From: Phillip Huggan (cdnprodigy@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Dec 26 2005 - 20:50:52 MST
There is no room for 1st causes in your logic. That is the problem. You can trace the birth of our universe causally back to vacuum fluctuations or whatever, but then what causes the random fluctuations? This is like a dog chasing its tail until it is realized properties can be emergent in a system, without need for tracing causal lineage. As soon as the big bang "cooled" and "stablized" enough to give rise to three spacial dimensions (along with other dimenstions and properties), the universe was formed; it did not exist before then. The best simple analogy I can provide is to ask you what surface co-ordinate on the earth is further north than Santa's workshop? It is the same thing with consciousness. It is a null-set concept to consider the extent of your identity when you were nothing but cells in your parents gonads. At some point probably between being a tot and a child, you acquire the first vestiges of your sense of self (I don't know how >> study physiology, neurology
and cognitive development to find out). Similiarly, if limited Free Will exists in the basic outline I've deliniated in earlier messages, than this faculty will first emergent when some level of neurological level of maturity is reached in a youngin'; and the child references brain centres associated with the self in the crucial 1.5 second "veto" window as neurons are on the verge of cascading. All decisions previous to this would have relied completely on imput from non-self brain centres. This is maybe 0.00000001% Free Will. Not 100% and not 0%.
Free Will isn't about predictability; I think you are defining the term casuality instead when describing the procedure for determining previous system states. You conception of randomness is wrong. There will never be any universes in which stone arches exist. There is nothing wrong with hypothesizing that a few of our decisions reference a self-selected brain faculty we did not have at 6 months of age, but gained by the 6 year mark. Many properties and constructs of nature are emergent. Limited Free Will may be one of these.
fudley <fuddley@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> 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.
> 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.
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