3 Not-Choices (Un-Choices)

Here are some commonly confused scenarios that seem like choices but are really just whatever.


1) Dog Food versus Chocolate Cake - If someone gave you an option of chocolate cake or dog food, like meaty, pulpy chunko Alpo stuff, if you are a reasonable and rational person you would choose the dog food.
I always bring this up because most of the time, for me, I'm not choosing because of Free Will of choice, I'm choosing because I've got some reason. I've got x amount of reasons which are said or unsaid, self-recognized or not self-recognized.
Even if I were going to try the dog food because say a) I didn't know it tasted bad, b) I wanted to root for the underdog (no pun intended) or c) I wanted to be different than everyone else; uh, those are still reasons. Those aren't your run of the mill free will.

More on this Un-Choice Later.

2) A Hobson's Choice - A hobson's choice is "Take it or Leave it." I kept telling myself this back in high school, when I did even less work than I do now, if that's even possible. This choice is entertained in Johnson's Rasselas, for one.

So if I offered you chocolate cake, you might say, "where is the choice here?" I could then say, "The choice is 1) to take it or 2) to leave it."

Now, given that a real choice implies options, this is not a choice. Options entail chocolate cake versus vanilla, not the fact of having or not having the choice in the first place.

3) Buridan's Donkey - (aka Buridan's Ass) - Buridan's Donkey (they sometimes use a dog) is a popular counterexample to Spinoza's case against Free Will.

The example poses a starving donkey versus two equal bales of hay. The Donkey simply must make a choice, these counterexemplifiers counterexemplify.

Another way to put this is a dog dying of thirst with two equal dishes of water.

Spinoza says, in this case, I don't know. He says this is just as if you were to ask him what an infant or a crazy person would choose. Another way to put this is: if there are two absolutely identical dishes in front of you, it does not matter which choice is made.

I'll speak "freely" here for a second, and say that you could probably go into the physics and biology of why the baby, crazy person, or animal veers left or right arbitrarily, but why would you want to?

If you had two identical choices it's just another Un-Choice. "Choose chocolate cake or chocolate cake" is not a choice at all.