On Jun 1, 12:27 pm, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > On 6/1/2012 8:12 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > >> They seem to think this free will has some ability to manipulate the > >> Universe in ways that avoid it's laws. > > > Not the compatibilist one. I think free will is not prevented at all by > > determinism. > > It just boils down to how you want to define 'free will'. The definition is > "purposeful > and free of coercion" is important because it plays a part in social > judgement and legal > assignment of responsibility. Determinism is thought to be inconsistent with > responsibility because some cause outside yourself doesn't count as your > responsibility; > but given determinism each of your actions can be traced back to causes > outside yourself, > even to before your birth. > > Brent
Social judgement and such are all human constructs. What is physically behind free will? The programming of our human mind affects the choices we make. We choose to call heads, or we choose to call tails. What is behind our choice? Our complex system of memories and information, current physical cues, etc, all will go into our decision.. we feel the power to make the call whichever way we choose, but that feeling comes from our internal program developed and shaped by our life history. It was determined by our past and our current information. In the instant we make the call, we could be teetering on the very edge of probability, we could go either way, and some quantum event could be just the slightest push needed to have us fall on one side of the fence or the other, in making that call. Replay the same event over again, and we just might make the opposite call, and write a different number in on our lotto ticket, and end up a million dollars richer rather than a dollar short, affecting the rest of our lives so much differently. Free will, or will, is the feeling of having a choice, regardless of the ultimate outcome. What shapes our choice is the deterministic quality of our universe. We have a choice but that choice is determined by all events leading up to that choice. The choice can be between a multitude of potential possibilities, any of which we can make real. All of which are real, to the observer in that particular future. Somehow that gives us a sense of free will. An illusion of free will. Just like the illusion of time. I've come to believe there was no beginning and no end to the universe (universe defined by everything possible), it has always existed and will always exist. It is the set of all possible states, all possible computations. This life I'm leading has been there forever, has played out forever, and every possible variation of it has played out forever, as has every other possible existence, from the lowest form of life to the most intelligent possible. A universe short of infinite might as well be nothing. A large but fixed number of possibilities is about as boring as having only smallest number of possibilities, white versus black, on versus off. The universe should have been nothing at all, or it should be infinite, for me there is no in between. Infinite does not imply there are no impossibilities. Just that the number of possible computations is infinite. Anyway, that's my "feeling". Subject to change without notice. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
