I think it's safe to say that I send out a causal *ping* with every action that I take. Granted, I can't track most of these streams originating from a particular decision I make, but that doesn't mean that they don't significantly effect the course of events for quite a distance.

Corliss Lamont talked a bit about this in a book on Humanism. Causal Streams is what he called them. Fascinating stuff to me, but then again I'm a scientific toddler

The whole thing about determinism is an interesting academic exercise. The whole "there is no choice, only one thing responding to another thing as it is predisposed to" really doesn't say much to me. There was a fellow on these boards some time ago that was really stuck on the topic. It makes sense to me, I guess it just doesn't matter, whether or not it is correct.

My actions are determined by my noodle. My noodle is a complex web of circuts that makes decisions based on experience, imagined future outcome, and basic processing power. When said grey squishy noodle encounters the need to make a decision it goes through it's process and, *pop*, I come to a decision. Could my brain have made another decision? I don't think so, not if my brain is exactly the same, with the exact same experience and processing power. I don't see how I could be capable of making a decision other than the one I make. If we were to go back in time and, under the exact same circumstances, present my brain with the same problem, it would make the *exact* same decision in the *exact* same fashion. It has too.

Right?

On a side note: Peppermint, your avatar is so cute I just want to bite you.

 Oh, and on the actual subject of the thread, I'm pretty sure it would be impossible to tell the difference between determinism and a system of agents acting independently in a "free-will" fashion. We seem to do the same things over and over again, because it's in our nature.

Free will? Of course we have it, though we have limited choices, we actually have a free will in choosing them.

The question is, is there a destiny? I think that in a certain sense yes. There are certain waypoints, goals of life, optimal experiences, which can be called our destiny. They're not predestined, but they're likely to happen, because they present the best, the most useful experience for us, and thus, the power of our effort aspires towards them. This makes them so likely. Ever had a deja vu? Maybe your brain just got left behind in perception and realized that while in a retrospective and this made this feeling. Or this exact place and exact moment was your destiny, one of waypoints on your way, and this doesn't even have to be any glorious situation.

Such a thought came to my mind recently. I don't put an official stamp on it of me insisting on it officially, I don't even know if it's true, but some of you might consider...
We make many mistakes, and the world is in such a disorder, so is the free will really a good thing? I won't thrill you for long, it actually isn't. It's the ability to be ignorant, to make mistakes, to stagnate, to resist the evolutionary pressure. This isn't very pleasant thing, right? But it seems to be necessary. We are not alone on this planet. There are people, animals and whole ecosystems dependent on us. Without a free will, whatever we would be, we wouldn't stay at one place long enough to support each other or the ecosystems dependent on us. We would either evolve or be swept away very quickly The free will holds us back, so plants, animals, microorganisms, or even families, can live their amount of time together with us. We, as a complex beings are exposed to wider range of influences than them, and an evolutionary pressure on us should be higher - our mistakes are greater, we should pay much more attention to them. But somehow, it doesn't happen, thanks to our free will, it takes a lot of time to actually move forward in evolution.

The evolution has a direction, as we can see, less complex systems becomes more complex and integrated systems.
The evolution of many living things around is dependent on a certain speed (or slowness) of our evolution. This is maybe why the free will is sacred and this is why all good beings avoids infringing of the free will. Let the children do their mistakes.

All should know the great Spinoza! A mentor of Einstein, and many serious thinkers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza

We are free to choose based on the outcome of our reasoning processes, modified by the influences of our emotional state, sensory input, relevant memories which these thoughts and inputs have brought to mind... Is there something I have missed in this list, some other input, or is our choice also governed by the equivalent of a coin toss?

All of the factors I listed are in turn governed by a whole bunch of other preceding processes and environmental and physical states, which in turn are 'determined' by a widening circle of outside events which have contributed to the immediate state of our mind leading up to our choice.

The 'deterministic' universe is so complex that it is effectively and practically unpredictable at the level of the exact course of local events, once you try to work back any significant distance in time, so there really is no way we could tell from our direct personal experience the difference between a world populated by beings making 'free' choices and one where their choices where 'determined' by the exact state of that chunk of the universe within their lifetime 'event horizon' - that is , all of the universe close enough in  space and far enough back in time for its light or gravitatitional field to have influenced our local environment.

The notion of 'free will' is how we perceive all this. Actually weighing up all the factors in the process of making a 'considered' choice is obviously determined. An attempt to make an 'undetermined' choice is harder, but my feeling about such a choice is like us consciously trying to simulate something like a roulette wheel, but is still ultimately 'deterministic', in the same sense that such a wheel is still goverend by the laws of physics.

Thanks Hamby...

I do find my sentences do tend to run on a bit, and have to force myself at times to go back and break them up if I can improve the clarity.

Not sure if I got some things quite right there, but your comment reassures me that I got the idea across.

I can't quite see exactly what people mean when they talk about free will, since everytime I make a decision, it is based on some set of prior states in my mind, whether long term personal preferences, memory, the result of some reasoning process, etc, all of which seem to me to be prior 'causes', and are all things we can match in principle to physical states in the brain.

I think it may be that people don't see 'feelings' as determined by physical events/states in that spongy physical organ.

Or it is that they are thinking of 'determinism' in terms of a simple linear chain of identifiable 'cause and effect', like a a chain of gears and levers passing on some movement at one end of the chain being rigidly transferred on to the other end.

Sartre said, and wrote "Condemned To Be Free", as I say condemned to be awed, as I say gawed.

Yeah, freewill is a funny word, but isn't freewill basically what we call consciousness? Wild, yin yang ... free, not free, condemned !!! .... ummm ??? My head hurts .... and a buddha laughed.    

I think the idea of 'free' will is related to the subconscious and intuition. We are not directly conscious of how our most basic decisions are made. We are not directly conscious of how our neurons work, for example. So, we have this ability to have intuitive ideas just pop into our heads, as if they came out of nowhere. We are not directly aware of what caused these ideas, so the credulous person assumes they have no cause, or rather that we ourselves caused them 'freely'. Thus, free will. "Why did I decide to go left rather than right? I don't know. I guess I just chose it of my own free will."

Of course, the true answer is that our neurons made the decision, based on their conditioning, which is what we call the subconscious. Literally, it is below our consciousness. There are reasons, we just aren't aware of them.

Sometimes it's possible to explore our subconscious, and bring some of it into consciousness. However, there will always be a lower limit to our consciousness of our own decision making. Our brains simply aren't sophisticated enough to be aware of intracellular processes in our neurons, for example. So, we will always have this 'mysterious' ability to make decisions that we can't completely explain. It will always appear that our will is 'free'.