Sentience, free will, and that which makes us tick

[Larimani]

Actually time is not continuous. The shortest interval of time of Quantum Time is around 10^-34 sec (don't quote me on this value).

So I guess the present is that interval of time between the past and the future.

[drudman]

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Conclusion : Given the above, I cannot possibly have free will.

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Why not?

Determinism doesn't prohibit free will; it enables free will. Free will doesn't mean that your actions will be decidedly randomly; it means that your actions will be caused (i.e., determined) by your wants.

What could be more free than you doing what you want because there's a deterministic cause-and-effect linkage between wanting and doing?

If you want ham, you order ham. If you want turkey, you order turkey. That's free will, and determinism is what allows it.

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You're just calling the decision making process "free will". It is not the same as what is actually implied when people use the term.

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I disagree. I think that's exactly what is actually implied when people use the term.

Imagine two killers -- one who chooses to murder in cold blood, and one who sleepwalks and has no idea what he's doing.

We'd say that the first one acted according to his free will and the second one did not -- precisely because the first one engaged in a decision-making process and the second one did not.

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No, you misunderstand. I'm saying that the decsion making process itself is not actually free, for the reasons stated by the OP. It does have the illusion of being a free process, and it is this essential "freeness" that I referred to as being what people imply when they use the term.

[BadBoyBenny]

I don't think assumption C is necessarily correct or possible.

[IPSC]

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Assumption C :
If we take a look at an exact moment in space and time, an exact decision, where I decide to pick up a pencil, and we duplicate all conditions EXACTLY, have an identical copy of that snap shot of space and time made, I will make the same decision to pick up that pencil. IE. if all the components are exactly the same the brain functions in the exact same manner.

Conclusion : Given the above, I cannot possibly have free will.

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I don't think assumption C is possible due to the uncertainty principle. If the brain is nothing more than a complex interaction of particles then taking your "snapshot" will disturb the very flow your trying to measure. Making a copy will not be possible.

I don't know if we have free will, but I'm fairly confident our actions are not deterministic.

[maurile]

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I don't think assumption C is possible due to the uncertainty principle.

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It is possible, it just may not be correct. It is possible that the uncertainty principle is wrong. (Ultimately, it is impossible to test whether the universe is completely deterministic or partially indeterministic. For anything that appears to be indeterministic, it may just be because we haven't found the pattern yet.)

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I don't know if we have free will, but I'm fairly confident our actions are not deterministic.

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Our actions are definitely at least mostly deterministic. The quantum effects of particle behavior are at least mostly canceled out on the macro level of human brain activities.

[Cooker]

There is much interesting research going on investigating exactly what our brains actually are doing. It is very unclear how we initiate our actions, and I doubt it is even safe to say with 100% certainty that humans even are sentient to the extend we believe. I am too lazy to post proper sources, but there was a recent experiment where people were told to randomly flick their wrist at a later time. Their brain activity was monitored and it turns out that the signal was sent from the brain after the wrist was flicked.

In some sense, the human brain allows us to operate at a higher level than other animals (similar to thinking on higher levels in poker) which is probably what our biologial niche actually is. Human brains have a theory of the mind for other animals built in, and I think it is possible our conscinousness is simply a by product or this. Being aware of other animals intentions made us aware of ourselves, but we are still mostly animals responding to the direct stimuli around us with fairly preprogrammed responses. This is why I am drawn to poker by the way.

[Popinjay]

The existence of a soul (perhaps divine and perhaps not) does allow for free will. The problem is how does one go about proving a soul exists?

Perhaps in other words I am asking are there still accepted methods of showing proof and truth other than science?

[spoohunter]

I have never had so many people on a message board understand these points so thoroughly.

Now, a soul, could very well come under the same criteria. A soul must be made out of "something" (other wise it is nothing). This soul may very well be subject to the same laws of cause and effect of your brain. If it is different, then it makes different "choices". None the less, I do not believe in the soul, so I will not persue this path of the debate.

Randomness, or "The Uncertainty Principle" while defeating determinism, changes nothing on the free will side of things. Randomness does not equal choice.

[usmhot]

All this debate about free will and no definition??

First, a lot of posters seem to be assuming that 'free will' means that if it were possible for the Universe to be exactly the same in every detail at different times then a decision made by someone would be different the second (or third, etc) time round. So, the assumption that it would never be different implies that there is no 'free will'.
Personally, I'm not satisfied with this as a definition at all. Even in a random decision making process its not unlikely that the same decision would be made. So supposing that the same decision would be made tells us nothing about what 'free will' is.
In other words, the leap from the 3 (debatable) assumptions to the conclusion is meaningless unless you define what you mean by 'free will' properly.

If I may be so bold, I'd like to present an initial attempt at such a definition. I believe that the following definition is as close to what spoohunter was getting at in the first place.

'Free will' is a trait of a sentient being that causes it, when presented with multiple options from which is must pick a subset, to make its choice in a way that could not be determined by another sentient being even if it had all possible information about the state of the Universe at that moment.

I am undecided myself about whether 'free will' exists or not (by the definition given above), but the only avenue down which I think its possible is chaos theory / complexity. And I would expect it to be an emergent property of the complex system known as the brain.

[David Sklansky]

'Free will' is a trait of a sentient being that causes it, when presented with multiple options from which is must pick a subset, to make its choice in a way that could not be determined by another sentient being even if it had all possible information about the state of the Universe at that moment.

I am undecided myself about whether 'free will' exists or not (by the definition given above), but the only avenue down which I think its possible is chaos theory / complexity. And I would expect it to be an emergent property of the complex system known as the brain.

I don't think chaos theory meets your requirements. But quantum theory does.