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Quote by: Thanatos  Open your checkbook.
People make decisions to do things they do not want on another level all the time. There's a part of me what wants ice cream and another part that wants to lose 10 pounds; neither wins reliably. Perhaps if you knew where every atom in my brain was you could load it into a computer and predict whether my prefrontal cortex or my hindbrain would win this sort of debate for a given scenario, but you can't.
I present you with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The short explanation is that you cannot know the exact position and momentum of a particle at the same time, or know the exact frequency and wavelength of a wave at the same time. This is a very sturdy and well-tested principle of physics; God himself can't know unless perhaps the God in question can also draw a circle with pi equal to 3 or make 2+2=5. Uncertainty principle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
So yes, we do have some measure of free will in either sense of the word. |
Which is why free will is an illusion, according to the predeterminist's argument. If you could have knowledge of every single atom in the universe simultaneously and understand the fundamental algorithm that governs them, you could veritably say that you have no choice, the atoms are doing exactly what they were predetermined to do based on the guiding algorithm that governs them.
However, you then have issues like chaos theory and unpredictable quantum behavior, which suggests that the fundamental algorithm for subatomic behavior has some inherently random characteristics.