RE: Do We Choose the Power to Do Right, or the Power to Do Wrong?
I've been thinking about the two stage free will of WIlliam James, Karl Popper and Martin Heisenberg. More to the point, I am thinking of free will as the ability to say "No" to our instincts. I see 99.999% of our behavior as deterministic, either directly generated by our instincts or perversions of them, or indirectly generated by the history of our instincts and the instincts of others, along with physical random chance.
But when we choose to say "No, I will not have sex with that person, no, I will not eat those berries", we are clearly going against our instincts.
Now we come to perversions of instincts. "No, I will not gather all the berries for myself" is easily translated into, "No, I will not build a multinational corporation that ravages third world countries while providing me with unused riches and plenty of slave girls." Same instinct, same brain activity, transliterated upon our modern world.
Heisenberg (son of Werner Heisenberg) is working on proving that indeterministic quantum behavior is responsible for those acts of free will. If that turns out to actually demonstrate that we are free, then we really do have responsibility for our actions.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. Good topics. Our unconscious motivations an drives are indeed a large part of behavior, and the power to rise above that automatic modality of living gives us greater degrees of freedom.
This is how I have understood the layers of reality where we live and exist, and the "unreality" non-existence of the quantum realm where we don't exist or live. They are two different realms. One is a building block that leads to the culmination of the other.
We are responsible for our actions, free will chosen voluntarily or involuntarily unconsciously driven to do. We have the capacity for free will. The is evidence in life, regardless of what quantum physics can add or attempt to deny.
We can the drivers if we want to be. All the quantum state changes are a reflections of what happens here, either deterministically or with free will. The deterministic causal course of events without free will agents is one part, and the quantum to atom to molecules builds that according to laws and forces. The randomized free will choices work int he opposite direction from consciousness to act and change the world which is then reflected into the quantum state change. The quantum state change does not happen "first" to determine what our free will choice will be.