Discussion Do you believe in free will?

[fedup1982]

I'm curious where everyone sits on the poll. I was reading Determined by Robert Sapolsky and it was dense and heavy but so far interesting.

If you do or don't believe in free will, why or why not? Please join in on this conversation whatever your views!

Personally I believe that free will is an illusion, because our actions are determined by determinism, chaos theory and randomness of partial physics. The quandary to me is why did natural selection create consciousness if there is no such thing as free will?

 

[Nightfoot]

I believe we have limited free will due to events beyond our control.

 

[Hvergelmir]

I believe in a free will as a useful high level concept, compatible with determinism.
I don't interpret "free" as free from from deterministic principles.

When thinking about will in terms of deterministic principles, would be like thinking of SS in terms of bits.

Will is probably determined by deterministic particle interactions, which in turn might be determined by probabilistic (non-deterministic) quantum interactions, but "will" itself is clearly free and non-deterministic, with the limited information we have available, while talking about it.
"Will" is a fuzzy and imprecise model, but very useful.

 

[fedup1982]

I believe in a free will as a useful high level concept, compatible with determinism.
I don't interpret "free" as free from from deterministic principles.

When thinking about will in terms of deterministic principles, would be like thinking of SS in terms of bits.

Will is probably determined by deterministic particle interactions, which in turn might be determined by probabilistic (non-deterministic) quantum interactions, but "will" itself is clearly free and non-deterministic, with the limited information we have available, while talking about it.
"Will" is a fuzzy and imprecise model, but very useful.

Interesting. I'm reading a book "Determined" by Sapolsky and it confirms that your view is the more common among scholars from neurologists to psychologists. But like Sapolsky, I think that since everything in the known universe is governed either by determinism or quantum randomness, what freedom is left for any will? Where is there any freedom a person can be shown to exert that changes the outcome of something?