Free Will

[netmouse]

In the comments on yellowmouser's journal here and here I engage the question of whether or not free will is an illusion (I think not). Updated to add: J argues against me here.

What are your thoughts on the question? Is it an interesting question or purely a polemic debate?

Comments

Coming at it mechanistically...

[flinx.livejournal.com]

To me, the question of free will always comes back to the need to define consciousness or self awareness. It comes down to perception, in my mind.

Some areas of quantum theory and cosmology suggest that not only are all possible options for any given event simultaneously superimposed, all possible options are taken, splitting off nigh-infinite orthogonal universes every attosecond. Classic sci-fi idea, to step from one world to the next, with the only difference being one little thing that happened a second ago or two million years ago.

Now, if you follow that conceit, and scale it up to include macroscopic options and 'choices' and then examine free will in that context, free will doesn't exist. If me and me' and me'' choose options A, B and C simultaneously and now myriad universes exist for those three in parallel, then I don't have free will. I'm merely another agent that takes all possible options, much like any other muon or electron or uranium nucleus.

However, I, me (not me' or me'') am only aware of having made a choice for A. My consciousness, my awareness, follows only one path. That's not saying that me' doesn't think the exact same thing, that his consciousness only follows the path of B. But I'm not me', and I have no awareness of that realm, and so I cannot be mechanical or destined to make the choice of A, in my universe. It's not an illusion, for I am aware that I could have freely taken B or C, but I didn't, and it does not matter to me that me' and me'' made those choices.

Sure, if I were capable of perceiving all the pluripotent realities simultaneously, free will would be an illusion. But I'm here and now, and live within my one world.

Now, take another quantum possibility: that the infinite universes exist simultaneously at the moment of choice, but once the selection is made via probability, the worlds collapse into the one universe that we can perceive. In that case, random chance dictates the path of events below a conscious level, but the existence of a conscious mind changes things. Awareness of all the myriad possibilities is not the same as inhabiting all of them simultaneously, and our emotions and unconscious biases and prejudices weight each and every one of those possibilities. In this case, free will must exist for conscious beings to be able to function in, and affect, the world around them.

My two filthy coppers.