(August 17, 2016 at 9:56 am)Tiberius Wrote: ...
The brain is a bunch of neurons firing in reaction to various stimuli. What if your brain is the one actually making the decision (predetermined by the stimuli) and your "thought process" in which you actively come to a decision is just an illusion, a byproduct of the brain.
Occams razor suggests that the illusion of free will is more likely than actual free will.
I think the answer to this has to do more with causality than free will specifically. Is causality top-down, bottom-up, or what? In other words, which events are significant for determining consequences?
What if the answer is that causality is flat? Neither top-down nor bottom-up? What if your thought processes just correspond to the brain states that unfolded during the course of the decision-making processes? In that case, they determined the outcome of the process, and yet were not illusory. They were a little piece of nature, the part that is you.
A Gemma is forever.