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"I go back and forth with humans having it fairly often even" I'm curious what kind of things tip you back and forth. I've been a staunch "undecided" for quit

• dantheman 17y ago
  Free will is a hard problem; but my response is - I believe in free will, because either I have no choice (no free will) and thus am choosing incorrectly but in reality no choice has been made, or in the case that I do have free will I am correct.
  • endtime 17y ago
    Never seen Pascal's Wager applied to free will before, though I suppose it makes as much sense as when applied to theology.
• darkxanthos 17y ago
  I'm sorry, I basically go back and forth between we don't have free will or I don't know. :) My line of reasoning is that free will would appear to break causation and I'm not sure what the ramifications of that are in the grand scheme of things (i.e. magic?). I'm more inclined to think we're just an insanely complex chaotic system, but then what is consciousness really?
  • chrismear 17y ago
    If you're interested in these topics, I highly recommend a couple of books by philosopher Daniel Dennett: 'Consciousness Explained' and 'Freedom Evolves'. His way of reconciling determinism with free will goes something like this. Assuming determinism, then we are living in one of a huge number of possible universes. As limited intelligences, we have no way of figuring out exactly which history we live in, and so no way of accurately predicting the future. That's the free will we have -- the ability to 'play the game' and participate in this deterministic world, using our limited knowledge to try and understand what's going on; and how we can affect it, within the rules of physics. Yes, this means that we don't have total free will in an unlimited fantastical sense; and, from the point of view of an all-knowing being who knows which history is the real one, all our actions are predetermined. But for all practical purposes, our participation as information-seeking, decision-making agents embedded in this elaborate ball game gives you all of the usual qualities that we worry losing with the loss of 'real' free will -- culpability for our actions, for example. Even if you're not convinced by Dennett's position, the books do give useful ways of thinking about these problems, and go a long way towards removing the baggage that has accumulated around concepts of 'free will', 'determinism', 'responsibility', 'consciousness' and so on, so that one can reason about these ideas with more pragmatism.