New answers tagged free-will
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This is by no means a rigorous answer, but I find that this video is quite revealing about free will.
This was a scientific experiment done on a patient with epilepsy that uncovered the nature of free will. The part of this video containing the experiment runs from 11:38 to 17:50, and if you want, you can watch the rest of the video, it is really interesting....
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Your comments
"I do not believe in anything until it has strong and concrete evidence, especially experimental evidence"
and
"I believe in B-theory because it is a physical fact about the universe and it has experimental evidence (general/special relativity"
Do not agree with:
"A-theorists are aware of these criticisms, and there are ...
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Free will is an experience, rather than a theory, so no: Testing Free Will
I see causality as a way of grouping narratives together, as story-telling about what the universe gives us, which is patterns. The story-telling forms s heuristic explanatory overlay, which allows us to abstract useful infor from the noise, and make models that allow us tractability ...
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So does the non-existence of randomness also imply the non-existence of free will?
Amazingly, the opposite is true: free will, as a conscious choice, is only possible if:
The Reality is deterministic and, therefore, fundamentally explainable1
and
Our brains are hardwired with all the rules of "logic and reason",2 as well as 3-d geometry, making ...
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If we assume that randomness does not exist, then we assume that every apparently random outcome is actually not random at all.
The logical opposite of random is deliberate. The assumption that nothing is random means that everything is deliberately decided. If there is no randomness, then everything happens according to someone's free will. Exactly. With ...
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Compatibilists assume the truth in some sense of determinism and the truth in some sense of freedom. Their view is not 'independent of whether or not determinism is true'. Compatibilism assumes the truth of determinism but aims to persuade us that the truth of determinism is compatible with the reality of freedom - which here means free will. This looks to ...
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Compatibilists redefine both freedom and determinism beyond recognition.
The freedom to determine one's own actions does not exist in determinism, where every action is causally determined by the previous event. There are no degrees of freedom at all.
Reconciling the conflict between freedom and determinism is simply not possible without redefining both. It ...
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As I was arguing in a recent discussion Testing Free Will position and momentum are a poor source of predictions about the future of a fellow human, even though a physicalist-materialist sees our behaviour as fundamentally, in principle, reducible to mechanisms that can be captured by position and momentum.
Just as we create a heuristic explanatory layer '...
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As I understand the principle — and I put it that way because the worldview is not one I share, for logical and philosophical reasons — the compatibalist position relocates 'choice' to be a property of mechanisms. In other words, a switch, a flipped coin, or a computer circuit are all capable of 'choosing' because they can be in this state or that state, and ...
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There are three broad categories of stance on free will: libertarian free will, no free will, and compatibilism.
Libertarian free will is generally a religious stance, premised on substance dualism - a supervenient but seperate layer, can generate 'acts of will' independent of the material world (eg, manifesting from our soul).
Those who deny free will, ...
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We would need an experiment with a result that is either possible with free will and impossible without free will or vice versa. (Better yet would be an experiment that forces such a result).
I think anything I could possibly do with free will I could do (be forced to do) without free will. There’s the possibility that there are things that I couldn’t do out ...
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If we assume that macro-scale matter like we have in brains only acts in ways that are caused
This assumption is questionable. As Thomas Breuer has shown, from the point of view of any observer, the behavior of a system in which he is properly included, is not predictable, neither deterministically, nor probabilistically.
This means that such system ...
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As other answers mentioned, we should first define free will.
I suggest the following definition, which is not perfect though because it can be explained by other phenomena instead of free will.
Let put the question this way:
Are there systems in the universe whose evolution is not predictable (from within the universe) neither with deterministic, nor with ...
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