one chooses the path they follow, whatever it may be.

Or starve and dehydrate, depending on speaker.

I've never heard anyone link omnipotence and free will before.

@FatherOfNyx Yes, this appears to be an argument that only God has free will, and the rest of us have only...will.

@Heraclitus It's an argument that there can be no truly free will unless it is free of all consequences. Since I'm an atheist, that is an argument that there is no one with free will.

Perhaps you have a definition for free will that allows one to somehow have it despite being in any way constrained? I'd happily entertain it.

@mordant
The trick is that if you define free will as requiring omnipotence, then by definition no one can have free will except a theoretical god, and some would argue that even God is not free from all consequences depending upon the theoretical god you choose to believe in. But for an atheist, you have simply defined free will out of existence. This is not an argument. There is nothing to argue about since free will, by definition does not exist.

But, if you are interested, some Compatibilists define free will as freedom to act according to one's determined motives without hindrance from other individuals. This is still a restricted form of free will, yet still allows for some degree of freedom.

Frankly, I have never liked the very term "free will" because if you have to be totally free from any influence, including that of your environment, then it would follow that there is no free will. I think philosophers have been tripping over themselves for millinnia because of the very ambiguous and ill-defined nature of this term.

@Heraclitus Agreed. That's why I focus on freedom of choice, which everyone has some degree of. True, sometimes, all known options suck, and you can flip a coin because you can't see a clear way forward that's better than another. But we clearly make choices all day, every day. I just chose to reply to you; I could just as well chosen not to. That's not unfettered free will, but it's enough to make me feel like there's a point to my existence, which is all that actually matters.

It's a weak argument, but a determinist will swear on everything they hold dear that the donkey will starve to death.

@FatherOfNyx but wait...do these people feed themselves unassisted? Doubt it!

@AnneWimsey Well they would argue that when presented with more than one choice, one will always be more influential than the rest.

@FatherOfNyx yes, true, but primal needs such as hunger will wipe those veneers away in a second! Hunger or spider stew!?

I have rarely seen such pontificating. We make choices. Hence, freewill. It's really pretty simple.

I dunno, if I believed in the selfish gene, suicide (among a whole array of other things) would never happen. The fact that someone can kill themselves before they pass on their genes tells me that that isn't exactly the case.

I too am a fan of the selfish gene theory, but I was always of the impression that Hawkins was proposing gene-centered propensities at a species level, not a philosophical hard determinism at an individual level.

Yeah, I guess my view has always been a soft determinism view. The majority of all your actions are you running on autopilot, with the ability to change course whenever. Once you make a course correction, you're back on autopilot.

Per my previous post I can't help but notice tony soprano is not a real person and I am a real person. You are using "props" that somebody else created for entertainment purpose. Do you really, really have any opinion of your own to offer here?

@GipsyOfNewSpain Yes, read my previous post in which I stated that I was a Soft Determinist. That is my opinion.

@Heraclitus Soft Determist is like Lame Actionist in another state.... oh... always the problem with labels. But cool if you have to be labeled pick yours.

@GipsyOfNewSpain Have no idea what you mean by that. But, do you really, really have any opinion of your own to offer here?

@GipsyOfNewSpain
What is?
Could you be more specific as to what your are referring to as "dogshit"?

@GipsyOfNewSpain So, do you really, really have any opinion of your own to offer here? Or do you just sign on to offer vague and vulgar insults to the opinions of members of this website?

How did they determine when the decision was made? How did they time it in reverse? Has anyone replicated this experiment under perfectly contol?

There is nothing in your story which carries any weight of credibility.

@JimG, it sounds like you just want there to be free will. Here's a video that explains it with scientific references:

@ldheinz I don't have any stake in it. I don't base my opinions on what I'd like to believe, and your willingness to jump to unsupported conclusions doesn't bode well for your assertion.

I cannot comment on the video right now because I'm at work. However I'd like to point out that my comments were directed only at the experiment. I can't accept the results as being any semblance of valid scientific research based on the information given.

@JimG, I do support massively extensive evidence. Watch the video.

@ldheinz
I've seen the video three times now and done some research on Libet. I haven't found any information on the experiments the discussed on the video, although he did do some interesting research in consciousness.

Assuming the video is accurate in its description of Libet's experiment. I think the presenter in the video is over reaching in his conclusions. As he presents his position, he fails to rule out any other possible explanations.

