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3. We Have Free Will, Free Choices and Free Reactions

The thoughts of humans cannot be compelled although many have tried, are trying, and will try. Force, coercion and beguilement are the major techniques but our private thoughts are always private. If humans are reduced to a non-human state (drugs, torture, etc.) then they are no longer human and if they are restored to their normal human state their innate privacy returns.

The free thought is father to the will and if the thought is free then the will is free. Or to put it another way, one can always choose not to agree.

Choices are all made on prior free thoughts. The resulting choices, ergo, are also free.

I want to make plain that emotion is different from the system of reasoning that we call logic. The main difference is that emotion is subjective and changeable and logic is, as my dictionary phrases it, "objective and permanent".

emotion noun [Middle French, from emovoior to move out, stir up, excite from Old French esmovoir, from Latin emovere to remove, displace, from e- + movere to move]

a. obsolete: DISTURBANCE
b. EXCITEMENT
a. the affective aspect of consciousness
b. a state of feelings
c. a psychic and physical reaction (as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling and physiologically involving changes that prepare the body for immediate vigorous action

Source: Mirriam Webster's Deluxe Dictionary, Tenth Collegiate Edition

e-mo-tion n. [same as derivation above]

Agitation of the passions or the sensibilities often involving physiological changes.
Any strong feeling, as of joy, sorrow, reverence, hate or love, arising subjectively rather than through conscious mental effort.

Source: The American Heritage Dictionary

e-mo-tion n. [same derivation as above ]

mental state in which a feeling, often intense, as love, hate, or sorrow, is experienced. often accompanied by a physical change or manifestation, as blushing, laughing or crying.
any of various feelings thus experienced, as love, hate, happiness, or sorrow.

Source: Dictionary, Macmillan 1987

There is a past cause-and-effect chain to past incidents and much information can be derived from examining these chains. But the past is not positively so, not absolutely so, it is only probably so. Even when many agree, as in a man was on the moon, there are those who will not agree, as in writers, i.e., The Flat Earth Society, aborigines. etc. What you really have is an agreement that something probably happened. And the more that agree the higher the probability climbs but it never achieves certainty. Similarly, the future is probably going to happen and the more agreement the higher the probability rises that it will, but it is never certain. It is a collection of logical probabilities on which you make an emotional judgment for one cannot be absolutely, positively, logically sure the Sun will rise tomorrow. The future is, by definition, unknown.

But in any event, since our choices are free our emotional reactions to these choices, (because they are subjectively derived and subjectively agreed to) are also free and one can choose to react happily or sadly to any event. Some people are sad at weddings and happy at funerals.

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