BBC: Horizon - Consciousness and free will

[Final-Fan]

Slimebeast said:

CrazyHorse said:

ultima said:

In case of dogs, it's an animal (albeit an extremely intelligent one), and you can't possible expect it to be as smart as a human; if it does something bad, it's because it doesn't know any better. Kind of like a mentally ill person. And that brings me to my next point. If a mentally ill person kills someone, they won't be sent to jail; they'll end up in a mental hospital, where they won't be forced to do hard labor and they'll always be well fed and taken care of. That's because they weren't responsible for their actions. Going by this explanation (that there is no free will), however, mentally stable murderers aren't responsible for their actions either. Why should they have to work their asses off and be in such a worse environment?

And I disagree with you and CrazyHorse when you say that free will doesn't exist. If you think about it, if there is no free will, then our whole lives are pre-determined. We may have illusions of choices and options, but which one we'll pick is already chosen for us. Your explanation makes sense to me, but I don't think the outcome would always be the same for the twins scenario.

On the issue of crime, people should still be held responsible for their actions simply for the fact that they are a danger to the rest of society and perhaps more importantly because the threat of punishment acts as a deterrent and so will affect their decision to commit a crime. Just to be completely clear on that point, in a set of circumstances 'A' in which no punishment exists a person will always make a given decision (to commit a crime or not). In another set of circumstances 'B' in which everything is identical except a punishment does exist that same person will always make another given decision on whether to commit the crime. So the person has no free will in what in decision may arrive out of either set of circumstances but the fact that the circumstances are different means that the decision may also be (in respect of set B to set A).

The last point depends on too many factors that I don't really know much about. It makes sense that if free will doesn't exist everything must therefore be pre-determined but I think physics may come into play here. Our decisions are pre-determined in as much as a particular choice is inevitable in a given set of conditions (hence lack of free will in my opinion), however, whether these conditions are pre-determined is still widely open to debate. For example, there are a number of theories in physics which suggest the universe has an element of 'randomness' or chaos to it. If that were true then our decisions are only pre-determined at any one exact moment in time but are not completely pre-determined in respect to the future.

I don't believe in the concept of randomness. Is there anything in our world that has been proven to behave randomly?

In quantum physics I believe the obsrved particles acting what looks to be randomly (or particle reactions that seem to have certain % chances to have different outcomes) is actually caused by unknown factors.

Interestingly enough, I was just reading a magazine article (Discover?) about how our brains work.  Turns out that to be efficient on power consumption, the neurons work at such low energy levels that signals are misread or misfired quite often -- [edit: 30] to 90 percent!  Our brains make up for it by having a whole ton of them doing the same jobs so the right answer comes out on top.  

With this kind of computing, things don't always happen the same way every time like the computers humans build -- we put a lot more power into the transistors so they don't make mistakes.  

Even if we don't have "free will" in that these neurons are controlling us instead of the other way around, that doesn't mean that our thoughts are predetermined based on our experience.