What is free will?

[Rogers]

A nice, easy topic for a quiet Sunday:

What is free will? Does it exist? Do we have any control over our actions? If so, how much control? If we have little to no control, can any human really be ascribed as being truly good or evil?

Free will
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will

Free Will vs Pre-destination
http://www.chaos.org.uk/~eddy/human/FreeWill.html

[trish]

I think that “what will be, will be” is a tautology and in that trivial sense determinism is true. I don’t think that sort of determinism is incompatible with the freedom to make decisions, though “the decisions I will make, are the decisions that I will make.”

A stronger form of determinism is that the future is not only determined but determined in a particular way; perhaps it’s, in principle, computable from the current state of affairs if only we could solve one big mother fuckin’ partial differential equation. Laplace’s determinism was of this ilk. His particular version was wrong because he thought the equation would be Newtonian. It’s interesting to ask whether determinisms of this sort are incompatible with free-will. I’m inclined to say, “no”. Just because you know you’re going you have to decide what shoes to wear tomorrow, and that you're going to pick the red suede ones with the cute silver buckles, it doesn’t follow that the decision is already made.

Still, I voted “not sure”.

[jefferson1776]

there is freewill...barnone

[Night Rider]

I voted yes but m not very educated im just going with my instincts

[trish]

Okay, I was just thinking about this some more...trying to clarify my position.

Today I woke up and decided to wear the red suede shoes with the cute silver buckles to work. And I actually carried out my decision; I’m wearing those very same shoes even now. So the proposition P, “Today trish is wearing her red suede shoes with the silver buckles,” is true. Since P is true today, the proposition “Tomorrow trish will wear her red suede shoes” was true yesterday…even before I made the decision to wear them. In fact yesterday it was already true that “tomorrow trish will decide to wear her red suede shoes.” Let call this weak form determinism the Que cera cera formulism or QCC for short. QCC is not a problem for human volition because putting on the shoes is still dependent upon the decision and the will to put them on. Moreover, in putting them on this morning, I wasn’t acting against my will; I wasn’t obeying a Master who demanded I wear, I chose to wear them. QCC is not even a problem for the occurrence of truly random events. To understand why, suppose you’re testing your home for radium with a Geiger counter. The decay of a radium nucleus is an utterly random event. Suppose the counter detected one such decay at time T. The proposition, “a radium nucleus will decay in your home at exactly time T” was true prior to time T. Nevertheless, the timing of the event is completely random and unpredictable even in theory (according to current quantum theory). The point is QCC doesn’t conflict with the notion of volition, nor does it conflict with the notion of random. QCC is just essentially the fact the law of the excluded middle holds for future tense propositions as well as present tense propositions.

I think the situation is largely the same with what some take to be stronger forms of determinism. These stronger forms require some machinery. The universe is supposed to be something like a closed physical system. At any given moment the “state” of the system is understood to encode a complete description of the system at that moment. The “laws” of a strongly deterministic system are so rigid that given the current state of the system and given any time T, there is only one state the system could be in at time T. This strong sort of determinism is often called Laplacian determinism. Modern science quite definitely comes down against this sort of determinism. So I don’t think we really need to worry about it.

But suppose it were true. Suppose the current state of affairs completely and utterly determines the entire course of future events down to the last detail, including the firing of each nerve cell in each and every brain. It would still be the case that putting on my red suede shoes depends upon my choice to wear them and my choice to wear them was not against my will. Even if the universe were deterministic, its determinism doesn’t take the form of a Master with a will of his own that dominates ours. Still, if it’s the only decision that I could’ve made, given the state of yesterday’s universe, am I responsible for the decision to wear red suede shoes today? Probably not…but like I said…in light of modern science, strong determinism is most likely false.

[hippifried]

Wow! If I had to go through all that every time I put on a pair of shoes, I'd never get out of the house.