Free Will: Fact or Fiction

[Tino]

If there were no rules punishing bad behavior, it would run rampart.

This statement suggests that people change their behavior based on awareness of external rules. How is that different than free will?

This is visible in kids born in the "I never lay a hand on my child" societies. Kids never learn the rules, hence they think they are free to do whatever their brains conjure up.

Ok you're off on a tangent but I've never had to hit my kids to get them to follow rules. But let's not turn this into a child rearing discussion.

With all rigor, all our mental operations should lead to a predictable result. If we knew all the original conditions of a given grain (all the neurons, all the synapses, all the initial conditions), we would be able to predict the outcome.

I've seen this asserted before but not by anyone who seemed to have the qualifications to back it up. It is also self-contradictory to believe that a machine could be built to model every "thing" in the world, since that machine too would need to be modelled, leading to an infinite spiral of bigger and bigger machines.