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I'm not sure you have appreciated the extent of the two opposing arguments. To not have free will wouldn't stop you from making choices. I would not jump because I calculate it to be an unfavourable outcome. I base a decision upon my knowledge and experience. Then again, computers are argued do the same every day, producing outcomes based on sensory information and memory. The burden of evidence lies on how these decision-making processes differ. I would argue they don't in principle.

We can learn, computers can learn. We can change our minds, computers can change their minds (when further, more detailed, computation is completed - as an analogy to our "thinking things through"). Would "THE TERMINATOR" jump off a cliff if it were raised as one of us with our instinctive drives and social conditioning? If free will is the ability of a physical system to respond to change, then a tree bending in the wind has free will.

I wouldn't agree though - I can't understand how free will can ever arise out of a system of pure ORDER (by definition following physical rules i.e. deterministic) or from CHAOS (where no occurrence has any significance). There is no in-between of order and chaos, any more than there is for up and down. The two can intermingle happily, but this doesn't create new behaviour outside of what the original things do individually (to give an analogy, if you mix pebbles and sand they are still clearly different things and are separable, like a mixture of order and chaos, but if you react two chemicals together you create something new. Mathematically we would say order and chaos commute).

Ok, getting a little deep here, but I'm struggling in retrospect of my young days when I did believe in free will, and now trying desperately to understand what it could possible be, and what would permit it to exist outside of order and chaos.

And yes with reference to the first paragraph, "deciding whether an outcome is favourable or not" is something important I missed. It boils down to comparing outcomes to moral standards. These moral standards are either hereditary/socially-conditioned (both of which don't differ from computers with preprogrammed standards) or self-chosen morality - upon where the point hinges. I would put self-chosen moral standards down to fitting in with other standards upheld (merely a calculation), or driven by emotions - which are in essence further preprogramming (a controversial subject, given how damaging to the ego such an admission would be to many people who hold them dear) That's quite a crude compression of a long argument I admit!

We can learn, computers can learn. We can change our minds, computers can change their minds (when further, more detailed, computation is completed - as an analogy to our "thinking things through").

Hi TrisB! You wrote: "To not have free will wouldn't stop you from making choices." Okay. But what kind of choices? You say computers can "learn." I accept that, with the qualification that they can only "learn" within the parameters established for them by their programmers: recursive loops, etc., etc., which perhaps provide for feedback that program logic can utilize in a "novel" way. Is this what you mean by "free will?"

But what a computer can never do is say, "I think I'll take a little break from executing this program, and go write a sonnet instead; or play baseball with my buddies; or maybe paint a watercolor, or compose a symphony, or build a tree house for my kids...." In that sense, computers are "determined," not free: They seemingly are "slaves" to their programs (and programmers) in a way a human being is not.

You wrote: I'm struggling in retrospect of my young days when I did believe in free will, and now trying desperately to understand what it could possibly be, and what would permit it to exist outside of order and chaos.

Well I certaintly agree with you that "order" tends very quickly to be boring, and that chaos produces "no occurrence [of] any significance."

When you boil it all down, human beings (and computers) are neither "orderly" nor "chaotic" (as a rule). The chief difference between them, it seems to me, is that humans can work outside of their "programs" -- which is why they have free will, and why computers do not. FWIW.

Being an atheist, you have ruled out a possible answer to the question of "what it could possibly be" in advance.

Thanks so much for writing, TrisB!

I had to search diligently to find a single personal offering that opens a doorway in discussion rather than pumping your ego: "Ok, getting a little deep here, but I'm struggling in retrospect of my young days when I did believe in free will, and now trying desperately to understand what it could possible be, and what would permit it to exist outside of order and chaos." Refer momentarily to the story of Flatland, the 2-D realm visited by a 3-D being. Confronted with a dot on the 2-D plane, a flatlander has only the choice of left or right, back away to avoid the dot; the 3-Der has the additional up or down (over or under) to allow freer movement.

If you can, apply this analogy to the nature of dimensional complexities in space, time, soul of life force, and spirit, such that a being of merely space, time, soulish level of complexity is a reactive-to-only-stimuli sensed by the three dimensional existence, while the space,time, soulish, spirit being has another level of variability to which decisions may be submitted for review before reaction. A cat killing a mouse is not committing a good or bad act, but a human killing another innocent human (not in self-defense or in war, for example) is committing a bad deed by the reckoning of a dimensional variability (spirit) not available to the cat or the mouse.

Imagine that the Creator God is seven dimensional (space, time, soul, spirit, 5, 6, and 7, though in my limits I cannot fathom what to name the 5th, 6th, or 7th dimensions of The Creator God's variability). While the cat is free to kill or not to kill the mouse, based upon abilities, the human is more free and more responsible to utilize the greater variability factors of his or her existent reality.

If you can imagine each dimension has three variable expressions (as in space has length, width, and height; time has past, present, future; soul has will, emotion, mind; spirit has ... well, you get the idea), the human is not just one level more free, but three levels/exponentials more free than the cat or mouse, having a spirit component the cat and mouse do not have.

The above is merely offered as a means to open thought to more realistic discussion not limited by antiquated notions of 'all animal kingdom species are the same in moral value'. Consider the entire field of variables is essential in reaching an ultimate truth regarding the reality of the variables, but we haven't the means to define all the variables yet, so we cannot 'know' in a scientific sense that there is no God of Creation ... to assume there is no God of Creation is arrogant in the main, since taking such a perspective assumes personal abilities regarding the variables not yet well defined. It is not however arrogant to postulate variabilities we do not have (yet; we are an evolving species) and assign these greater variabilities to God of Creation, an uncaused cause of our reality. Is it irrational to postulate God of seven dimensions and believe our universe (the realm of our perceptions, and don't eliminate spirit as a means of some perception) exists within those seven yet the One Of All Seven is outside and inside our realm? Philip got that same Physics lesson from Jesus as related in John's Gospel, 14th Chapter. You might find it an interesting read.