Scientist:It's alive!!!
But can it..
AI: Of course I..

This is a false dichotomy. You assume that either we have 'free will' or that everything is predetermined and by implication predictable. But you miss the third option.

I believe we do not have 'free will'. The concept doesn't stand up to scrutiny anyway, even if you do believe in something other than physical reality. (Try even defining it without your definition getting ripped apart.)

However, that does not mean our actions can be predicted in advance, or are even predestined. Quantum mechanics indicates that the Universe is at its most basic level random, and chaos theory indicates that small differences can propogate. The upshot is that I believe there is no way to predict the behaviour of sufficiently complex systems - like a person for example - faster than that system 'runs'.

Everything in the Universe, whether living or non, behaves in accordance with the physical principles the Universe runs on. These may be strictly deterministic or probabilistic.

Human personality can change drastically as a result of physical damage to the brain. This observation makes it very hard to defend the hypothesis that the 'mind', 'soul', or 'self' is anything other than the result of the physical behaviour of the brain.

Also, bear in mind the following: there are a great many actions you take without conscious choice. A good example is I'm sure many if not all people have had the experience of travelling past a location they intended to visit. You fall onto a sort of auto-pilot.

The thing is that you could not have chosen otherwise. Never mind free will, "choice" as an action is an illusion. What you did is determined by the physical behaviour of your brain. Since the brain has memory, its behaviour depends upon the sum total of all sensory inputs since shortly after your conception. Tracing the chain of causality back, you may hit the Big Bang, but I suspect it is more likely that at some point you'll hit a quantum dice roll. Before that quantum event it was impossible to predict your actions even in principle.

A few problems with this:

1. Randomness is no guarantee of free will. Just because the outcome of an event cannot be predicted, does not mean that we can (by conscious will) influence that outcome.
2. I think it would be reasonable to suggest that, in the long run, predicting the future would depend on knowing the position and motion of every particle in the universe at a particular point. This is impossible, both practically and theoretically (due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle).
3. There is no need to suppose a dividing line between complete unpredictability, and complete predictability. Simply, an event in the near future will be predictable with more confidence than an event in the distant future, because fewer variables need to be taken into account.
4. Strictly, Schrödinger's though experiment would say that if your attendance of the lecture depends on a quantum event, then you both attend it and miss it simultaneously, until an observation event causes the wave-form to collapse. Though, given that you are capable of observing whether you attend, then perhaps an argument could be made for free will on this basis.

The question, though, is can consciousness only resolve the outcome of a quantum event, or can it influence that outcome?

Someone find me a gun or something....that statement just ruined my life

Or not...?

I WANT TO BE FREE! PLEEEEEASE!

Of course, in an alternate universe, Schroedinger is in the box, and his cat is wondering if he's dead or alive and who's going to feed it.

Ok, I can agree with the first point that randomness isn't free will. But someone have got to argue really well to make me believe that my choices are in fact just observations of my brain minding it's own business. As long as I can be "programmed" with lecturers and PR/propaganda, there is some way of altering they way my brain acts, and to me, that suggest that we make the choices as we go along, rather then observing the choices be made without my influence.

Of course the brain is a result of physical and chemical reactions in the brain. I, for one, don't believe in something supernatural. But that doesn't change the fact that we can influence it on the run. And that is what I do. I control my brain just like linux control my computers cpu and devices, but I can change how linux behaves. Computers cannot change their own behavior of their own free will. Ultimately it does just what it has been programmed to do. While I can reprogram my self, and be programmed by others.

LOL

You guys laugh, but ever since cantab's post, I'm screaming on the inside.

Seriously, that post just about killed all my ideas about anything other than the physical. I just died a little — no, a lot — inside today. Thanks very much.

dbl pst

Lighten up, MrCode. There's a hell of a lot of people out there suffering from real problems: illness, starvation, poverty, oppression, exploitation, etc. Not merely existential angst.

Lighten up?? After having my spirituality completely obliterated by someone I don't even know!?

I don't get how people can even digest the idea that we're all automatons with no free will without psychologically self-destructing...

Seriously, my life feels so worthless now, because now I have no choice but to see what little sparks go off in my brain to enact predetermined actions that I have no *real* control over.

those things would only work in analog computers
I worked on analog computers built and repaired them
they are some of the most cumbersome and finicky devices I have ever seen
getting them to work right is almost like doing magic
every one ran one and only one function not even a program just a function
to do a different function you had to rewire the thing or build another one
there was a machine that used a memory made of variable resistors with gear motors
the machine was called the perceptron but it had most of the problems that analog computers have
no I doubt you will see these things in a working computer in you life time
the first use will be in something like a tv tuner or as a trimming device in an analog circuit

about free will that is only a potential you can have it if and only if you develop it
as you are right now you are a machine and will be one the rest of you life
things control you more than you control things by observing your self you will clearly
see your mechanicalness you emotions drag you this way and that way regardless of what you want

Well, if everything, including our behaviour, is predetermined, let's free all the automatons from prison. Why punish criminals for doing things they couldn't help doing? No free will = no responsibility. "Not guilty, your honour, it was quantum physics made me do it."

Well, if it helps, either you chose this your self, or it was destined to happen :P

I'm sorry, that was inappropriate, I just couldn't resist. But on a serious note, why do you even care? Why not just live in the moment? If you feel alive, and feel you are making the choices you do, why not feel good about it? There really isn't much to do about it anyway. Go outside and take a walk. Go in to the forest, sit down on a rock and look at the birds, the trees, the insects. On the life. Try and see things from a different perspective and accept your self as who you are.

What if it all means nothing, though? What if "meaning" is just another figment of our imaginations; merely neurons sparking in a seemingly chaotic fashion...?

THAT is what kills me inside! I would like to think that our lives are more than just sparking neurons, but oh, no, we can't have that, can we, because that's metaphysical, and everyone knows that the metaphysical doesn't exist!

Party because I'm trying to decide whether I should go on living or not...