Could you forgive someone who shot you?

[Kevy Baby]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

B: Isn't "anything I want" a convenient little delusional phrase? Clearly your will is NOT as free as you think. You are limited to "choosing" only that which "you" will allow yourself to "choose".

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?

An instructor in a potentially boring class once made the statement to the class that "you are all sitting here right now because you have nothing more important to be doing" (I always loved instructors who forced us to think and not just teach a rote lesson).

On the surface, you think the guy is nuts. Of course I would have rather still been in bed (if I remember correctly, it was an early morning class) or doing something else. But then I realized that this class was a requirement for me to graduate and I had a higher probability to get a passing grade in this class by sitting in each session and learning as much as possible (I like to the best I can in my endeavors). And I wanted to graduate to help me secure a better career path. And I wanted a better career path to secure a better life for me and my future family. So yes, once I thought about it, being in that class at that moment WAS the most important thing at that moment.

Bastard.

[Alex]

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?

But it also isn't evidence of free will since it also appears to be action based on rational inputs out outputs. But like I said, in my view a universe with free will and without are essentially indistinguishable. Since we live in a perceived spacetime-linear world we can never know whether the alternate actions were actually possible and chosen against.

If I tell you to spin in circles and then stop and you did so, spinning three times before stopping, was spinning three times actually a choice? Could you have chosen to spin four times? There's no way to know, using the structures currently available to us. Could the physics of your brain have been saying "SPIN JUST TWICE" but something in your "animated spirit" said "AWAY SILLY PHYSICS, I'M SPINNING THREE TIMES!!!" Everybody will perceive the latter and most will also believe it to be the truth.

[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.