Thread: Do we have free will?

If you are paying attention to what is going on around you, you can think clearly and make your decisions based on what is. If you are spacing out, thinking about what you are going to do later, you base your desicions on your thoughts and conceptions more so than on your perception of what is. The action is still rooted in what is, but it is not fully there.

Put simply the more aware you are of what you are doing the more control you have over it. You control how aware you are of what you are doing. My overall definition of free will is a little more complex, but I don't feel like writing a lot.

Granted, we do not have a truly "free" will. Past experiencs obviously will have some kind of an effect on people. But we have the ability to over time change concepts and even drop them, in that we have a large level of control over our life which I would call free will. Loose will might be a better term.

Originally Posted by Sandform

The problem of free will comes down to the definition of free will. If free will means actions which are not predetermined by the rules of reality, then no.

Clear and simple.

Some people believe Free Will and your mind comes from "beyond" though.

I believe in Free will but some make the mistake of understanding the true fundamental nature of free-will in which they believe it to be constructive like a video game. If you think about it, every second, every minute, every hour, everyday, etc… we are given an infinite menu of choices, with each choice made it results in an entirely new game to play. However this is not the point of free-will and that’s where people get confused on the concept of free-will because this only explains the choice that free will is presented with. Free will and the nature of Free will is the how and why of conscious decision making, rather than the outcome of it. How can quantum mechanics begin to explain what sort of microscopic physics could make a valid objective explanation without also removing it’s very course of action in reality? So with that in mind what do we really know about consciousness and it’s place in the universe?

For starters consciousness seems to be intimately and inescapably tied to the “Preception” of the passage of time. The idea that the past is fixed and perfectly deterministic, and that the future is unknowable shows true course of free-will and it’s reality. If the future were predetermined, then there’d be no free will, and no point in the “Perception” of the passage of time.

Saying that we have free will is like saying that a dropped pencil freely made a choice to fall to the ground at 9.8 m/s/s rather than falling up or sideways at a different rate of acceleration. The way your brain works is no exception to the same laws that govern EVERYTHING.

And a note to add about Ne-yo's comment: You say that "every second, every minute, every hour, everyday, etc… we are given an infinite menu of choices." All of those choices you mention are a bi-product of someone else's choices. So how can you have free will if all the choices laid out in front of you are all directly related to other peoples choices that you had absolutely no control over?

Originally Posted by SpecialInterests

And a note to add about Ne-yo's comment: You say that "every second, every minute, every hour, everyday, etc… we are given an infinite menu of choices." All of those choices you mention are a bi-product of someone else's choices. So how can you have free will if all the choices laid out in front of you are all directly related to other peoples choices that you had absolutely no control over?

I take it you didn't read the entire post because I recall somewhere in my posts that I mentioned this...

Originally Posted by Ne-yo

this is not the point of free-will and that’s where people get confused on the concept of free-will because this only explains the choice that free will is presented with. Free will and the nature of Free will is the how and why of conscious decision making, rather than the outcome of it.

Originally Posted by Ne-yo

For starters consciousness seems to be intimately and inescapably tied to the “Preception” of the passage of time. The idea that the past is fixed and perfectly deterministic, and that the future is unknowable shows true course of free-will and it’s reality. If the future were predetermined, then there’d be no free will, and no point in the “Perception” of the passage of time.

Well, I guess we could say that the past and future are just ideas, with no real relevance, just illusions. The past is a record of present moments and the future is an idea about the presents that will be. With our "brain-power" we can run scenarios giving us the impression, and in some cases a very good impression, of what will happen. As good as my assumption that I'll die if I jump out of the window is, it's still not something I should regard as an actual future and the same goes for the choice I make, which isn't changing the future. Even though this thinking doesn't disprove free will, or at least make its existence harder, this is just a tip of the iceberg-ish argument. The thing that I rely on when deciding on free will is what science tells us... in short what I've said before or what SpecialInterests said a post up.

How likely is it that we, humanity, keep mulling this question because one answer or the other is correct?

I believe that we have free will, as I believe that there is more to a person that a meatsack with electrical impulses running thrugh it.

I believe that people have souls, and minds, and other extracorporeal things like that.

Therefore, I assume that our capability for true, non-chemical based free will lies in one of those things. And thus exists.

And besides, I'm Christian, and it says in the Bible that God gave people free will to make their own decisions and to choose whether or not to follow him. To choose whether to be righteous or to sin. Not an illusion, but true free will.

I do concede that many of our choices are affected by external stimuli and the environment, but this still involves an analysis of the environment/stimulus, and a conscious decision to do something based on the fact that you choose to find the stimulus/environment compelling enough to do one thing or another.

Originally Posted by Universal Mind

There is a way the future is going to happen, and there is a 100% chance that it will happen that way.

Everything is determined by the laws of physics. No event can escape that. If determinism is not the truth, then there are uncaused events at some level. Uncaused events are impossible, so determinism is the truth.

Doesn't quantum mechanics invalidate that idea, or is that just a theory?

Originally Posted by Marvo

Doesn't quantum mechanics invalidate that idea, or is that just a theory?

Apparently it's a very good theory. It's just that at the effects lessen with size, so we don't see random things happening in the macro world. It's all very complicated and I have a laymen (un)understanding of quantum mechanics. But he, in a way, already answered your question...Even if random things happen, how does that change the 100% outcome that always happens? Is that not determined?

Besides, if there seems to be randomness, that doesn't need to be the truth, it can be only a lack of understanding of some universal law. You don't see physicists stopping at the seemingly uncaused universe and I don't see why they would stop at quantum randomness, if they had the chance to continue.

Originally Posted by Ne-yo

Free will and the nature of Free will is the how and why of conscious decision making, rather than the outcome of it. How can quantum mechanics begin to explain what sort of microscopic physics could make a valid objective explanation without also removing it’s very course of action in reality? .

I like this mode of thinking, it makes a lot of sense. I myself believe in Free will also and it's mostly in part to what you've mentioned here. The how's and why's of decision making on a conscious level plays an enormous role when dealing with free will in the everyday world. I definitely agree that if the outcome of free will (after-events decision making) is the focal point, then it is indicative toward prior an ongoing events which would make entirely deterministic. I think there is definitely an irreducible first person perspective that Science cannot and will never answer. Because you can't bypass the simple fact that you will never know what someone else truly feels.

We have free will. The question is, how much do we use it? If you don't question anything and go with the flow, your use of free will is minimal. If you do however, then you use your mind and will to actually determine what you're going to do. If you do the same like in the first case, it's still different.

Originally Posted by Marvo

Doesn't quantum mechanics invalidate that idea, or is that just a theory?

Quantum mechanics and relativistic space-time do complicate matters, but there are simpler principles that call the universality of Newton's laws into question. Foremost is uncertainty of measurement: absolute precision of measurement--any measurement--is unattainable even in theory, because that precision recedes to infinity. At the very least, this uncertainty makes the initial conditions required for Newtonian predictions unknowable.

Common sense, and scientific consensus prior to the late 1800s, say that if we refine our measurements enough, predictions will still be sound. For some systems, it's true, but as scientists applied Newton's laws to more and more systems, they found that many, perhaps most, are chaotic. Anything less than (unattainable) total knowledge of initial conditions in these systems renders Newtonian physics no more predictive than chance.

Common sense again would say, okay, the system is still proceeding deterministically from a discrete set of initial conditions, we just can't know those conditions.

Do we know this to be true?

Does our ability to know quanta regress toward infinity, or do specific values simply not exist? What makes our assumption that we live in a universe of finite quanta in specific states (of mass, position, velocity) more true or complete than the underlying infinity which limits our approach to any such things?