Do you believe in Free Will?

[meredith101]

If so how can it be part of a brain that is entirely physical, and as such, deterministic? Shouldn't one thing in your head just lead to another? If we have free will, how do we divert our thoughts/actions one way or the other. How would it work?
If we think what we know about the brain shows there probably isn't free will, is it ok to still lock people up as if they chose bad things? Is there any point in teaching people to do good, if they were going to do whatever anyway?

[Theland]

Yes, I believe we have free will, and reject entirely a mechanistic view of our behaviour.
However, our behaviour can be affected of course by drugs, mental illness, and as a reaction to others behaviour, and to that extent, there can be mitigating circumstances for wrongdoing, and this should, I believe be taken into consideration when deciding if a convicted criminal should be punished or treated.

[mibn2cweus]

The purpose of science is not to ponder or agonize over what an individual chooses to believe but to examine the validity of what can be known.

Nothing is free and freewill is no exception. Freewill presupposes the freedom to choose, just as choice presupposes options. Options are presented to us as we learn what alternatives are available. Learning to determine which alternative to choose in a given situation or circumstance is key to obtaining and maintaining the freedom that is won by acknowledging responsibility for ones own life and being accountable for ones own actions and their consequences.

Learning how to live, defending and maintaining the essential rights and freedom of everyone, is the price we all must pay to realize and appreciate the benefits of freewill. Without freedom, freewill is little more than an unfulfilled dream.

[jake-the-peg]

I don't know if you agree meredith, but I don't think you've had an answer to your question yet - I especially like Thelands rejection of mechanistic behaviour without any reason or justification.

Maybe I can help with one.

I guess the point is that you need an element of randomness in the process to break what would otherwise be a truely mechanistic system.

Certainly 100 years ago it looked very much as you describe a mechanistic process, however since then we have two important advances.

Firstly quantum mechanics. The discovery that at it's very heart nature has a random essence.

The obvious question then is how can a process at a subatomic level affect a macroscopic object like a brain? If you think about the famous Schroedingers cat thought experiment this is exactly what is going on - admittedly this involves a particle detector but the principal is still there.

Maybe you don't like that one, well probably more interestingly there is non-linear dynamics - chaos theory to it's friends.

Here we discover "sensitivy to initial conditions" otherwise known as the butterfly effect.

Not to do with time travel, this was coined from the expression that the beat of a butterfly's wings in New York can cause a storm in London.

The point here is that some systems are so sensitive to initial conditions that the tiniest change in intitial conditions can be amplified into a major change.

Obviously the weather is one such system but an easier one to play with is the double pendulum.

Have a look at the applet here that shows this:

http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/ChatterBank/Que stion538829.html

And especially the chart below, this is fractal, infinitely complex and hence the source of random motion

[WaldoMcFroog]

Not entirely sure a girl cacking herself in a hot tub is what you meant to show Jake, though I suppose I can see that it is instructive from a certain philosophical position... ;-)

[mibn2cweus]

That's rich! Not a lot of thought required to make the right choice in that situation.