Free will - Truth or Illusion?

Yeah, that was something of a typo. Meant consciousness not a conscience. Not sure why you took issue with the algorithm thing, I was just trying to demonstrate that these are simply calculated values not independent choices and decisions. I wasn't attempting to provide any 'moral basis' either, just calling as I see it. Anyway, we're done here. Toodles.
 
Oh course there's free will, you choose whether to get up in the morning or not, you choose whether to have toast or cereal in the mornings, you choose whether or not to cross the road at point A or point B

You even choose whether or not to pull the trigger...
 
Jay794 said:
Oh course there's free will, you choose whether to get up in the morning or not, you choose whether to have toast or cereal in the mornings, you choose whether or not to cross the road at point A or point B

You even choose whether or not to pull the trigger...
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Merely the illusion of free will.
 
Well maybe 'free will' in its purest sense is an illusion. You are the product of your upbringing and your genes (99% of character is from the environment around you).

But what are you going to do about it?
 
There are too many random factors in the world to say for example that I was always destined to make this post.
I'm currently working on a saturday and there are so many factors beyond my control that led to this happening and me seeing this thread.
Granted, due to my past experiences I'm likely to respond in this way based on them, but my past experiences are equally affected by random situations.

So I would say my choices and therefore free will is based on the following:

% past experience
% chemical / hormone state at the time of making the decision
% random infuences

For example take a situation where I may decide I want to go for a run:

Past experience - I've been for runs before, based on this do I think I want to go today, am I capable of running the distance, are my shoes functional etc...

Chemical - have I just received some depressing news which makes me not want to run, or maybe that will make me want to run even more.

Random - is it ****ing it down?

All of these factors contribute to my decision, change any of them slightly and it may have an effect on the outcome, I don't think that means I have no choice on the outcome, just that I am statistically swayed one way or another. But the bottom line is I still have the choice.
 
The absence of free will does not necessitate determinism, i.e. everything that will happen in the universe can potentially be predicted. The uncertainty principle takes care of that.

However, no, I do not think that human beings are free autonomous agents. I think the evidence is overwhelming, and one can perform so many simply thought experiments to test (albeit not conclusively) the idea that our conscious mind is the producer of our thoughts, and what not... None of them are able to do just that.
 
There are some things where you have the skills to do it but you can't do it. Maybe free will doesn't exist, how many of you could go and shout hello around loads of other people?
 
Evangelion said:
You haven't provided a moral basis for punishing a person who did something only because they had no freedom to do anything else. Saying 'we've drawn a line' does nothing to address this point. It merely begs additional questions.
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Absolutely right. If we succumb the the neuroscientific consensus on this question, we have to admit that criminals are merely individuals that have been unlucky enough to have had a certain set of genes, a certain set of life experiences, etc, that have, in turn, produced a conscious mind that has committed a criminal act. The idea of 'punishment' becomes a meaningless, useless word. Putting someone in prison for that reason is completely pointless (something I would argue, even if free will did exist), but if you put someone in prison to rehabilitate, or to keep out of circulation due to their danger; with the aim of rehabilitating, then it serves a real purpose.
 
RomanNose said:
There are some things where you have the skills to do it but you can't do it. Maybe free will doesn't exist, how many of you could go and shout hello around loads of other people?
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That's maybe not so much free will but fear that stops us. We are people of purpose also so it goes against our nature to do something purposeless like that.

Is purposeless a word btw?
 
Naffa said:
I think the evidence is overwhelming, and one can perform so many simply thought experiments to test (albeit not conclusively) the idea that our conscious mind is the producer of our thoughts, and what not... None of them are able to do just that.
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The evidence does't exist. It's just not possible to test whether free will exists or if everything is predetermined as the human brain is too complex to model to demonstrate how someone will behave prior to the event.

The problem for free will is that there isn't a mechanism for it to happen. Ultimately the human brain is just a massive neural network that takes inputs and generates outputs based on passed learnings.
 
This crappy about having no free will. Is a lot of crap.
I do what I want every day . I guess my "path" is good then...... not.
 
Some say there is an illusion of free will but you could also say there is an illusion of having no free will.

Basically your will is free under the laws of the land and the laws of your own morality and if you overstep those laws then you will suffer in some form or other and lose a part of your freedom. So we have free will within certain restrictions, some people call it free agency. The freedom of your will is relative(ish) to how you both treat others and how they treat you.
 
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Eliot said:
This crappy about having no free will. Is a lot of crap.
I do what I want every day . I guess my "path" is good then...... not.
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Only seems like free will because you haven't examined the factors that motivated you to make the "choices" you did.

Without getting into some considerable complexity I think free will boils down to a choice between good and evil its somewhat complicated to explain how it could go beyond just how our stance on that would be affected by cause and effect and how its the factor we can arbitarily control to influence every other choice we make.
 
Rroff said:
Regardless of whether we have any degree of free will or not for the most part people go about their day to day lives carrying out actions based 100% on cause and effect.

Even the act of stopping to consciously analyse a choice would be due to a longer chain of cause and affect leading us to make the decision to actually think about a choice before choosing what to do and our choice would be based on weighing up past experience/knowledge with a bias based on what we have experienced - even deciding to arbitarily make an arbitary decision is based on realising we don't have (atleast for the most part) free will.
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Yes!

There is no free will, the closest thing to free will is randomness in physics.
 
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