G-D sounds like an STD. That or some kind of High Explosive.
I think freewill, at the very least, is the ability to think about stuff you did in the past that might have been an unthinking reaction and modify your behaviour in the future. It's not always possibly to exert freewill instantaneously (famously with the experiment with the
button and light where however hard you try to choose to press the button before the light lights up, the light always lights up first as if it knows you are going to press the button before you do) but you can certainly think about the light and the button and then choose to stop pressing it or leave the room or something else.
Another analogy might be when you are driving a car. You don't make conscious decisions about every single action you take (unless you just passed your test) but you make a conscious decision as to where you are going, which you can change depending on your knowledge of the traffic ahead, whilst at the same time driving 'on automatic' reactions naturally as you've taught yourself without thinking consciously about it too hard.
I think that at the very least our experience of past events allows us to exercise our freewill in regards to future events, if we think about it ahead of time. I don't think it is an illusion - i think the illusion is that freewill happens instantaneously magically inside your brain where your soul is all the time and without error, freewill is imperfect and requires effort and forethought.
Papa said:
Despite the illusion of constant free will, I think we're largely on autopilot; the huge amount of unconscious processing that goes into each simple 'decision' we make seems to support this. We do seem to be able to sporadically interject and arrest otherwise automatic processes e.g. stories of people in India learning to control all sorts of autonomic functions
That's kind of what i was getting at with my car driving example. I would disagree with the idea that freewill is usually absent - i think that when i'm driving my car (or whatever) my freewill is disconnected and i'm usually daydreaming or planning something unrelated to whatever the real world task i am performing with the illusion of freewill is. Maybe some people do just sit there and drive and think about nothing.
Delta-9-THC said:
Are we just organic machines, our only purpose to survive and reproduce, driven on by our pursuit of enjoyable stimulation and our aversion to pain, hunger, etc?
This is a false choice. We can be both organic machines driven by hunger, survival, reproduction etc. and also posses the ability of freewill. The initial unthinking reaction driven by hunger might be to steal the food, the conscious free will decision after thinking about it for a while might be to go hungry (either due to morals or the risk of getting caught - either way free will).
Delta-9-THC said:
If science is correct in determining that there was a big bang or some kind of "birth" of our universe than from this initial action, if we had complete knowledge of natural laws and properties of this universe and the computing power to do so, we could theoretically simulate every physical action in the chain events that follows this big bang. From this we could predict anything and everything that will happen within the life of this universe, whether it be finite or infinite. Including any of your or my actions, decisions, and thoughts.
That was held to be true by scientists up until the discovery of quantum physics and the
Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Quantum physics and quantum uncertainty may seem like obscure scientific theories but they are real and have implications in the real world. The reason the hard drive in your computer isn't bigger (in terms of gigabites) than it is is that there is a limit - once they get down to an electron or two for each bit there is a chance they'll start randomly flipping due to quantum instability and your data gets shuffled about. The reason hard drives keep getting bigger anyway is that the scientists/technologists keep finding loopholes and other ways round this fundamental limit (like storing the data parallel instead of in series or was it the other way round?)
