ThatsWhatHeSaid
Well-known member
- Joined
- May 11, 2007
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- 7,263
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- 5w4
The problem is: How do you KNOW that we are entirely dependent on everything around us in regards to making decisions?
It seems to me much like God: How on earth can one possibly prove that free will DOESN'T exist at all? Perhaps there is still a minute portion of our consciousness, that one "last private inch" of ourselves, that operates independently. We have no way to explore the truth of that, or articulate it. It might not exist.
But there's no way to prove it doesn't.
And if there is any smidgen of free will in a decision, then there is (to some degree) "free will."
I don't know, that is what comes to mind at the moment.
First off, we have to get our burdens of proof sorted out and decide who is making the claim. If you claim free will exists, you bear the burden of providing evidence for it. A person should just assume free will exists just as a person shouldn't assume God exists without proof.
With that said, I'm still working on a disproof, even though I don't bear the burden of disproving anything. I would start from the physical laws of the universe, which can be used to determine the future with almost complete precision. That almost is due to quantum uncertainty. So the question is whether human observation can affect the outcome of those quantum events. The answer would seem to be yes, since observation can cause waveforms to collapse, etc, etc. But what caused the person to make the observation? Again, we turn to the physical laws of the universe and say that the decision was predicated on past physical states. Could THOSE physical states have been influenced by human observation? Sure, but we just keep running into the same problem ad infinitum until we get to the point where there is no human observation, and then you're fucked.
The only way out of it is to have something independent of this chain of causation, but if there is no separate self, there's nothing to break from of the causal chain and act as independent observer.