Could you forgive someone who shot you?

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Kevy Baby

Um, unless I am stupid or completely missing something, this statement makes zero sense. If free will is about making personal choices, how is making a personal choice not free will? How is looking at the options, weighing the outcome and making a decision based on the available information limiting?

To expand a bit on Alex's response, the essential idea is that given the exact same scenario, the exact same inputs, and exact same state of your brian, "you" (by "you" I mean the collective results of what you perceive as your mental processes) will "choose" the same thing every time. Of course, due to the complexity involved, it's impossible to come anywhere remotely close to the "exact same" situation (it would require every atom to be in the very same state), so it's impossible to recognize.

Actually, now that I menition it, to dispute something Alex said earlier, a computer's random number generator is NOT truly random. It's based on an ever-changing "seed" number (usually tied to the computere's internal clock), but it's a deterministic algorithm. But because the initial input changes every time, it APPEARS sufficiently random. So if you could reproduce the same input conditions on the same hardware, you will deterministically get the same result. And if you could reproduce the same real-world conditions on an unchanged bit of brain hardware (again, impossible), you'd get the same result.

Or, to look at it another way, where does this "want" come from? I'd suspect most people would be comfortable with an answer along the lines of it's the end product of your life's experiences as processed and stored by your brain. Well, your brain is a physical entity made up of atoms. So, as Alex said, unless something happens to such a collection of atoms that transcends physics, what you "want" is the result of mechanical physical action.