconscious to even desire the ice cream now or later on. If you really had no free will, you will be forced to lick the ice cream whether you felt like it or not. There would be no way to resist the urge or impulse to eat ice cream. You wouldn’t be able to overlook it. Your body would be moving regardless of your consent. You won’t get a vote in this matter. This idea leads to apathy, and it is to be easily expected to find that the scientific experiments lead to the conclusion that the people tested are all lacking free will, when this is how they are living their real lives. They are reactive people, waiting for their unconscious mind to dictate its random urges and impulses on them and they just obey. They are really people lacking free will, and that is something that is becoming endemic. And that is not a discovery to be cherished, that is just sad. It is embarrassing that people find it out of their realm of control to have behaved differently in any given situation, and everything couldn’t have turned out with another outcome, regardless of what they do to make that happen. Believing just because our people have become passive and reactive instead of self-aware, strong, with a habit and an ability of planning ahead before taking any action, and proactive, that there is no such thing as Free Will is just giving up, and is just pathetic. People no longer sit down and say what do I want to do today. They just empty their urges and repressed impulses and unconsciously created desires as they come or arise in their minds and call this a life, and call this freedom while this is the epitome of slavery. This is a failure mentality, just like the passive mentality of destroying your thoughts by meditating on a regular basis, until you are transformed into a lifeless brain dead very skilled and capable drone, so that you start feeling happy, now, after you have destroyed your ability to detect what sucks and feel bad about it to the extent that you cannot settle for not fixing or changing what is standing between you and living the epic life that you are supposed to desire and aspire and have ambition to live it. It is not about being happy. It is about having accidentally run into realizing that intelligence grants you effects, results, and states that make a useless life actually worth living forever.