Free will and determinism: why quantum uncertainty and physical laws help

Paradoxum said:

Well I don't really have much to say to this, other than that I disagree.

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When did laws ever change who you are? Never? Then there is something outside the law, correct?

I don't really understand how you are trying to explain how decisions come about.

Even if you are a soul, the soul will have to make decisions for reasons. For example, I will pick up a pen so that I can type that I did so here. The considerations that come to mind when I have to make a decision are based on my previous state of mind, and current stimuli. I can't control what I think of. I can't consider something that I don't consider to consider.

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Yes but where are those decisions being made? In your brain? Or did you see something? Or did you imagine something? Or were you excited? Or had you decided that whenever you feel excited you would try to calm down? Don't you see? It could be happening anywhere throughout your body... what kind of "law" explains that?

I don't know what that means.

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Saying that it is about being fruitful, just means it is more than force.

Do you think that if I pick up a pen, I could have chosen not to? If I concluded that I wanted to pick up the pen, why would I have chosen differently?

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Yes but what about interpretation? Were you trying to trick me? Were you trying to impress me? Were you trying to hide the pen from me? Were you just bored? For each of these things the outcome will be different. You may succeed in tricking me, and be disappointed that I don't care. You may impress me, but still make a mistake and drop the pen. You may do it quickly and so hide it. Maybe when you do it out of boredom, I choose to be angry and snatch it from you. Laws account for the picking up of the pen... but not whether you do it again, how you do it again, why you do it again, where you do it again. I could go on and on.

I rejected free will while I still believed in an emergent soul. I don't see why something non-physical would be any more free than a physical thing. There must be reasons why something acts as it does.

Lets say I need to decide if I want chocolate or vanilla ice cream. If I actually choose chocolate, how would it ever have been possible to have chosen vanilla? If all things that I considered lead me to choose chocolate, then the only way I could have chosen differently would be if I considered something else that would override the other considerations (or didn't think of something that I did in fact think of). But the fact is that I did think of what I thought of, and I didn't think of what I didn't think of. It's not possible for me to consider something that I didn't consider to consider.

I never could have chosen vanilla since that would require that my state of mind was different from what it actually was.

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Yes but remember quantum indeterminacy, you may choose chocolate, but still get vanilla, and you may indeed want to be surprised, and you may want to be surprised so much that you eat the vanilla as if it were the chocolate and you may want to laugh about being surprised so much that you say "just like chocolate" when it is vanilla because you chose to rely on quantum indeterminacy, knowing that there was a very good chance you would be surprised. This is not weakness, you are just having fun.

As I said, all this can be encoded in the brain. One minute you decide to be free, the next minute you are determined to save your soul, the next minute you are hoping that instead of thinking of your soul, you are thinking of a ferrari, but instead of it being able to drive down the road, you want the ferrari to be upside down, because you want to rebel against the rest of the ferraris. In your DNA this looks like FreeFreeFreeDeterminedDeterminedDeterminedQuantumQuantumQuantumLawLawLaw and it just so happens that you do end up thinking of an upside down ferrari, so you decided to add Determined again to the end, and that is what you go around thinking about.

Nowhere in the brain does it say "this brain must be determined"; nowhere in the brain does it say "I am afraid of quantum chance"; nowhere in the brain does it say "determinism and the law are the same thing"; nowhere in the brain does it say "free will is only free will if free will is an illusion". These are all fictions.

drjean said:

I believe that the observer effect is stronger than anything environmental. The will can alter the environment. God's Word assures it; I've done it (as have thousands of other believers.)

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I agree, the observer is the key.