An aside, the gentleman in the video arrogantly implies that he has a better understanding of consciousness than the real scientists or that they are all biased. That's preposterous. I will concede that his inflated ego doesn't mean his wrong, I would consider the possibility that actual researchers and scientists haven't espoused his conclusions for a valid reason. Maybe they're overly conservative, and that would be warranted, but someone, somewhere would be following up on these results.

Again though, I want to reiterate that the guy in the video presents his conclusion
as compelling, although there are other explanations that he doesn't rule out. He may be correct, but he's a long way from proving it.

For what it's worth, he misrepresents quantum physics. Stating that the quantum universe appears to be random is a far cry from declaring that it IS random.

I don't believe you are wrong about free will, but I don't see any compelling evidence in this video that conclusively refutes it.

@JimG I agree with your point about randomness in science. It is widely misunderstood. It is not meant to declare an absolute randomness, but a perceived randomness because no established pattern has been found. Individual mutations, for example, are spoken of as occurring randomly, yet at the macro level they occur at a relatively predictable rate. That which can be predicted at with relative accuracy cannot be totally random.

I have often spoken of these experiments myself to others who often refused to believe me. No doubt many of our subconsious reactions are later rationalized consciously, if for no other reason than out of cognitive dissonance. Yet, I think we should not jump to hard and fast philosophical conclusions that even the scientists themselves who performed the experiments did not make. Then again, maybe I am just telling you this because subconsciously I have already decided to tell you this and my conscious mind has no choice but to do so, as it is the slave of my subconscious. Then again, maybe that last sentence was just a conscious rationalization to avoid my taking any responsibility for anything I say or write.

Are you saying that there is something "more" to our physical bodies? Like a soul? Or are you saying there is a difference between our mind and brain? I've never believed our minds are anything more than brain activity and the concept of a metaphysical mind is too much like the concept of the soul for me.

There is nothing about behaviors of software systems that have to be rote and repeatable. There is fuzzy logic, Boolean networks, and now, causal calculus ... lots of ways to make a software system that learns, even, increasingly, infers -- and, I'm convinced, there's no reason in principle, can't make moral decisions. The old trope of the "mechanical man" is pretty dated. General-purpose "hard" AI may, depending on the details, be 5 or 50 or 100 years away, but it's within reach.

As per my comments above concerning freedom of choice vs free will, robots will have constraints just like humans ... so they will have limited freedom of choice just like humans, but not some theoretical free will, just like humans.

@FatherOfNyx Well, I don’t like the soul word. Who or what is it having the soul? The question in my mind is who or what the heck are we anyway? It is very hard for me to see how the kind of conscious awareness that we enjoy could arise from a mass of neurons. No one so far has explained how such a thing could happen, no matter how many neurons are firing. Of course there is bodily sentience that disappears when we die. You can make a robot with that kind of sentience, but the robot will not have self-awareness. I’m talking about something else.

It seems to me that when we die our mind dies also, along with memories. Our selfhood as separate individual selves was just an illusion anyway. It really never existed.

What I lean toward thinking is that conscious awareness is primary and exists in its own right. This higher consciousness resides in the part of reality that we can not understand with our mater/space/time model. From that true perspective there are no individuals—there’s not me and you—it’s all universal consciousness.

The river of organisms is there for a purpose, but individual bodies are of little concern. At the higher level of reality the concept of time has no meaning. The question of immortality makes no sense.

I freely admit that this is metaphysics—I offer no proof. However, the ideas have been around for millennia. They are in Hindu scriptures for example, and see Donald Hoffman’s “Conscious Realism”.

@mordant What you are saying about the complexity of software systems sounds correct from my limited perspective, however, I find it impossible to believe that computers will actually have conscious awareness of themselves. I’ve been hearing that conscious computers are just around the corner for most of my life, and so far it hasn’t happened, so I’ll just store that information in a remote place in memory and await further evidence.

Of course that’s not what you said. You said that both computers and humans can make choices but neither has that “some theoretical” free will, in the metaphysical sense. If you are talking about human bodies and minds, then we are in agreement.

Where we differ is that I don’t think deep conscious awareness arises from the firing of neurons in our brains. I think consciousness is primary in reality, and I think that our true collective self is that consciousness.

I have personal evidence that conscious awareness does exist. It is something that I am experiencing at this moment. If I identify myself with that awareness, what I learn is that the body can be controlled—controlled indirectly. The body can be nudged in a desired direction, and if there is no overbearing reason not to, the body will follow the instructions of higher awareness.

That’s my impression anyway.