RE: free will
August 16, 2016 at 8:28 am
(This post was last modified: August 16, 2016 at 8:52 am by fdesilva.)
Hi Sappho
A long, long time ago, I like you had this very same question. As you say if you imagine all the particles of the universe at this instance then their state will determine the next. So then Free will as we feel it is impossible. Everything I do, I might feel like I am making choices but in the grand scheme of things my brain at any given instant is determined by the state of the previous instant and therefore not really Free. It seemed crazy, I was around 18 years at the time and I used to think about these on an off for the next 10 years.
One day I had my Eureka moment and it was this. Imagine the particles at a given instance. Now if you were to plot the motion of these particles over time they would be like strings across space and time. Like a 4-dimensional spider web.
Now here is the deal.
What if you pulled on one of these strings? Pulling it would mean changing its position across time and space. In other words, Free Will is possible at a given instant but doing so will also mean you change the past as well as the future.
I wrote a paper it did get published 4 years later, you can find it here
http://philpapers.org/rec/DESCAS
More recently I wrote a shorter version with less physics
http://tianweb.com/Event%20to%20Dualism.pdf
A long, long time ago, I like you had this very same question. As you say if you imagine all the particles of the universe at this instance then their state will determine the next. So then Free will as we feel it is impossible. Everything I do, I might feel like I am making choices but in the grand scheme of things my brain at any given instant is determined by the state of the previous instant and therefore not really Free. It seemed crazy, I was around 18 years at the time and I used to think about these on an off for the next 10 years.
One day I had my Eureka moment and it was this. Imagine the particles at a given instance. Now if you were to plot the motion of these particles over time they would be like strings across space and time. Like a 4-dimensional spider web.
Now here is the deal.
What if you pulled on one of these strings? Pulling it would mean changing its position across time and space. In other words, Free Will is possible at a given instant but doing so will also mean you change the past as well as the future.
I wrote a paper it did get published 4 years later, you can find it here
http://philpapers.org/rec/DESCAS
More recently I wrote a shorter version with less physics
http://tianweb.com/Event%20to%20Dualism.pdf
