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.
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.
We have will but I question whether it is really free or if this will is really just controlled by even more underlying programming that is both inherent in our mental structure but also capable of adapting to our experiences/memories.
Could it be that our conscious decision of where to drive or what to do are just a different level of processing that takes more of a priority because they are constantly changing depending on the situation while the other actions(such as shifting the gears, stopping for red lights, obey traffic laws, etc) are more static and thus run on auto pilot with less flexible processing required for their function and thus they are put on stored pre-recorded responses that activate when prompted by the correct stimulus.
I think there is a very complicated process in which the brain decides what is allowed to drift into our conscious awareness and even more processing that determines how to react when it gets there. Our reasoning is very methodical and formulaic although at the same time, it is capable of adjusting it's functionality to adapt to new concepts and building new formulas for reasoning.
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).
I think our reasoning is based largely on determining what is most beneficial to us and most likely to give us positive stimulation or to relieve negative stimulation. If we require food, and if we are desperate enough, most if not all would steal to relieve their suffering and to preserve themselves. Normally we would not do so because of the risk of getting caught but this is overridden when it is necessary. It is all in the deliberation between whether we reason that a given reaction will have a positive or negative outcome for us.
This gets complicated when you bring in a mechanism that we all possess: empathy and conscientiousness. We all have a base level of this (other than sociopaths) and it can be strongly reinforced by social conditioning. This is a further obstacle that causes us to react to the anguish of others as if we where experiencing it ourselves. This is a very practical evolutionary functioning which benefits the species as a whole by making us reluctant to harm each other. Our reasoning incorporates this and the potential backlash from the conscience into account as a negative stimulation when deliberating on a given action.
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?)
That seems to be more about our own inability and limitations to measure phenomenon and doesn't really seem to disprove what I was saying. It should still be theoretically possible to simulate reality accurately it would just require a complete understanding of every property of reality down to the quantum level. True we would need to measure it to develop an understanding of how it functions and to come up with a equation to simulate a given physical law/property, but that is beside the point. Suppose we could? The point I am making is every action is the result of a precise mathematical process or trajectory(as qwe calls it) that is entirely non-random. IF we had a complete understanding of it's workings than we should be able to simulate it.
Another related sub question is: does randomness exist anywhere in reality?
I wish I had more of an understanding of quantum physics but unfortunately my math background isn't 100% solid and I have forgotten much of what I learned to it is hard for me to decipher some of the technical language used into a more practical idea that can be applied to my perception of reality.
