How many Posters here believe in

[J.C.MacSwell]

Free Will

 

A. Free Will

B. No Free Will

C. Uncertain of Free Will

 

This is somewhat targeted at Strong Atheists (believe in no Greater Power), but they are a tough bunch, so I think they can handle it.

 

Basically I am asking if there is a "Master" (read God) of your brain, or is that part of the Universe just reacting like clockwork (hidden variables included), or perhaps "quantum uncertainly", but still with no Free Will.

 

Personally, I believe I have Free Will, but cannot prove it even to myself.

[Realitycheck]

Considering that Jews and Christians believe in free will and they believe in God, I really think that, if there was a God, he really wouldn't want to mess with all of that detail.

[1veedo]

Well we certainly think we have free will. If you take psychology however you'll find out that a lot of what we consider our choices are actually caused by operant conditioning and other learning that takes place. This in itself doesn't mean that we cant consider this free will though.

 

We, our brain, and inherently our "mind" are all physical. Emotions and all cognitive processes are nothing more than chemical reactions obeying the laws of physics so you'd think we don't have "free will." But in reality the distinction isn't clear enough that our inherently physical decision making is part of what you'd consider "you" even if on a physical level.

 

Determinism in other words doesn't necessarily have to imped on free will depending on how you treat free will and your "mind" (which is animism talk) as being in and of itself physical. A different conclusion to the same premise.

[bascule]

I believe in free will in terms of the ultimate causes of our actions being for all intents and purposes effectively isolated from our actions. I think it's not improper to say that the totality of our memories cause our actions, and because this comprises so many events over such a long period of time with so much distortion in terms of the actual event versus the remembered one to say that they are, in effect, isolated.

 

Dennett argues something similar: We have all the freedoms that matter.

 

Consciousness is a strange but awesome thing which shouldn't be downplayed even if it can be deterministically reconciled in terms of purely material events.

[lucaspa]

Free Will

 

A. Free Will

B. No Free Will

C. Uncertain of Free Will

 

This is somewhat targeted at Strong Atheists (believe in no Greater Power), but they are a tough bunch, so I think they can handle it.

 

Basically I am asking if there is a "Master" (read God) of your brain, or is that part of the Universe just reacting like clockwork (hidden variables included), or perhaps "quantum uncertainly", but still with no Free Will.

 

Personally, I believe I have Free Will, but cannot prove it even to myself.

 

I suggest you read Chapter 6 of Miller's Finding Darwin's God. I will try to summarize. Free will requires that the future not be "fixed" or strictly determined by cause and effect. Under pre-quantum mechanics physics, free will was not possible because the universe was thought to be strictly deterministic.

 

However, QM changed all that. It turns out that events in the quantum world are regular, but uncaused in a traditional sense. That is, C14 always decays with a half life of ~5,280 years. That is, take any number of C14 atoms, and half of them will always decay in a half life. However, look at the individual C14 atoms, there is no cause that the particular atom decayed when it did.

 

So the future is not "fixed". It is open. So I believe in free will. The actions we take now are not strictly determined by the past, and those actions will have real consequences in the future.

 

This argument, BTW, applies to theist, agnostics, and atheists. Miller, being theist, argues that having free will allows our lives to have meaning. And this, in turn, is consistent with the Judeo-Christian belief of a loving God.

[Everlasting]

I would have to agree. Free will, will always be restricted by uncertain free will. Christianity takes a prophetic view of the world. A world that operates under the premise of free will. But uncertainty can usually astound us when the current changes. Everyone's free will is embedded within the context of uncertain free will. The Christian free will comes from the source who provides the liberation. The acceptance there in only one free will, and that is the will of God.

 

 

 

Just a Thought

_____________

 

Everlasting,

 

Moon over Key Biscayne

[markus.dnd]

well i think all we do is a reaction to our environment.

 

like me posting here is because i read the article and someone answers to me the same way...

 

cause-and-effect

[Severian]

However, QM changed all that. It turns out that events in the quantum world are regular, but uncaused in a traditional sense. That is, C14 always decays with a half life of ~5,280 years. That is, take any number of C14 atoms, and half of them will always decay in a half life. However, look at the individual C14 atoms, there is no cause that the particular atom decayed when it did.

 

So the future is not "fixed". It is open. So I believe in free will.

 

QM is not a good argument for that though. For a physics point of view, there are two options: either the 'random numbers' generated in QM are not random at all (some sort of non-local hidden variable theorem) or they are completely random.

 

If it is the first, you are back to the deterministic no-free-will scenario that you have in classical mechanics. If it is the latter, how can it be your will if it is random?

 

To allow free-will you need to remove the predictivity but retain causality, and that is outwith the realm of physics as we know it.

[someguy]

personally i don't believe in free will. i don't believe in random, and I don't believe in fate or the possibility of foreseeing the future. even if lacking freewill means that theoretically you could build a computer model of the universe and plot all of the actions of every individual.

 

if you did such a program and predicted say what would happen in two weeks and you read the prediction of the computer after the two weeks had expired it could predict accurately. but if you read about your future first the computer model could not possibly have taken you reading the result into account in the prediction. if it tried, then that one didn't take into account reading the new prediction, so on and so forth so your computer would be stuck in a loop forever. hence you can't foresee the future.

 

if i believed in freewill, then i feel i would need to believe in my own ability to change my own intelligence. my intelligence is the thing that thinks for me and decides what to do based on my memories. if i can't change that thing that decides for me, then i don't feel i can call my decisions freewill.

 

i think that freewill implies that my awareness is the thing making the decisions, but i think its more like my awareness is watching the decisions happen to me, otherwise i could decide independently of intelligence, which nobody can, intelligence is the tool that decides. that's what i think anyways.

[Royston]

Freewill basically requires that you can determine an event (through choice), without any influence from external sources.

 

That's clearly not determined or random, because the source of the next event is solely your choice. I'm sure there's many ways of looking at how that could be a possibility, but how do you test such a thing.

 

Freewill would have to be something that manifested or evolved over time, it would have to involve some anthropic view of the universe, which I'm not entirely comfortable with. I certainly don't feel I'm in a position to say whether it exists or not.

[someguy]

if we say freedom of will is your choice. then the problem lies in defining "your" what is that "your". what is that you what is that thing making the choices. your brain is material and functions under the laws of physics. physics is only possible due to the fact that nature functions predictably though in some somewhat random way, predictable randomness. your brain must also function predictably randomly. therefore to say that truly you have freedom of choice beyond that predictable randomness implies that you have a soul, some sort of non-material thing, that is you, the "your" we are talking about, that is capable of acting upon the physical world and this i don't think is possible. just the proposition of a non-material soul itself I don't think is scientifically sustainable, let alone that it can act upon the physical world.

[Everlasting]

If intelligence is our basis or tool, which gives us a insight into our free will.

 

ie.. ~~Be careful. The stove is hot, you might burn yourself. ~~

 

Could it be possible that we could take this learning further?

 

Truly find out if there is a "spiritual side" for our intelligence, at every turn?

 

 

Just a Thought

_____________

 

Everlasting,