However, I still have a problem with a world without volition. I choose to think about volition. I decide that it's a very important philisophical topic. If thinking about volition or philosophy is not caused by my choosing to do so, then philosophy would be pointless and irrelevant. It would be contrived. I know that this isn't proof, but there is something wrong here. Since asking questions appears to be an exercise in volition, I won't give up the idea of free will until someone can explain how a mind without volition can question whether it has volition.
Each one of our actions comes from a series of processes that take place within our minds. Some of them we happen to understand, but these are the small minority of what goes on.
But without free will, much of what is part of us and our society seems to crumble. Where is the place of praise and punishment when the action was a result of chance or something that was determined to be. It is free will that forms part of the judgment of good and evil. We feel virtue when resisting an evil temptation, but how much of that is our choice?
Through childhood we learn about various forms of coercion and compulsion and resent it when people use them to influence us. We as thinking beings want to make our own choices, even as a child. It is difficult for us to accept something that we cannot control being held as 'responsible' for all of our actions. There are more than a few people who become depressed about the futility of a universe of predetermination which is tempered only by chance.
The illusion of free will is an essential part of who we are as humans. The notions of responsibility, good and evil, self control and volition. Justice and punishment are closely linked to the question of free will - who are we to punish people who were destined to do as they did.
Probably one of the most hotly contested issues in science, philosophy and religion, the question of free will has plagued humanity in one form or another for thousands of years--at least, the portion of humanity whose basic needs are taken care of, and who have enough idle time on their hands to waste it sitting around discussing lofty philosophical notions. For the portion of humanity that spends their days making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s the issue is of no immediate concern.
In the beginning, was the Word. The Word came in different guises, depending on one's culture. For the Jews, the Word came on an immense scroll called the Torah, to be lovingly reproduced and passed to future generations. For Muslims, the Word was the Qur'an; the Christians had their Bible.
In a society which has grown accustomed to the idea of the Word as absolute truth, to question free will makes little sense. When you take it for granted that God created you and is telling you how to live your life, it is only natural to make the minor jump to believing that God is directly controlling your life.
As the years passed, technology and science evolved from obscure tools of the literati to religions in their own right, and people began to ask: what's so sacred about the Word, anyway? At about this time a number of early scientists, known at the time as natural philosophers, tried to unify the ideas of God and Nature. Within a few hundred years of each other, Anselm, Aquinas, Kant and Paley all took a crack at it. Suddenly, the appropriateness of determinism was in doubt--because the idea of God's very existence was in doubt!
Then came a chain of radical new ideas, completely at odds with convention, that yielded Newton's laws of motion, and eventually, Rutherford's model of the atom and Freud's nurture-over-nature explanations for human behavior. Suddenly we were all living in a clockwork universe, our actions dictated by easily derivable laws, and it was only a matter of time until we understood the working of the universe down to the last subatomic particle. In 1906, the dean of Harvard physics was heard to remark to prospective incoming freshmen that physics was a very poor career choice for aspiring young men, because there remained only six unsolved problems in the entire field.
Within thirty years, those six problems had turned classical physics upside-down. The work of Bohr, Einstein, Maxwell and Heisenberg (among others) fueled a paradigmatic shift; in this brave new world the universe is random, chaotic and unpredictable. Alan Turing showed us that, not only are some problems unsolvable, but some problems cannot even be determined to be solvable, or unsolvable. In the brave new world of 20th-century physics, free will was suddenly on very shaky ground. The straw that broke the camel's back was the development of quantum physics, which buggered the entire problem by suggesting that things might be deterministic and unpredictable. In the end, nobody was sure of anything regarding free will, and a lot of people threw up their hands in disgust.
Not me, though. Growing up, learning the history of science and coming to think about the world from a modern point of view, I was always fascinated by the concept of free will. And, after a great deal of thought, I have come to a conclusion: the question of free will is irrelevant.
Consider:
In other words, having or not having free will makes no difference in your day-to-day life. Your best bet is to act as if you have free will, and not to fret about what might be coming in your future if you don't have free will. The future is impossible to predict, irrespective of free will. The past cannot be changed, irrespective of free will. Worrying about it isn't going to make a whit of difference.
Define free will in terms of what it would mean to not have free will: To not have free will would mean that if somebody has exact knowledge of your body (and your surroundings), he will be able to predict what you will do next. So to have free will means to be unpredictable.
Now, it is very likely that the human brain is essentially a quantum system, like a quantum computer, which means that quantum physical effects are necessary for its operation
But in quantum physics it is not possible to obtain exact knowledge of the state of a quantum system, because the act of observation will necessarily affect the state.
It is not even in theory possible to obtain exact knowledge of the state of a person's brain, which means he has free will.
Like Richard Feynman said: "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics"
Free will is _____
I advise that you avoid using the phrase if you are trying to make a rational argument. Too many meanings are associated with it, so it just muddles understanding. For example, free will is the false bridge between the ideas of quantum physics and God's omnipotence.
Free will (?).
1.
A will free from improper coercion or restraint.
To come thus was I not constrained, but did On my free will. Shak.
2.
The power asserted of moral beings of willing or choosing without the restraints of physical or absolute necessity.
© Webster 1913.
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