Thread: Do we really have a free will?

@ Dutchraptor - Was it you who said that? My bad! Your name takes a lot more neuron-firings to remember than Xei...

What I meant was something very close to what you said - I originally said (and Heavy Sleeper quoted me before I had changed it) that thoughts are qualia. But I changed it because I realized they're not entirely made of qualia, only partially. But in thinking more about it later (thats what I love abut these discussions - they cause you to consider things in new ways) I realized that what thoughts actually are is just information. To go back to a couple of my earlier metaphors, light bulbs firing in a coded pattern like morse code would carry information. Words on a page are a code that also carries information. Just like the binary code that arranges the pixels on a computer monitor into meaningful patterns is a code.

My thinking was flawed, but in a slightly different way than you said. What I meant at the time was that thoughts, memories etc are not physical things because you can't weigh them, or pick them up. If you break a person's head open and look inside you can't see them. In the same way, a story isn't a physical thing ether. But in thinking more about it I realize that the code that carries the information might not be strictly physical - for example morse code. It's not just the sounds, it's the intervals - the length of blips and of the pauses between them. The arrangement of those intervals. And a length of time is not a physical thing.

But I was wrong again - intervals of time are measured against the movement of a clock hand or something similar, which is physical. Tap the key, wait for the second hand to move 2 notches, tap it again.

So I agree - even the code that carries or stores the thoughts is something physical.

Then I thought "But something like a story conveys so many things that aren't physical - feelings, sensations, etc".

Well, some of this is qualia - the color indigo for instance. That might not be a physically quantifiable thing, but whatever causes qualia, it's something in our mental makeup that can be stored as a memory (pattern of neuron-firings) and then re-created later.

So everything that happens on the 'story level' is still something physically created, stored and re-created by the brain.

So I finally concede - thoughts are physical. Well, maybe that's not quite right, but thoughts are information that's entirely conveyed and stored physically.

I don't like the word automaton - well actually I do, but it describes something slow ponderous and lumbering. I'd be happier with a less negative term.

Man, I hate to add more to this already long post, but in the interest of not double-posting:

@ Tommo -

I don't think absolute originality is necessary. You're talking about the kind of complete originality that art students lament. The ability to suddenly and spontaneously invent something the world has never seen before. That kind of invention happens when we've made a new discovery in the world of physics or chemistry or something - that's why there were so many of them when science was still showing us new things at an alarming rate. Now all the big easy discoveries seem to be behind us. Now invention progresses at more of a snail's pace, small improvements to existing designs. New ways to do old things. There are essentially only a limited number of story lines, but countless different takes on them, each unique.

In one sense the internet is based on the telephone network, but in other ways it's something profoundly new, that's connected the world in astonishing ways. For something that's supposedly not an original invention it has changed everything like nothing has since the Gutenberg press.

Like Stanley Kubrick said, everything has already been done - it's our job to do it better. When you use the same old story line - let's say "Revenge may feel good but it destroys something human inside you" but create a new story you've made something that never existed in the world before.

Slightly better is still something new. This goes hand in hand with what I said earlier - that some people are basically saying "There isn't MUCH free will, therefore there's no free will". It's self-contradictory - if there isn't much that means there is some. Just substitute originality for free will.