Just wondering what forum members think about the concept of Free Will. Do you choose your actions? Or are we all just elaborate machines, automatically ticking away like uber-complex clocks? Or perhaps it's divine fate that seals our path in advance?

Do you believe in Free Will? Or not?

Peace


Edit: So apparently I'm an idiot. After creating the poll I promptly clicked the wrong vote button! So while the poll results show one for 'Yes,' it should be a 'No'....good lord, hehe

I believe free will and destiny are the same thing. We are destined to freely choose our destiny.

There are lots of people who have had a precognition in a dream or in a passing thought which later came true. Coming up with an opinion to that question for one of those people might prove frustrating.

If you go back to the big bang and consider that billions of years later you would exist because it happened just the way it did, then there's no escaping the feeling that it was all bound to happen, and even the illusion of complexity and vague randomness cant fuck with the aftermath of that first sequence of reactions. etc etc.

You cannot speak of free will and avoid paradoxes. free will is both true and untrue, depending from what perspective you judge it.
Objectively speaking there cannot be something like absolute free will, since that would allow you to 'will' anything, even the things you don't want. From an objective, neuropsychological point of view, your and mine free will is a necessary illusion that is part of our functioning as an organism and social being. Not believing you hava a free will would be most unhealthy.
This means that from a subjective point of view we are destined to belief we have a free will and thus that the concept of free will is real. We cannot do otherwise then believe that we are free and therefore the concept is from a subjective point of view, absolutely true. If that wouldn't be so we would have the choice to believe we are not free.........
Therefore the most reasonable position seems to be to believe that you are free, but to realize that this believe is true within a limited, personal perspective. That something that is true within a subjective perspective could be totally the opposite from another perspective, without one of the perspectives being false.
people on both hemnisphere's are as justified to think that their part of the world is 'on top' of the other, while from a cosmological standpoint, there is no top or bottom.

^^what polytrip said..

I kind of also see the whole consept of"free will" as nothing more than a human construct...move beyond the human realm of things and is the question even relevant to the situation??

Whenever I hear anything about free will I'm always reminded of this scene in the film Waking Life

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VxQuPBX1_U

Its a debate thats been raging for thousands of years and I'm sure will still be going on in another thousand - if humans are still around then.

W

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill;
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose freewill.


102 views and 5votes WTF. are we to lazy to vote or are they Guest Views?


BTY YES I need no private ballet box. My votes views and opinions are open to all for consideration.

destiny is a combination of ingredients one of them being you/me
and you do have the POWER to CHANGE for the better
so you do have some control of you destiny
what will you do with that power?
OF course we all could be dead tomorrow


PEACE
MV

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYzGMxGq9rM RUSH FREEWIL

There are those who think that life has nothing left to chance take,
A host of holy horrors to direct our aimless dance.

A planet of playthings,
We dance on the strings
Of powers we cannot perceive
"The stars aren't aligned,
Or the gods are malign..."
Blame is better to give than receive.

Chorus
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill;
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose freewill.

There are those who think that they were dealt a losing hand,
The cards were stacked against them; they weren't born in Lotusland.

All preordained
A prisoner in chains
A victim of venomous fate.
Kicked in the face,
You can't pray for a place
In heaven's unearthly estate.

Chorus

Each of us
A cell of awareness
Imperfect and incomplete.
Genetic blends
With uncertain ends
On a fortune hunt that's far too fleet.

i cant vote because i dont think that its that the its either or... i think the universe is more complex then the question of free will or no free will.

A very interesting question that has been asked over and over again and answered over and over again.
Free will is not easy or free.

I think modern physics is starting to make some headway with this question... you know a bunch of scientists are working on the "theory of everything" and although they havent got there yet, I find the direction of this explanation very convincing.... it may well be true that we exist in a multiverse, a multiverse effectively means a universe of ifinite possibility, a universe that always was and always will be, it may also be true that the multiverse behaves in a completely deterministic way (think about it, it has to be for anything to make sense), our conciousness may actually be travelling along an axis of possibility, and thats not at all crazy, bare in mind our physical matter travels along 3 axis of space, another axis we're all moving along is time, now it looks like we're also travelling along another axis of probability and the conciousness may actually just be tuning in to the axis of probability which enables a type of "free will" but I'm not quite sure we can even explain that in those terms.

