From: Remy Webb (rtwebb43@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Dec 26 2005 - 17:23:38 MST
I would define freedom as a complete degree of separateness from any other objective structure or will. In that sense, there is no such thing as "free will" for humans or any other sentient beings save G-d. For humans to have free will, we would have complete autonomy from everything including the atoms in our bodies. Ultimately, we can not separate our will from the -illions of processes which occur to sustain our existence. On a much grander scale, individual humans do not possess a true free will completely separate from the other humans in society. Our choices and decisions are limited by the availability of resources and the choices of humans who existed before us. We are "limited will" beings. The only being capable of free will would exist existentially from our reality, say the programmer of the universe we live in for example. :)
fudley <fuddley@fastmail.fm> wrote: On Mon, 26 Dec 2005 "Phillip Huggan" said:
> There are many effective refutations to this argument.
I don’t think so.
> What is your explanation for the big bang?
I am gratified to be able to answer promptly. I don't know.
I can however tell you one thing, it was due to cause and effect OR it
was not.
> Our best guesses exceed either of our graspings
> of the physics involved, but none of them postulate a 1st cause.
Then they must be random.
> AFAIK they all involve a random fluctuation
Ah yes, random.
> of some underlying and ever-present
> background energy source.
Well that’s just peachy keen, but what has that do with this thing you
call “free will”. I humbly submit it might be wise to decide what free
will means before we debate if humans have this peculiar quality or not.
I already said I thought it meant it take a human 5 minutes to decide
what to do 5 minutes from now. In that sense even a computer has free
will. It would only take a few seconds to write a computer program to
find a even number greater than 4 that is not the sum of two primes and
then stop, but what will the machine do, will it ever stop? Nobody
knows, even the machine doesn’t know what it will do, all you can do is
run the program and watch what the machine decides to do, and you might
be watching forever.
However I don’t know what your meaning of free will is, it seems
completely unrelated to mine.
John K Clark
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