This Dinosaur Comic is for Alex

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by tracilicious

Seriously though, is there any proof or hints of proof at no free will, or did some guy just jump out of bed one day and decide to thumb his nose at free will? Did I just choose to type that?

Read Douglas Hofstadter's essay `Who shoves whom around in the careenium?' (available in the compliation "Metamagical Themas"), it does a good job of painting the picture. Essentially, it boils down to the fact that we exist in a physical universe and that, in the end, our thoughts are the result of our brain, and our brain is a physical thing guided by physical laws. Electrons, protons, neutrons whizzing around. Entirely too complex to predict, but entirely bound to their natural course.

One of the things Hofstadter points out is that the usual definition of free will, namely, "I can choose to do anything I want" has a rather fatal limit built in. Not "anything", "anything I want". When you start to explore where that subset of anything comes from, the concept of choice begins to slip away.