I'm not sure I understand what you are saying. It sounds to me that you are saying that Free Will is sort of a force of nature which allows you to change the future.
I guess I am saying that Free Will is a consequence of the future not being determined because of inherent randomness.
In either case we believe in Free Will. It's really the only thing you can believe since in a fully deterministic system everything, including beliefs and thoughts, are already decided.
To say that you have Free Will so long as you are not deprived of your freedom is really circular logic. I can determine to visit the Eifel Tower on News Years day, but I can't guarentee that the tower won't fall before then, or that I won't be prevented from travelling, or that I will still be alive on New Years Day. This is because the future is not already written and has nothing to do with what decision I make about the tower.
Everyone simply accepts determinism
I, for one, do not believe in determinism. I believe in cause and effect, or as it is sometimes known, the arrow of time. But I also believe that at the heart of the smallest of the physical interactions of this world, effect is not completely determined by cause, but has a random component.
For what it's worth, I think the origin of the randomness is that time is not a continuous function, but actually moves in discrete ticks. During that ummeasurably small interval between ticks things can move. The movement is immeasurably small, but instantaneous. This is at the outer theshold of my understanding, unprovable, and subject to change with the least bit of data or insight.
TP |
