Freewill

Atoms and electrons do what atoms and electrons do. This, ultimately, means that freewill is simply not possible.

Whatever you do is decided by the motions of atoms and electrons both yours and those of your environment, which obey the laws of nature. You might harbour the idea that your brain somehow overrides the actions of atoms and electrons and allows us, not nature, to be the cause of what they do. This, I argue, is an illusion, a fallacy.

Take a computer program, a web browser for example. The browser behaves in complex ways. The browser takes downloaded text and image files as input and displays them as pretty pictures and text, and yet no one would argue that the web browser has freewill. The browser is simply a manifestation of the activity of the computer, which in turn has no freewill.

By analogy, as far as freewill is concerned, you are like the web browser. You take in light and sound as input and you "see" pictures and "hear" sounds. But these pictures and sounds are merely the activity of your brain, which is a computer. What you see and hear is not voluntary.

At this point you might say, hold on! We direct our eyes. This is not true, eye movements have been shown to be involuntary. When we scan a painting, our eyes can only perceive a tiny portion of that painting at any one moment. So the eyes scan the painting. This "scanning" is subconscious, not affected by our conscious will.

But, with effort, if we "think" about it, intuitively we believe that we can control what our eyes do. "If I want to look to my left, then I will look to my left". But what is really going on here? Is your conscious mind making the decision of where to direct your eyes or is your subconscious telling your conscious mind where to look? After the event the conscious mind might "think" it made the decision, but there is no evidence for this. Instead experiments using brain scans tell us that our decisions are made before we become conscious of having made them!

When all is said and done, the brain is a computer, it has no freewill, it merely processes input from the world. The experiments show us consciousness is not affecting the processing leading to decision making, therefore unconscious processing by the brain is doing that. All our decision making, all that we say, write, create and do, is done utterly subconsciously. We don't have the ability to override that subconscious activity consciously. Any effort to do so will have been spurred by the subconscious.

The subconscious activity its self is caused by computations running in the brain, much like computations running on a computer. Those computations are carried out by the blind movements of electrons and atoms obeying the laws of physics.

Your life is like a computer program, it is determined by a set of rules turning input into output. If see food and feel hungry then eat, unless you are doing something else more important. If tired and in bed then sleep. If in pub then drink beer. If see a sexy and/or rich member of opposite sex and not homosexual then drool. Etc. etc. These rules may be much more sophisticated than the trivial examples above, leading to correspondingly more complex behaviour, BUT... complexity is not a sign of freewill. Worse, you do not make the rules! You follow them. The rules are determined by the configurations of atoms and electrons in your brain, over which your conscious mind has no control.

In short, I have no choice but to bring this conclusion to your notice: I am sorry, my friend, but nobody, not even you or I, has freewill. Any intuitive feelings to the contrary are an illusion aided and abetted by misplaced arrogance and wishful thinking.

Update: I had a dream half an hour ago in which I was given a choice between colours for a web page design. I don't know who or why I was being given the choice (in my dream) but I had to make a choice. Before me were various colours. I chose one. Then more colours appeared. I chose one, and so on. Now here is the strangest thing: gradually it dawned on me (in the dream) that I didn't know why I was making those decisions! Something else was making those decisions for me, the subconscious mind. I had no freewill in the "decisions" I was making. My choices were not selected by my conscious mind at all. My conscious mind was merely perceiving the choices being made. Some might call such a mechanism gut feeling, or intuition.

If all decisions are made by the subconscious, as I suggest above, then what if the subconscious has no free will, as I also suggest? Psychologically, it is easier to imagine the subconscious being deterministic than the conscious mind being deterministic. If the conscious mind has no control over choices and the subconscious is deterministic then suddenly it is easier to take the hit and admit we have no freewill.

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From:	John Brown	Subject:	Heading	2001-02-02 15:13:26
From:	Aido	Subject:	We are free if we believe we are free.	2001-02-08 05:25:26
From:	dave	Subject:	s'pose y'think y'know all about atoms?	2001-03-18 10:33:27
From:	MadPole	Subject:	You mentioned this subject, not me!	2001-03-20 19:13:42
From:	Joe Black	Subject:	I agree	2002-09-17 15:04:43
From:	Joe Black	Subject:	I agree , part II	2002-09-17 15:06:45
From:	katie	Subject:	my opinion on free will	2002-09-28 10:59:32
From:	Lisa Ann Hurley	Subject:	life on earth part 1 of 3	2002-11-17 14:22:04
From:	Lisa Ann Hurley	Subject:	life on earth part 2 of 3	2002-11-17 14:23:36
From:	Lisa Ann Hurley	Subject:	life on earth part 3 of 3	2002-11-17 14:28:36
From:	Joe Black	Subject:	more thinking	2002-11-21 14:41:11
From:	Kami Blas	Subject:	Does fate control every man's destiny?	2003-05-22 20:07:22
From:	Mikey	Subject:	it would be a paradox	2003-08-20 18:07:01
From:	Doug Wilder	Subject:	freewill	2003-08-27 21:01:10
From:	Mmmm logic	Subject:	big flaw	2003-08-30 22:56:08
From:	Clayton Carter	Subject:	Dreams of free-will	2003-09-03 20:30:22
From:	Clayton Carter	Subject:	Dreams of free will pt 2	2003-09-03 20:31:15
From:	Courtney	Subject:	To every action there is a reaction	2003-09-04 18:27:33
From:	Clayton Carter	Subject:	Regarding Newton	2003-09-05 17:10:06
From:	Mike	Subject:	Sure!!!	2003-09-07 01:52:11
From:	ivan	Subject:	when it all comes down to it... 1 of 2	2003-09-28 22:42:48
From:	ivan	Subject:	when it lal comes down to it... 2 of 2	2003-09-28 22:43:38
From:	Nick	Subject:	We will always take the best option	2003-11-07 17:44:08
From:	Hera	Subject:	THe greater truth	2003-11-11 21:05:30
From:	Hera	Subject:	quantum physics	2003-11-11 21:10:20
From:	Ivan	Subject:	???	2003-11-12 04:32:28
From:	Ian Manns	Subject:	Freewill	2004-01-19 08:45:01
From:	BeLLa	Subject:	Fate Vs. Freewill	2004-01-22 19:15:12
From:	Robert Dankinson	Subject:	About you ideas	2004-02-08 03:54:17
From:	BathtubShitter	Subject:	determinitive? no	2004-04-28 15:21:27
From:	Saahil	Subject:	Depends on how you define 'me'	2004-11-26 23:00:58
From:	Helen	Subject:	That's true but we still have freewill.	2004-12-06 20:41:01
From:	Ivan Gorleik	Subject:	The Real Truth	2005-05-25 13:15:56
From:	Jeff	Subject:	free will to a point	2005-08-08 12:15:27
From:	ashi	Subject:	free will	2005-10-16 07:06:06
From:	Ballad	Subject:	YOU SO STOLE MY IDEA	2005-10-25 07:41:06
From:	Ballad	Subject:	I lied! I'm gunna leave one more post!	2005-10-25 09:40:22
From:	Wil	Subject:	freewill	2006-01-15 15:59:38
From:	jackie	Subject:	freewill	2006-01-25 16:07:42

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