Check out http://www.tenthdimension.com for a great flash explanation of how modern theoretical physics are tackling the theory of everything... I love this video because once you've watched it once or twice you really start to understand why physicists believe this is true... and the whole subject becomes far less hazy for people... what I find interesting about this theory is it could be an explanation of how DMT works... tuning into alternate realitys? I could believe it.

I voted yes, for me personally i do believe in free will. We have the power to choose, mold and shape our reality by the choices that we make in our lives. We create our own destiny, their is definitely no fixed path or road that we are meant to travel. The way that nature and energy works is with change and fluidity nothing is fixed or static and to believe that our lives and our journeys are predetermined and static goes against how all energy moves and flows so why would that be the case with our journeys? Its no different to how nature and our universe works.


Much Peace and Compassion

exactly..free will means something to humans, no doubt. Like, I think it's importanat to follow you're heart and do what you feel..because there are things to be done..reguardless of who or what is pulling the initial strings.

Wow! I'm really pleased at the response this thread has elicited! It's great to see that people have thought about this stuff and find it interesting/important enough to speak on. I was away from my computer for a couple of days so I haven't had a chance to really think about the above replies yet, but I'm sure I'll have some comments to add soon here. Overall though, I'm really surprise that NO ONE other than myself is willing to come out against Free Will absolutely, but perhaps if I briefly explain the reasoning behind my position it would seem a bit more reasonable.

Thanks again

Just a few things that caught my eye.



I'd have to strongly disagree with you there. What makes you think that believing in free will is necessary and healthy? I'd like to know what you think not believing would do to your psyche? I think NOT believing in it has a lot of interesting advantages as well. Especially if it the truth. What you're saying reminds me of people that say we should believe in God because it makes us feel better when loved ones die, for example. I mean I wish I could believe in God, but if you were to ask me what was "better," I'd have to lead towards the truth, because its a consistent picture of reality.



So if I believe that I'm being constantly spied upon by the CIA does that make it true? Overall though, I love the fact that you're suggesting is more than just black and white. I think just about everything in this world's shades of gray.



Yea this is the basic perspective I come from. And from my own lay-person's understanding of impossibly complex theories of physics I still think it leans against any kind of special free will for us.

To me the multiverse idea has always made a lot of sense when you look at the whole question of quantum wave collapse questions. The idea is that every possible thing that can happen, DOES, but that reality splits into two diverging universes, one with each possibility, so we only see the one that were in (for obvious reasons). But if EVERYTHING that is physically possible DOES happen, then what does that do to our free will? Does it make sense to say you "choose" an action, when, by definition, you made the exact opposite choice as well? I'd have to say no.

Plus there's the other multiverse idea, based only on the fact that space is infinite (and from what I've heard the best evidence we have supports that it is infinite). The nutty part is that if space is infinite, then somewhere out there, every single physically possible reality must take place. So if you traveled far enough you'd have to eventually run into a galaxy that was EXACTLY like ours, complete all the way down to the solar system, history of earth, and even YOU! And in one of these exact copies out there, your twin will make the same decision as you, and in another, he'll do the opposite. So we come back to a paradox much like that of the other multiverse idea in the paragraph above. "If you're going to decide both ways, necessarily, then how can you say you choose anything?"


But even if there is no such thing as the multiverse, and there is just one time-line, I think the history of science has shown us that everything we've once thought to be free, or unexplainable, or of divine origin has ended up being explainable by regular, mechanistic means. Im sure people once thought the the eruption of a volcano was the result only of an act of god, but now we know about tectonic plates and lava and all that. Or people might have thought the parts of a cell interact through the use of a mysterious life force, when now we can see about the complex chemical reactions going on inside (which is far more beautiful and awe inspiring and divine to me anyway). So with all this progress, should we really doubt that the basis of our actions, of our decisions, should be the one thing this pattern doesn't apply to?

