I honestly don't think humans have free will. We can see on an MRI the part of the brain used to move our arm firing before we consciously decide to move. We're not making decisions, our brain is and only after the fact does it send an executive summary to the homonculous behind our eyeballs. And like a disconnected executive we say, "I did this!"

[–] taiyang@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This is correct. What I generally tell people is that, due to the complexity and unpredictability of human cognition, it's practically indistinguishable from free will (but ultimately deterministic, otherwise why even have psychology.)

After all, a coin flip is considered random but there are observable forces acting on it to ultimately determine if it is heads or tails-- and that's just things like the initial force and angle, the air resistance, etc., and that's still considered random. Now imagine something magnitudes more chaotic and complex and you have the human experience.

[–] fleck@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

This is the classical understanding of it. Determinism basically says "given some initial state of the universe, you can pre-determine the end state before it happened". E.g. there would be enough information at any point in the timeline of the universe before the 9/11 terrorist attack to infer that it will happen, just like with your coin flip example. So the question becomes whether true randomness exists. If it does, then it will have a major say in how the universe evolves between its beginning and 9/11, due to how chaotic systems work. Your coin flip example is a typical argument against true randomness, but modern quantum mechanics challenge this point of view, opening up some more interpretations. I suggest the Wikipedia article on Determinism. It has some very interesting points.

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