Free Will?

[Joe]

Hi all,

Although it seems like this place is all but forgotten, I figured I'd come post a topic anyway.

So... what are your thoughts on the free will, determinism, compatibalism, incompatibalism or whatever you want to refer to specific positions?

I have a vested interest in your responses, given I'm doing my dissertation on the topic. More specifically, I'm doing it on Jean-Paul Sartre's conception of freedom, but other views will most likely be incorporated. Scholarly knowledge is always helpful . With regards the compatibility of free will and the attributes of the classical god I do not need to know, but feel free to discuss that here also since there's nowhere else to:).

Hope everyone is doing well,

Joe

[Rob]

Are we talking about the existence of free will, or the existence of a person's perceptions of free will? Even if an action or event can be determined as having to happen without any concious thought, a person can still feel that they have caused it and that they have free will.

[Joe]

Are we talking about the existence of free will, or the existence of a person's perceptions of free will? Even if an action or event can be determined as having to happen without any concious thought, a person can still feel that they have caused it and that they have free will.

The existence of free will. As in, can a person be held accountable for their actions?

[Rob]

From my physics-y viewpoint, the current theories of quantum mechanics and statistical physics assert that there is an inherent randomness to the universe, but one over which we have no control. For example, when making quantum mechanical measurements you can only determine the probability of getting a particular result, rather than with absolute certainty. While this generally only has an influence on microscopic scales, there are elements of it at larger scales (such as light reflecting from a transparent glass window or random number generators). These same quantum effects occur in the brain, which makes it incredibly difficult to have any idea what the outcome will be for any particular thought (or, working backwards, what caused a particular action). However, just because it is impossible to tell exactly how the thought process is occurring, that is not to say the person has any significant control over it. We wouldn't be able to predict the outcome, but it would have been a purely stochastic result, not one influenced by the person.