interesting how one desire causes another one, if say fast food / high fat food wasn't so tasty there would be no desire to eat it. so there would be no desire to buy products from the weight loss industry i guess.

The example you give is a case of mental-to-mental causation, but it’s not an instance of one desire causing another: it’s an instance of the experience of not liking the way the food tastes causing the desire to not eat it. So, the first state (not liking the way the food tastes) causes the second state (desiring that you not eat it). A case of one desire causing another would be something like: I desire that I eat some salty food; I see a pretzel in front of me (this is another mental state, a visual state); I desire that I eat the pretzel. In this case, the first desire works in conjunction with the visual state to cause the second desire.

If the mind can be taken over by emotions such as anger, isn't it part of the set of innate desires that we have also no control over? (love, jealousy, etc,) and the fact we have these innate desires , would they not play havoc with our free will?

Well, you’re not in control of any of the desires that you have in this respect: You don’t cause them to happen when you have them; they just happen. It’s just something you undergo, like digestion or mitosis. What you control is which desires you act on, at least if you have free will. You don’t control which desires you have, at any moment in time, or the relative strengths of the desires that you have, at that moment. So, innate desires (which presumably are desires for food, thirst, warmth, and maybe, sex, etc.) are no different from all other desires in that respect. The unique thing about innate desires is that they continually recur throughout your life, from birth to death: you can’t ever completely get rid of them.

if a computer had to decide on which car to choose and evaluated that each model had the same functionality maybe it would not be able to make a decision? (other than a picking one out randomly)
perhaps if we really had free will we would be as indecisive?...... your final choice of car might be a random one to if you liked them all ..or would it be ? ( innate desires influencing your choice perhaps) may be not having total free will is a mercy that stops our minds from "crashing" due to this indecision?

Well, you have free will just as long as:

There are alternative courses of action available to you
You’re capable of being aware of them.

Having a belief that I have an alternative course of action isn’t enough. The belief has to be true. If I jump out of a plane, and am falling down towards the ground, I could have the belief that I have the following alternative courses of action available to me

I stop falling, and just float in midair
I fly straight upwards

And I could have the following competing desires:

I desire that I stop falling, and just float in midair (strength of my desire: 50%)
I desire that I fly straight upwards (strength of my desire: 50%)

Despite all of this, I wouldn’t have free will with respect to my falling down. The reason is that these alternative courses of action are not available to me, despite my believing that they are.

In the example I gave previously about the addict, the addict still has free will. Because there was an alternative course of action available to him. Now, it could be the case that you are an addict, and there really are no alternative courses of action available to you: that when you’re confronted with the choice of smoking crack cocaine, you can’t choose to not do it. You just do it. That’s a case where you don’t have free will. And your action here really isn’t an action at all. It’s just a reflexive behavior.

Now, it could be the case that we are all mistaken: that there is no free will. That anytime I believe that I have alternative courses of action available to me, I actually don’t. That if I do do something, for example, buy the Honda, then I could not have done otherwise. If that’s true, then my action isn’t really an action at all: it’s just a reflexive behavior, like your pupils contracting when they are exposed to a bright light.

Just because you have free will doesn’t mean you have to act for a reason. I could be at a restaurant, and I could want to have three different dishes. And the relative strength of my desire for each of them could be equal. But I could just will to act on one desire, for no reason at all. Just do it spontaneously. It is still the case though that I exercised free will in making my decision.

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Well, you’re not in control of any of the desires that you have in this respect: You don’t cause them to happen when you have them; they just happen. It’s just something you undergo, like digestion or mitosis. What you control is which desires you act on,

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interesting comment. just thinking about it, we are biological machines and there are lots of mechanistic processes that go on within us , processes that you mentioned like digestion and mitosis etc, but would it be far fetched to think that the idea of a mechanistic processes also occurs in the brain? could we not reduce what goes on in our heads to functions .., a mechanical process that makes what ever we do ultimately predictable? (after all , everything else in the body is a mechanistic process why not the brain also?)

maybe we are not so different to wind up dolls?

perhaps a person who commits a crime is not really committing a crime but is a slave to his or her structure of the brain that is making the decisions ultimately for him or her? ( like bees seem to be involved in a certain task , its like they cant do anything else but the task they were born for etc )

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Well, you’re not in control of any of the desires that you have in this respect: You don’t cause them to happen when you have them; they just happen. It’s just something you undergo, like digestion or mitosis. What you control is which desires you act on,

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interesting comment. just thinking about it, we are biological machines and there are lots of mechanistic processes that go on within us , processes that you mentioned like digestion and mitosis etc, but would it be far fetched to think that the idea of a mechanistic processes also occurs in the brain? could we not reduce what goes on in our heads to functions .., a mechanical process that makes what ever we do ultimately predictable? (after all , everything else in the body is a mechanistic process why not the brain also?)

maybe we are not so different to wind up dolls?

perhaps a person who commits a crime is not really committing a crime but is a slave to his or her structure of the brain that is making the decisions ultimately for him or her? ( like bees seem to be involved in a certain task , its like they cant do anything else but the task they were born for etc )

Well, if there’s free will, and I freely will that I lift my arm, then when I do lift it, I could have not lifted it, all other physical facts being the same. The argument that there is no free will is just as metaphysical in nature as the argument that there is free will. One fact that I think everyone agrees on is this: when you cause one of your bodily movements to happen by just doing it, it feels differently than when the exact same thing happens, but you’re not doing it. They’ve actually established this in the laboratory. When a neurosurgeon was performing surgery on a patient, he asked him to move his right arm, and the patient did so; then the surgeon stimulated the patient’s neural cortex and caused the patient’s right arm to move in the same way: the patient always reported that it felt different from when he moved it: the patient always knew that he wasn’t the one moving it, when the doctor would stimulate his cortex and cause it to move. So: what’s the feeling that we get when we cause our bodily movements to happen? It’s the feeling that we caused it, and NOTHING else caused it. The feeling that something else is causing your bodily movement is very distinct. For instance, if I’m standing behind you and pushing you forward, and your body moves forward, you feel that something is causing your body to move forward, as your body moves forward. This isn’t what happens when you are causing your arm to go up, when you are lifting your arm. It feels like nothing else is causing your arm to go up. It’s because you have this feeling while you are lifting it that you believe that you could not be lifting it. And after you lift it, it is what forms the basis for your belief you could have not lifted it. That’s the basis of your belief in free will. It’s not ideological. It’s not because your mom or dad told you that you have free will. And it’s not an intuition, in the way that it’s an intuition that the Sun is moving across the sky when you seem to be seeing the Sun moving across the sky. That intuition is based on a certain relation (a visual experience) that you bear to a certain object (the Sun). But this isn’t what’s going on when you’re having the experience of lifting your arm. You’re not bearing a relation to anything. You’re experiencing causing your arm to go up, and you’re experiencing the absence of experiencing something else causing your arm to go up. The very nature of your experience of acting, and the very nature of your experience of having things cause your bodily movements, are what form the basis for your belief in free will. So, who’s the empiricist now? The determinist or the non-determinist? Who’s relying on experience as the primary basis on which we know anything? What does the court of experience tell us on this matter? It tell us that we are free.