Why I Believe in Free Will and Not Determinism Nor God's Intelligent Design.
It seems to me theoretically possible that if one entity could have enough computing power to observe the behavior of every atom in the universe, it could thus predict the future at perfection.
The universe to such an entity would thus be deterministic.
If there can be such a thing a god capable of intelligent design, it would have to have this quality. But such a quality can only happen on a computing organism arguably the size of the universe.
And thus what would be the difference between the entity and the universe its self? it would, of course, have to compute the atoms that make up its own form as well, since its own capacity to compute the future will influence the future.
At that point, we might as well call God the universe.
Anything less than that and this organism would be dealing in abstractions, perspective limited assumptions. Thus introducing the potential for error, and incomplete conceptual patterns. Which in turn transforms determinism into statistical prediction game.
Basically what humans do to try and predict the future.
Anything under 100% computation of the behavior of every atom, becomes then a perceptual game of statistical predictions.
Add mortality to that, and suddenly you have to make choices based on limited information that will have short, mid and long term real life consequences for you and others.
And you'll have to deal with the choices of everyone else close enough to you.
Because of your limited computation and perception, change emerges as another factor. Since there are naturally occurring phenomenon that you won't be able to predict.
To top it off, you'll also have to act on your predictions to take advantage of them and form the future that you wish to see. Which deals with competence, and discipline as well as knowledge of what motivates you at all.
So things get real complex.
Free will thus emerges from our inability to see the deterministic flows. It emerges from our inability to perfectly predict the future. From our capacity to influence the shape of the future based on our limited perception, From our computing capacity, our competence, our luck and our very unique time and position in the universe.
What do you think?
There are too many coincidences in nature of unexpected phenomon to make me believe that universe has been intelligently designed. Take for example the Golden ratio. Why does it occur so often in nature? Sounds like some designer(s) was very fond of number.
Yeah that was the one point I failed to include in this.
The above does not discard that there are some fundamental axioms. There certainly is order that emerges form the universe, and such order builds and gets disrupted by other structures regularly.
We have the capacity to connect with the fundamental structure of the cosmos. Primarily because we are part of the cosmos and it is in us as in everything else.
While that is true and that can help us be more aligned with nature and what is good (I also believe in morality in a specific sense), it does not mean that there is intelligent design or determinism in the human experience
The future can't be predicted exactly. But the future can be predicted to a certain degree.
I think Free Will is purely what we think is Free Will. It's not like we can really change our future, as we don't know what our future includes.
I agree that the future can't be predicted exactly. It's just impossible, for multiple reasons.
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Thanks for sharing but I don't think that if God exists this necessarily means that we don't have free will. There is a concept called divine foreknowledge that explains how God can know everything before it happens but people still have free will. The idea is that human decisions determine the foreknowledge of God. Not the other way around.
oh, id be willing to conceed that god exsists. Depending on how you think of god or what you mean by it.
Just not intelligent design. that,s where i have some problems. though i certainly skipped definitions on this one and it was more of a moment of inspiration after conversations with friends, many convos.
Then a proper philosophical paper of sorts.
But yea, divine foreknowledge does not equal determinism. knowledge alone does not imply action or will. simply awareness.
So even with the above concept, you are still not talking about intelligent design which is what I'm talking about.
Free will is only an illusion of adult and sober brains. Children, mads and drunk people do not have free will, not even the illusion of it.
Free will is earned through self knowledge.
Those that do not know them selves are slaves to the forces that shaped their motivations.