Please have patience for another long but necessary post.
Quote:
Originally Posted by David Sklansky
Though I haven't tried to prove it rigorously, it seems intuitively clear to me that anything that wonders whether it has free will, does. Said differently anything that says (and thinks) "I don't have free will" is contradicting himself.
Allow a computer to have access to vast information and "senses" and offer statements about what is going on that constantly update and it will appear to have will too but it wont be any more free than ours because it is the product of all past history that created that state.
Because of quantum mechanics a part of that history is originating in terms of its "luck" from the system itself (us or the computer) because clearly what we define "us" is the region of space occupied by what we call our body which is a collection of whatever 10^28 particles. Obviously these 10^28 interact with the rest of the world but they weren't always our particles!!! They gradually got accumulated in that system by physical processes where no sense of inner self was thoroughly responsible for, especially because that self didnt even exist for a great part of that game (eg embryo etc DNA type sequence) and because we do not control what happens to the food we eat or the oxygen and water we obtain from outside for example etc, DNA and chemical reactions do.
Also Determinism is a crude part of the picture not the locally detailed part but the statistical averaging part. For example a stone falls to the ground always. It doesnt go upwards first if left to drop because it has super-unreal low chance for that as a mega system unlike eg an electron released that doesnt have to follow classical perfectly determined trajectory. As it falls the stone breaks things in its path offering a chain of causation (eg the stone did it) but the tiny super-tiny details of all its particles are not as destined as the crude average result each time. We simply do not care to observe all the details in such huge system of eg 10^26 atoms. Ie we do not observe the 10^26 "coin flips", we observe the average outcome of them flipped together that is of course statistical (that plus or minus above some avg however can affect local "decisions" in an unpredictable sense eg see how radioactivity as an easy example can trigger behavior at microscopic level -eg mutations- that eventually becomes macroscopically important - eg affect health in a person- hence deciding/determining the future in a way including among other things what he will eat next etc moreover it appears "he" decided that meal's details). So luck plays a great role too locally and globally. So the system becomes inherently unpredictable (plus chaos theory in interactions with other systems etc) and therefore all is not set or destined (only in some crude macroscopic sense, eg the planet will still keep rotating, have weather for a long time etc).
Imagine how your entire future is changed by whether "you" "decided" to brake or accelerate in that yellow light. But isnt the timing affected eventually by random process at the turning point? Well there are endless turning points affected by microscopic luck in everything we do. However crude behavior appears to be unavoidable, eg "you" -lol hell no- "decided" to go to your home driving and no light or traffic will prevent you from this typically. But it will determine whether you miss that life changing phone call at home because your arrival time is affected (eg she has to decide if you are free to go out with her or not and if not she will do something else). It will determine if you got into a traffic accident or if your delay allowed you to "meet" a truck carrying a pizza ad that triggered a desire to visit the local pizza store first (where you met an old friend etc). What exactly in all this was decided by you alone in some totally clean and free sense??? Some quantum particle that decayed allowed in some advanced ramdomizer casino system the river card to be an ace, the guy to win the hand, cash in and get out happy, drive to his home a bit earlier and find himself just ahead of you driving slow enough, while calling his friends to come party, for you to miss the yellow light "go for it" window, just in time, affecting all your future forever.
So no free will from some ethereal spirit, just an endless application of natural law in interactions that forms a sense of will (mostly forced). But at the same time we "own" the luck locally produced in our own system as it interacts with other systems. We do not "own" the past history that took us to that system though.
This is a participatory universe. We are all together responsible for everything.
Sure we may want to claim all people are responsible for their actions and hold the murderer responsible for the last action but what about all prior actions that took them there? We cannot examine in detail all of them (lazy, unable etc) so we conveniently avoid the questions and raise the maximum blame at the very last action (in our laws etc). We have to do that because it works as incentive! It introduces a very strong resistance against behaving "poorly". But all this is the large scale wisdom built over time in our civilization.
It is necessary to live and produce that wisdom by existing and interacting (large biological systems produce a lot of collective "wisdom" by playing the game) so although there is no free will and we all play a game we cannot control in any isolated clean sense, we are not at all destined or pointless (or puppets etc). We have to exist in order for wisdom to be created and the system to evolve to a higher state of complexity and awareness. The world (civilization etc) is the product of all of us having existed. Life is very meaningful in that sense. The system would be significantly different in its details if someone that has existed didn't for instance.
Last edited by masque de Z; 05-29-2017 at 06:05 AM.