Free Will

(I think we’ve corrupted KF’s thread long enough.) The entire problem of mind/matter dualism is rooted in a single error of thought: the reification of an abstract descriptive model of experience into an causal agency independent of the mind that conceives it and the mental experience it is extrapolated from. It is similar to the same error of thought that mistakes “forces” and “physical laws” and “energy” as independently existing causal agencies, when in fact they are abstract models of various mental experiences. All experience and all thought about experience takes place in mind, regardless of whether or not it is caused by something external to mind. Therefore, “an external, physical world” is a mental abstraction about mental experiences. Insisting Read More ›

Computer engineering prof Robert J. Marks, first author of Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, explains, When I was boy, my father explained free will and predestination to me: I dig a fence post hole. · Did I create the hole because of my own free will? · Or was the hole already there and I simply removed the dirt? If true, the hole was predestined. The question cannot be answered by examining the evidence. In philosophy terms, it is “empirically unanswerable.” That is the sort of stuff that philosophers debate. Religious people might point to scripture to support one conclusion over the other. In physics, however, quantum randomness offers a definitive answer to the question of predestination vs. free will—for subatomic Read More ›

 A philosopher claims that neuroscience has proven thoughts do not exist. Eric Holloway looks at the neuroscience and examines the claim: There is a problem with this sort of reasoning. One could make the same argument about computer code, as follows: There is no code. It’s all just assembly language. Or, there is no assembly, it’s all just machine code. Or, there is no machine code, there are just voltage levels on transistors. One could continue following this chain of reasoning to the point where the transistors don’t exist. It’s just a bunch of electrons doing their thing. Of course, the electrons don’t really exist either. They’re just a bunch of quarks and leptons. In which case, the program your computer requires Read More ›

Possibly. They certainly rule out experimenter interference: Quantum particles appear to behave randomly when measured. But what if there is no free will? In that case, the physicists were fated, so to speak, to set up the experiment to achieve a certain set of results which might appear to them to be random. But that was fated too. Koberlein explains, “It’s often said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but it’s really information that can’t travel faster than light. We can send each other telegrams or text messages, but never faster than the time it takes for light to travel between us. In a small lab, light has plenty of time to travel back and forth Read More ›