antunesaa said:
IIIIITHE1IIIII said:
Alright, so those of you who remember my "Fate exists?" thread will probably notice some similarities, but bear with me :)
Let's get right to it with an example where most people would say that a decision has been made, like when some guy decides to rob someone for money. Now, if you were to reverse time again and again (it could be any timespan from years to minutes), do you think that (a) this guy would have decided to rob this person after each time reversal? (As supported by determinism.) Or do you think that (b) each time reversal would have resultet in him making different decisions each time? (As supported by quantum theories.)
Those are really the only two possible outcomes that comes to my mind, and this is where the problem starts. If he decides to rob the victum every time, then that suggests that he couldn't possibly have made another choice at the moment, meaning that he has no free will, but follows a predetermined pattern that has already decided all of his future decisions.
If the outcome would be different each time, on the other hand, wouldn't that too suggest that he has no free will? If each and every decision you make throughout your life is based on randomness then they might as well have been completely different, suggesting that you never really had control of any of your actions, and thus no free will.
Any thoughts?
|
I think - like the ancient Greeks and all the philosophies that posit the existence of free will - that the nature of free will is fundamentally supernatural. If one resorts to purely naturalistic arguments, then you're right and either we're subject to determinism, or randomness, or a mixture of both. But the point is that we seem to have free will. This is no proof that it exists, but at the same time your thought experiment cannot disprove it in the sense that it is not feasible, as you cannot go back in time. I also think that time irreversibility and the incompleteness or indeterminacy of physics laws (and I do not agree, as someone said, that quantum effects do not have macro effects - they have and those effects can be gigantic if you go back close enough to the big bang) allow room for this elusive concept that we cannot grasp with sensory tools.
And finally I am not convinced by the some brain science experiments showing subjects reacting after some stimulus but before they seem to be aware of the stimulus. But I'll leave that aside.
By the way, if what you say were true, then our answers to this questionnaire would be meaningless because they would have been dictated to us by some deterministic mechanism or by randomness, or maybe both. But surely not by reason (another essentially ungraspable concept) unless you're prepared to assume that, by some miracle, randomness and determinacy are conducive to the enunciation of true statements. I think that kind of assumption would not be natural - and in this sense it would be supernatural as well.
|
