Jwlst said:

Fuck you moron.


Don't blame me, I have no free will or control over what I post.

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Don't worry, I'm sure the banning you'll subsequently receive will be done by a moderator as unavoidably dictated by the iron Laws of Fate. 

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I would suggest that the only two things that can possibly go into decision making are your brain structure and past experiences.

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iThink said:

I know this comes up a good amount here, but I've been thinking about it a lot lately and want to test my arguments.

So first I ask, what is responsible for decision making?

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Brain structure is dictated by your DNA which you obviously have no control over as you are forming into a human.

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So you now exist with a brain and experiences, both of which you had no control over. If brain structure and past experience are what dictates behavior, where does the free will come into play? At what point can you make a decision that isn't dictated by your brain structure and past experiences which we have established are out of your control?

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And yes, I understand the idea that quantum mechanics adds a randomness to the universe, but it's not like you have control over quantum fluctuations.

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The idea of being in control is an illusion; you are merely an expression of matter interacting with itself. The world creates you, not the other way around.

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Jwlst said:

Fuck you moron.


Don't blame me, I have no free will or control over what I post.

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Sorry man but at the moment I only accept insults in Classical Hebrew.

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johnm214 said:Probably unknowable, as we can only determine efficient causes.  If those suffice, than certainly it seems like the brain, frontal lobe, have a good deal to do with it, though that would probably best be called conscious decisions.  Other decisions are made by the autonomous nervous system et cet depending on how you define decision.

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Well, environment surely changes that as well.  Monozygotic twins are different, surely environment affects this.  We can damage developing brains so surely minor effects, if only brownian motion, would influence things.

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Sure, you either have a deterministic or nondeterministic person that might not or might have free will.  Decision making could be deterministic and still not observable or practically relevant due to the great plurality of variables that are impossible to tabulate.  Someone with a deterministic brain who makes decisions predictable in theory, limited by the uncertainty principle, would appear no different than one who is not, neccesarily.  Certainly there's no way an individual themselves would have to know this.

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But, even if we are deterministic, if we treat the environment as not so, this still introduces different influences that would allow the person to produce, perhaps completely in practice, the divergence of decisions from what might otherwise be expected by someone with freewill.  Even if the world is deterministic, this would nevertheless effect everyone different, as everyone had different environments, and produce a similarity to free will.

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I've been thinking about this.  I think I might be a bit wrong on my prior thoughts on quantum mechanics and randomness/biology.  Quantum mechanics seems pretty deterministic up to the level of uncertainty in our data, so it would seem perhaps this randomness is, in theory, only an emergent property of the uncertainty of the system, rather than a true random state.  Of course, this is metaphysics mumbo jumbo that is utterly unscientific, but its interesting to think about.

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Yet I think this is a question of no practical distinction.  There's no reason why this hypothesis would produce any results that are observable, necessarily, so I tend to file it with the solipsist ideas.  Really, I can think of no way to prove someone does have free will, only that they do not.  Someone without free will but who's decisions are the result of sufficiently complex variables, such as the state of all the neurons, would be no different than someone with free will.  I think...

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husmmoor said:

Jwlst said:

Fuck you moron.


Don't blame me, I have no free will or control over what I post.

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Sorry man but at the moment I only accept insults in Classical Hebrew.

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Diploid said:

And yes, I understand the idea that quantum mechanics adds a randomness to the universe, but it's not like you have control over quantum fluctuations

This is true, and free-will does not follow from this, but it does negate your other point here:

If brain structure and past experience are what dictates behavior, where does the free will come into play?

Those are not the ONLY things that dictate your behavior because quantum indeterminacy adds an element of random to your behavior. Two PERFECTLY identical brains created at exactly the same time and fed EXACTLY the same life experiences will nevertheless make different decisions because of quantum indeterminacy.

Again, I'm not saying that indeterminacy therefore free-will, but I am saying that indeterminacy therefore behavior is not a function of only physical brain plus experience.

If you start with two identical snow globes, identical to the last quantum number, and shake them using identical accelerations, they will still swirl differently.

The universe is weird, and consciousness / free-will are two of the weirdest things it contains IMO.

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Kickle said:

speaking of tons of quotes with responses, where's Poid?

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