Interesting one this - Pre-determinism vs free will

[battered]

Sorry, I still don't accept that this is anything other than an everyday occurrence. Quantum effects lead to whether I can cover 13 miles in 2 hours? Hardly. String theory? Do me a favour. This is a binary yes/no observation. A man runs down the road and covers X distance in Y time, so achieving an average speed of X/Y. Or not. Euclid could have worked this one out.

[Atomic12C]

battered said:

Sorry, I still don't accept that this is anything other than an everyday occurrence.

Of course its an 'everyday occurrence'

[battered]

Stop trying to be clever. The rest of my post makes it very clear what I mean.

[Atomic12C]

battered said:

Stop trying to be clever. The rest of my post makes it very clear what I mean.

Ah , ok.
You're one of those.

Nevermind.

[battered]

Atomic12C said:

Ah , ok.
You're one of those.

Nevermind.

And so are you, evidently. I'll ignore it and you and find something interesting instead.

[Jabbah]

battered said:

I really don't think that it has to be that complicated.

I know that I am capable of a sub 2 hour half marathon, given appropriate training. I've done it before, albeit when a good deal younger. So all I need is free will then? Er, no. If I don't put the miles in beforehand then it won't work. that's the events of the past dictating the result. Equally I can train all I like but if on the day I can't be arsed, it's a fail. That's free will dictating the outcome. So even something as prosaic as me trotting down the road depends upon the events of the past and free wiil.

I'm not sure if you are talking about what the OP was asking. Given a simple experiment where a subject is asked at a random time of their choosing to lift their index finger, the free will advocates will say there is no way of telling when the subject will lift their finger whilst the determinism camp will say you always can. Is it free will if the behaviour can be predicted? In the case of determinism "free will" is an illusion, something that we experience to explain the choices made by the brain that are not available to our consciousness. I guess the question should be if free will is just a label given to a deterministic process or if it is something not yet measured with causal powers?

[Jabbah]

ash73 said:

I think chaos theory facilitates free will, as does quantum mechanics. If reality is probability based then it is not truely deterministic.

You might find this lecture interesting:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec18.html

Goes on to link free will with identity.

For me, I think that our experience of free will is an illusion to help our conscious selves explain the complex decisions made by the chaotic processes in the brain. Chaotic processes and probability distributions still don't open the door to classical free will though IMHO.

[Atomic12C]

It is an interesting subject as there can be many ways to describe the happenings.
Its one of those areas in science that can't really be tackled with mathematics.... at best we could approach it via statistics/probabilities etc. but nothing that would provide a definitive answer to what is happening.

[Jabbah]

Atomic12C said:

It is an interesting subject as there can be many ways to describe the happenings.
Its one of those areas in science that can't really be tackled with mathematics.... at best we could approach it via statistics/probabilities etc. but nothing that would provide a definitive answer to what is happening.

I think the hard question of consciousness is more interesting than the question of free will itself, ie why/how do have experiences such as free will. It doesn't seem as though it is something that will be answered soon by science even if/when we create artificial constructs that claim to have consciousness and free will.