(November 25, 2021 at 8:38 pm)Ferrocyanide Wrote: I’m getting the impression that people think that there are 3 systems:
1. deterministic
2. non-deterministic (random)
3. Free will
But I haven’t seen anyone give a logical explanation as to what “Free will” is suppose to be.
This is a matter of logic.
1. Either you know the system entirely and you can predict the outcome: deterministic.
2. Either you don’t know some of the system, but the system might still be totally deterministic.
3. Either the system is a mix of deterministic and random, so it makes the output of the system hard to predict to a certain level of precision, at a certain scale.
4. Either the system is totally random, and such a machine will not work properly.
I think our reality rides on #3.
Yes, we have figured out that matter behaves as a wave, and so, this makes predicting their position, their speed to a certain precision impossible.
Even radioactivity gives us a clue that matter behaves randomly, so we get the equation : N= N_start * e(-t/z)
So, I’m still not sure what you guys think free will is.
Just became a software (brain) is a set of algorithms, doesn’t mean that software is not responsible for the decisions it makes.
I don’t judge fizzy water, tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes because consider them mindless (brainless) entities. They don’t have decision making circuits.
Great post. I think the mystics believe that free will means agency, and that agent (the soul) is outside of the material world and therefore not bound by it.
In this scenario, the agency of the soul is either
A) not caused by anything else - it is a first order cause in and of itself, owing to its divine nature.
B) The agency is caused by some sort of "non-material" framework, and subject to the same 4 possibilities you mention above. In other words, declaring the soul's agency to be non-material gains you nothing.
The problem with A) is that there is plenty of evidence that choices ARE correlated with the material nature of the brain.
