[David Cooper]

Well, if you can get rid of a bad mood that easily, that's great, but what's it got to do with free will? If you don't like being in a bad mood and you have an easy way to get out of it, you'll be driven to take that route. Of you like being in a bad mood, you'll be driven to stay in it, but you might decide to get out of it because you realise you're not showing your most attractive side to the people around you, so again you're driven to lighten your mood. So, ask yourself what your motive is for deciding to switch out of your bad mood, then come back and explain how that demonstrates your free will.

[Gordian Knot]

So, ask yourself what your motive is for deciding to switch out of your bad mood, then come back and explain how that demonstrates your free will.

My choice to change my mood despite my situation is not an example of free will? My motive is obvious. Despite a bad situation, I do not want to be in a bad mood over it. Why have a bad moment ruin an entire day? So now I have explained my motive and shown a demonstration of free will. By making a choice.

Our motives help us define our choices. Being capable of making choices are examples of free will in action. You seem to be suggesting that no matter what choice we make, it's the only choice we could make and therefor it isn't free will.

Choices are not set in stone; not predefined, not predestined. Pick a situation, and one has multiple options on how to react to that situation.

If one is capable of picking from a range of  options, that means one is choosing, being capable of choosing is a demonstration of free will.

[David Cooper]

So, ask yourself what your motive is for deciding to switch out of your bad mood, then come back and explain how that demonstrates your free will.

My choice to change my mood despite my situation is not an example of free will? My motive is obvious. Despite a bad situation, I do not want to be in a bad mood over it. Why have a bad moment ruin an entire day? So now I have explained my motive and shown a demonstration of free will. By making a choice.

What you've done is identify what drives you to make your decision to get out of your bad mood - it would ruin an entire day if you didn't. So, in what way does it make sense to say that this demonstrates your free will when the decision has been made for you by this drive? You might, of course decide to stay in the bad mood in an attempt to show that you have free will, but then all you'd be doing is responding to a drive to back up your belief in free will.

Our motives help us define our choices. Being capable of making choices are examples of free will in action. You seem to be suggesting that no matter what choice we make, it's the only choice we could make and therefore it isn't free will.

Our motives compete against each other and our decisions are then made according to the stronger total weight of desire to do one thing rather than the alternatives - the only times we go against that are when an error occurs somewhere (usually due to rushing a decision and not measuring the weights properly) and we find ourselves doing something we really shouldn't have chosen to do.

Choices are not set in stone; not predefined, not predestined. Pick a situation, and one has multiple options on how to react to that situation.

One has multiple options, but one always goes for the one which appears to be the best one. Often it may not be the best one, but you can't be bothered thinking it through and just go for the first one that looks as if it will do - in such a case the drive that wins out may be tiredness or laziness, so it is the best option on that front and you've made the judgement that that's the most important consideration.

If one is capable of picking from a range of  options, that means one is choosing, being capable of choosing is a demonstration of free will.

Computers can pick from a range of options, but there's no free will about it. A multitasking operating system, for example, may have hundreds of threads waiting in a queue to be run, so it has to work out which to run first. It will look to see if they are high or low priority, and may go for the first high priority thread in the queue. Now, you could say it doesn't have a real choice because it has no option other than to run the first high priority thread in the queue, but you're just the same when you're working out which task you should carry out first - the highest priority one is the one that you should do first. The rules you operate by are more complex though, so if it's a task you dislike you may put it off and do something of low priority instead, but there you're just being driven to avoid starting on a task by your dislike of it. Ultimately you have no more choice than a computer - a computer could be given rules written for it which make it put off doing the high priority tasks too. The big difference is that the machine wouldn't actually like or dislike anything whereas you do, but that would make no difference to the way decisions are forced by the setup of the system.

Edit: the free will discussion now jumps into its own thread:-

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=43037.0