IIIIITHE1IIIII on 26 April 2012
| Plaupius said: If you want to argue for determinism, then you can not shrug off quantum effects. While it is tempting to think that the universe acts in a predetermined fashion, that is simply not the case. For determinism to work, the whole universe needs to be deterministic, down to the smallest particle. Yet we know for a fact that quantum effects can have profound implications on the macro level, otherwise we couldn't have quantum computers, for example. Hence the universe is not deterministic, and human behavior is not deterministic either. However, things are not that black and white. The overwhelming majority of the universe that we perceive behaves as though it were at least reasonably deterministic: we observe cause and effect, and usually can be pretty certain that the same cause will have the same effect. So, perhaps 99.9% (or some other percentage) of the universe is behaving deterministically, and the rest is random. But, due to the complexity of the "deterministic system" even slight randomness will accumulate and result in widely different end results, i.e. the chaos theory. However, we usually can't observe these random elements, so we experience a deterministic universe. All of this doesn't answer your question of free will, and it really can't, at least not under the limits you have posed. If you consider our brain as the unit containing our consciousness (the apparatus making decisions based on input), how would you categorize events that occur within that unit? By definition, input is external, but we know the brain has a huge amount of internal "feedback": areas of the brain communicating back and forth, synapses firing at least seemingly randomly, brain cells dying etc? In fact, the brain is perfectly capable of generating "fake input" if real input is absent. So, does everything come down to pure randomness? To answer the question of free will, you must first account for how consciousness is born. From a purely scientific point of view, I think that we are a combination of random and deterministic processes. I specifically don't believe that the universe is deterministic as a whole. The end result, I believe, is a world that is chaotic and, ultimately, unpredictable. And we seemingly have a free will to decide upon our actions, whether it is an illusion or not. |
The thing is though that my theory did include quantum effects as an option, and that even then the will wouldn't be free. Like you said, lots of things that we cannot control happens in our brain which affects our final decision. So does random or determined events that we've witnessed earlier in our lives.
