RE: Do you believe in free will?
March 5, 2012 at 1:55 am
(This post was last modified: March 5, 2012 at 2:04 am by Angrboda.)
(March 3, 2012 at 1:25 am)helmespc Wrote: The scientific existence of freewill depends largely on Heisenberg's principal.... but in turn Heisenberg's principal gives credence to the idea of "something from nothing" which gives credence to the idea of a universe w/o an initial cause. Either way, Heisenberg's principal is a fact at this point, and therefore freewill remains possible... but by its very nature, we must now allow for the creation of something from the hypothetical "nothing" due to the very same principal that gives us the possibility of freewill.
This is a misunderstanding of the meaning of Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle. The Uncertainty principle places limits on what we can know, it does not in any way restrict or grant freedoms to the systems themselves. The course of a sequence of subatomic interactions can be completely determined, 100%, and Heisenberg would still apply. Because it's not a principle about what subatomic particles can do.
But beyond that, you're looking for free will in the wrong place. Events at the quantum level, if they have any effect at all, express themselves as mere random moments. Randomness is not will. And it's relatively clear to all but die hard woo peddlers that the real action is macroscopic. And yes, we're discovering more all the time, such as the involvement of the myelin sheath in modulating neuron responses. However, what you're suggesting is that, if we take a probe hooked up to a random number generator, and stick it in there somewhere, free will is going to pop out, "like" an emergent property. Ain't gonna happen. Order plus randomness equals either more order, or complete randomness; freedom never emerges.
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