No. of Recommendations: 1
It's a shame benjd25 isn't here. He'd dive head-long into this. Last I heard from him, he was having a sort of crisis about this. He spent a lot of time thinking about it, and discussing it, and realized that free will (at least libertarian free will) didn't make sense. As I recall, he labeled himself a compatibilist, and even that was being shaken.
Briefly, my view is that we have the illusion of free will. Just because we can't foresee events very well, doesn't mean they aren't already set in motion. Our reactions are dictated by genetics and "stuff that happens to us" (sthtu). Neither of which we can control. And any quantum phenomena that have any influence in anything are actually random (it's all statistics...it can be shown that they only truly random things are quantum, and "random" is not choice). Combine that with all the natural processes going on in the universe, and the genetics and sthtu of all the other beings we encounter, and it seems like we all have choice because it's too complex a system for any of us to map out. But it is still deterministic (except for quantum, which is random).
Too bad TMF scrapped all those boards. We had some seriously meaty discussions there.
