Does free will exist?

[Au Naturel]

The human brain isn't wired to make sense of the absence of free will. We can see the world around us is deterministic but we can't seem to apply it to ourselves. There are lots of other things that our brains don't have the tools to handle. Some of them can be emulated with math, and some are simply beyond us.

It seems that we have no option but to feel like we have choice, regardless of whether we do or not.

 

[Neri]

There can be no human evolution or development without free will. The problem at the moment is that some use their free will to usurp other's. This is a violation of our divine rights and will be rectified shortly, I believe. Some folk don't want the responsibility of their's, as it's a weighty responsibility, and most of us have forgotten that we wanted to be human, and chose the circumstances for experience and knowledge acquisition, before we were even born, as it's a realm of anmesia, for the most part, so it's easy to think we are victims of circumstance. We also have the free will to buy into a sense of victimhood, or to allow other's to dictate how we should be. Ultimately, we step into an awareness of our sovereign divinity, as we are creators of ourselves and our lives, as the prime creator, that we spring from, creates us, so we create our lives and our selves, as well.

 

[Boogs]

From my perspective, you have to consider the nature of causality (or time if you prefer the human measurement of causality). Personally I'm inclined to believe time is little more than a dimension of spacetime, and just like the three spatial dimensions, it has a start and an end (of sorts), and is always in existence. I believe mathematically, physics works as well in both directions, it's only our perception that applies a one-way arrow to time, the anthropic view, but it seems hugely arrogant to assume our perception of something automatically reveals it's true nature. That certainly doesn't seem born out by the advances in physics over the last 100+ years. e.g. relativity and quantum mechanics have both shown our perceptions and intuitions can be wildly wrong.

What if, our perceptions working in a neural network, which is in essence an electrical circuit, only works to produce self-conscious cognition when the electricity flows in only one direction, just like many electronic circuits of all sorts of types. This could mean that our perceptions only operate in one direction of the flow of time?

If this is true (and I don't believe anyone has managed to disprove it yet) then we always exist, we are always there, during that brief span of time (our 'lifetime'). Maybe there's even an almost infinite number of moments during our life when we are aware, Maybe the me of a femto second ago is always there, but can't know of all the others before and after. Feels to be singular, unique, and travelling a path that once past is gone, but before reached doesn't yet exist (to it's perception)? We only perceive things by moving to the next version of us in the progression of time (bear in mind it's seems likely time is granular not continuous - I believe the smallest possible progression of time/causality has even been calculated). Like the frames of a celluloid film, it only makes sense when played, each static moment on it's own has no direction or speed.

This would mean that not only do we never truly die, we are always in existence during that time span and will be forever ('forever' being a rather unhelpful descriptive term, but there you go, humans are not suited to understand this stuff, hence don't have the language to adequately discuss it), but also it would mean that there really is no free will.

It can be argued that quantum 'randomness' would disallow that, due to the unpredictable nature of quantum interactions, but I would argue back, it's clear in the anthropic universe (that which we can natively experience) quantum effects average out very quickly as we move up the scale from subatomic particles. The scale of neurons is pretty large, and can be observed and measured and shown to follow defined rules with those 'random' effects being cancelled or averaged out.

So where does free will reside if it does exist, what is it's actual nature? I'd say that without determining that, any discussion will struggle. One could resort to the supernatural (the 'soul') but the supernatural only begs the next question, what is the nature of the supernatural, where did it come from, how did it come into existence? And so ad infinitum.

I'd judge we may well not have free will, but the inability to determine that experimentally, and the complexity of function that would make it impossible to predict our next actions even if they are predefined, make the question moot. In the end, it's no more helpful than the 'living in a simulation' idea. It cannot be disproved, therefore it cannot hold scientific value as a theory.

Therefore, only non-scientific enquiry could make much of it, and that's so subjective it defeats my ability to consider it seriously - I need evidence and logic, I'm not capable of believing that which has no evidence to base itself on beyond billions of different irrational beliefs. Which one could be correct when there's no way to determine that?

 

[Au Naturel]

 

[Au Naturel]

 

[Boogs]

Have to view those when not working.

A lot of people get so upset about the idea they don't have free will in reality, but I suspect that's more a failure to understand the nature of how the universe works, and the fact we are only a part of that grand mechanism, not something extra or other, apart from it. But to worry that the decisions we make are not under our complete control is, to me at least, ridiculous. It's like inspecting one atom of gas and expecting to predict the flow of a mass of zintilion (that's a 1 with lots and lots of zero's! ) gas atoms.

Perception from which we think we make decisions is simply response to stimuli. A simple entity can detect an external (or internal) stimuli and will have a set range of responses. It has no decision to make beyond the mechanistic. We still operate at that level in the same way, and mostly differ through complexity, but still using the same processes in essence.

So even if our conscious mind is able to make it's own decisions on how to respond to stimuli, what is the underlying mechanism that flips us from one option to choosing another? The perception of control is simply that, a perception. We may think when we choose between two flavours of ice-cream we're making a conscious free-willed decision. But what's actually made us decide one or the other? Is it simply our body's feedback loops telling us we need a particular vitamin and hence decide on the fruit flavour instead of chocolate? We think we choose fruit because we wanted that taste, but why did we want that taste? Did we really have control in our conscious mind? Or did it just appear to be the case because the underlying subconscious mechanisms are hidden from our awareness?

If spacetime is indeed as Einstein described, and time is a dimension just as space is, then for it to be a dimension it must have permanent existence? A dimension is a range of measurements, no? Not a single instant, if the universe only exists in the instant of 'now', then is not time a process or state rather than a dimension? So I choose to tend toward thinking the universe exists at all moments of time forever (poor description - 'forever' doesn't mean much at that level), and if this is the case, then everything is pre-determined, and if so there is no free will by definition.