| badgenome said: There seems to be a common misunderstanding of what having free will means. For example, someone here put forward the idea that if I know you well enough to know what restaurant you will choose, you must therefore not have free will. But free will doesn't mean that genetic or environmental factors don't play a huge role in who you are, and therefore what choices you will make, and it certainly doesn't mean making completely random decisions based on nothing (which would mean you are much more of a nonentity than a creature without free will). It simply means that, in contrast to an animal which is driven entirely by its instinct or a computer which only can do what its programming tells it to, a human is a higher form of being with a mind that enables him to introspective and contemplate his actions before taking them - and in so doing, he can overcome his environmental influences by actually reprogramming his own mechanistic brain. |
When someone thinks about their actions before doing them, their brain makes decisions based its own compostition and chemistry, as well as on past experiences and prior knowledge. This means that your actions aren't your choice at all, but the consequence of all of your past experiences being run through your brain and judged.
Your computer argument may be true for simple computer programs and applications, but a computer program that is sophisticated enough could emulate what humans do with great accuracy, it could reprogram itself based on its experience...etc (see neural networks in computers). Does that mean a computer like that has free will?
Not to mention animals are also capable of this to a certain degree. Say you put an animal's favorite food behind an electricuted fence, after a few tries the animal will give up on trying to get the food even though its instincts tell that "food is good". The animal chooses not to try again based on its past experiences of pain.