Then again, physics could be used in support of free will as well. Quantum mechanics has clearly shown that not every phenomena has a 'cause' in the traditional sense. For example, an atom may have a 50% chance of decaying in the next minute, and there is NO WAY of knowing if it will or not. You can only find out afterward by looking at it. It's completely up to chance. I think this is a logical place for defenders of free will to look, as it sure seems to leave an opening for exactly that. I don't particularly like it though, because I don't think free will should be random, and I don't think the kind of free will most people believe in should be able to include single (mindless, inanimate) particles.

Peace

PS. I just hit the 'Preview' button and wow, that's a HUGE post lol

mmmmm.. yeah, I pretty much agree with everything you said... if you're just dealing with physics those questions should be asked, but when we deal with the idea of "free will" we have to factor in that we don't have much science on consciousness, and sense of self , this really throws a spanner in the works for the free will question... you know, the internal projection of sentience is one of few things science knows almost nothing about, it probably requires an entirely new field of physics just to explain it... and I personally believe we will never have a true theory of everything until that theory encompasses the "physics" of the mind... there are so many possibilities, I would like the nature of "the self" to be the thing that is constant, and it could be that our "egos" are the things that there an infinity of, in that infinite universe, you have "free will", I think of it as my "self" that chooses which "ego" I wish to experience which could be an infinity of... then again, the whole idea could be back to front... conciousness and "the universe" could be an entirely personal thing where everything in the universe we experience is just for us and therefore entirely free will... thats a nice idea too because it would allow for a physics proof of "life after death".

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's entirely logical to say the universe is infinite and full of infinite versions of things, but that not to say that our conciousness isn't some kind of infinite thing as well... that scenario stills allows for deterministic free will... we just don't know anything about consciousness, chemistry doesn't cut it, physics doesn't seem to tell us anything about it, even if you understood the mechanical biology completely, you'd still be at a loss to explain that internal sense of "self"... I would be extremely surprised if consciousness could be explained using current physics... to me, we need new physics to explain that as well... I bet it'll be something magical and awe inspiring when someone finally figures it out, but to me, the mysteries of the physical universe are somehow related to the mysteries of the mind.. and to be honest, experiences with spice definitely point in that direction because SWIM has experienced strange paradoxes where physics still work the same in a completely different reality, like seeing your own reflections in metallic surfaces whilst under... it's almost as if my conciousness is also creating the physics themselves, not just interpretting them...

That brings me to my next point/idea that is being explored by modern science at the moment... some on this forum have wrote about tesseracts... like the 4 dimensional cube, a tesseraract is to a cube what a cube is to a square... I've wondered another possibility that we are all tesseracts completely unaware that are consciousness is actually our 4th dimensional "shadow".... I hope this makes sense... they're all just ideas, we just don't have the answers right now... but SWIM loves spice because it really can offer some insight into this question.

Remember my vote as yes but also and equally valid is

"If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice" IMO

Thats some old school Rush wisdom there I made my decision back in the late seventies.

Sitting around getting stoned after high school 29 years ago!

Damn this is what it is like in middle age young people.

Let us all hope things will be much better when you arrive at this point in space/time.

As always PEACE and Love

Unfortunately spice has also shown SWIM how difficult this question is to answer, and how pathetically little we know about it.

To me this question is as silly as asking whether or not their is a god..... sure its nice to hear what people think on it, dont get me wrong. And i'm not saying questions with no answer have no right being asked. But neither side has any real ground to stand on.....

I like reading some thoughts on this, but it seems as though we realy know nothing on this subject and never can, maybe its not our fate as humans to know. As suggested by ibeing that we even know alittle about it. Maybe one day we will, I dont know, but for now ive seen no evidence leading me to believe in anything other than free will, but im not close minded enough to disregard fate/destiny. So yea, its nice reading some other viewpoints, but itll always come down to 'I respectfully disagree'

Until we have the ability to effect our future by changing our past, it's not completely free will; and even if we have the ability to change our future, whatever ends up happening is still your destiny.

How can I argue with that??