Free will?

Do you believe in free will?


  • Total voters
    22
Seditious said:
I think the biggest question one supposing free will is an illusion has to wonder is, what need a machine be made of to be conscious as we are, existing as a puppet watching itself do everything it is determined to do with no comprehension of how or why it is programmed to do it.

Before we will be able to do that, we still have much research to do in how exactly our consciousness works. We have come a long way and already know much about the functioning of our bodies, but there are still many areas to explore. And even if we almost completely understand the complex processes behind our consciousness, we will have to find a way to design an analog system using completely different materials as the ones we are made of. I think this is something for the far, far future.

Something quite interesting I found in the wikipedia page for free will:

Wikipedia said:
Neuroscience and free will

It has become possible to study the living brain, and researchers can now watch the brain's decision-making "machinery" at work. A seminal experiment in this field was conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, in which he asked each subject to choose a random moment to flick her wrist while he measured the associated activity in her brain (in particular, the build-up of electrical signal called the readiness potential). Although it was well known that the readiness potential preceded the physical action, Libet asked whether the readiness potential corresponded to the felt intention to move. To determine when the subject felt the intention to move, he asked her to watch the second hand of a clock and report its position when she felt that she had the conscious will to move.

Libet found that the unconscious brain activity leading up to the conscious decision by the subject to flick his or her wrist began approximately half a second before the subject consciously felt that she had decided to move. Libet's findings suggest that decisions made by a subject are first being made on a subconscious level and only afterward being translated into a "conscious decision", and that the subject's belief that it occurred at the behest of her will was only due to her retrospective perspective on the event. The interpretation of these findings has been criticized by Daniel Dennett, who argues that people will have to shift their attention from their intention to the clock, and that this introduces temporal mismatches between the felt experience of will and the perceived position of the clock hand. Consistent with this argument, subsequent studies have shown that the exact numerical value varies depending on attention. Despite the differences in the exact numerical value, however, the main finding has held.

In a variation of this task, Haggard and Eimer asked subjects to decide not only when to move their hands, but also to decide which hand to move. In this case, the felt intention correlated much more closely with the "lateralized readiness potential" (LRP), an EEG component which measures the difference between left and right hemisphere brain activity. Haggard and Eimer argue that the feeling of conscious will therefore must follow the decision of which hand to move, since the LRP reflects the decision to lift a particular hand.

Related experiments showed that neurostimulation could affect which hands people move, even though the experience of free will was intact. Ammon and Gandevia found that it was possible to influence which hand people move by stimulating frontal regions that are involved in movement planning using transcranial magnetic stimulation in either the left or right hemisphere of the brain. Right-handed people would normally choose to move their right hand 60% of the time, but when the right hemisphere was stimulated they would instead choose their left hand 80% of the time (recall that the right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for the left side of the body, and the left hemisphere for the right). Despite the external influence on their decision-making, the subjects continued to report that they believed their choice of hand had been made freely. In a follow-up experiment, Alvaro Pascual-Leone and colleagues found similar results, but also noted that the transcranial magnetic stimulation must occur within 200 milliseconds, consistent with the time-course derived from the Libet experiments.

Despite these findings, Libet himself does not interpret his experiment as evidence of the inefficacy of conscious free will—he points out that although the tendency to press a button may be building up for 500 milliseconds, the conscious will retains a right to veto that action in the last few milliseconds. According to this model, unconscious impulses to perform a volitional act are open to suppression by the conscious efforts of the subject (sometimes referred to as "free won't"). A comparison is made with a golfer, who may swing a club several times before striking the ball. The action simply gets a rubber stamp of approval at the last millisecond. Max Velmans argues however that "free won't" may turn out to need as much neural preparation as "free will".
 
i've always been turned on to mysticism, have had a few profound mystical experiences myself, and have been practicing meditation for the past few months.

a couple of nights ago, i reached new ground in my practices, and was having a blissful day. i felt a new connection to my surroundings. i was spacing out, listening to some birds, and a friend asked me a question. in a tree nearby, a snapping stick immediately responded. honestly...i was dumbfounded. i heard clearly what my friend asked me, and I had a response ready...but not only did i find it pointless to respond, (because the stick already had) but i didn't know whether i should respond to the question, or the stick.

what did this tell me about free will? the snapping stick had as much effect on me as did my friend's question. the two stimuli were in the same league, the same mode. the stick's snapping was to me, at that time, equally as important in the response to my friend's question as was his question.

granted, that was the only experience i have ever had of that kind. maybe it was....i dunno...but, it was a very real feeling, and i can remember it vividly.

what does my experience tell me about free will? the fact that there is a coke bottle next to me, and will be for the remainder of my stint on the computer, bares equal importance on what i am saying right now, as does the meaning of what i am saying, and the fact that i am saying it. now, how much say does it have in the ending of this sentence, and my going to bed?
 
what does my experience tell me about free will? the fact that there is a coke bottle next to me, and will be for the remainder of my stint on the computer, bares equal importance on what i am saying right now, as does the meaning of what i am saying, and the fact that i am saying it. now, how much say does it have in the ending of this sentence, and my going to bed?

if you drink that caffeinated beverage, quite a lot :lol:
 
Free will: the belief that 2 persons, with the exact same body structure (everything, thus the same genes, the same injuries, the same memory, etc...), and receiving the exact same environmental stimuli (thus being in the exact same place and receiving the exact same sensory input) can perform 2 different actions. Thus that they have a real "choice".

So, there are people here who actually believe this? Forgive me for not having read the first 8 pages of the thread, but if there have been any major arguments made in favor of free will thus far, I'd really like to see them. I want to see someone who believes in free will actually defend this position.
 
Knowledge of free will requires omniscience; we can only guess, and use half-reason to make educated guesses. But truly, we come no closer to the real answer no matter how much we know. We simply can't know if there is free will or not, as such a thing is beyond the grasping of a finite mind, a human mind. I put "Other."
 
Life is all about choices. Some you cant control...Some you can control, which is free will.

or maybe you just have the illusion of control...


Reminds me of Alan Watts when he proposed "what you took to be the thinker of thoughts was just one of the thoughts."
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Life is all about choices. Some you cant control...Some you can control, which is free will.

That's freedom. Not the same as free will.

That's the biggest problem with a discussion like this. So few people actually understand the concept of free will. A good analogy between freedom and free will is "the ability to do what you desire" versus "the ability to modify your desires at will". Of course, your will to change... your will... still has to come from somewhere.

I have a hard time even imagining just how free will would work. When is someone ever free from all desires, inclinations, or motivations?

Eh, I'm rambling. My main objective right now was just to point out the misconception of freedom as equivalent to free will. I'll form more coherent thoughts on the rest of this sometime when I'm not busy with homework.
 
I havn't read the whole thread, but I think it's really simple. Everything that happens is either determined by past events or is completely arbitary (God might and might not throw dice). Suppose someone does something. If that something wasn't inevitable and determined by the past (the laws of physics, your DNA, the weather) , and we don't have free will, or it was arbitary, and then we also don't have free will. It's that simple.