Free Will

Free Will - in 4 acts

Free Will - Rene Descartes

I now have no difficulty directing my thought away from things that can be imagined to things that can be grasped only by the understanding and are wholly separate from matter…

I acknowledge that it is impossible for God ever to deceive me…

Next I experience that there is in me a certain faculty of judgment, which, like everything else that is in me, I undoubtedly received from God. And since he does not wish to deceive me, he assuredly has not given me the sort of faculty with which I could ever make a mistake, when I use it properly

No doubt regarding this matter would remain, but for the fact that it seems to follow from this seems to follow from this that I em never capable of making a mistake…

But once I turn my attention back on myself, I nevertheless experience that I am subject to countless errors. As I seek a cause of these errors, I notice that passing before me is not only a real and positive idea of God…but also, as it were, a certain negative idea of nothingness…and that I have been so constituted as a kind of middle ground between God and nothingness…

I make mistakes because the faculty of judging the truth, which I got from God, is not, in my case, infinite

…the will is the chief basis for my understanding that I bear a certain image and likeness of God

…the power of willing, which I got from God, is not, taken by itself, the cause of my errors, for is it most ample as well as perfect in its kind. Nor is my power of understanding the cause of my errors. For since I got my power of understanding from God, whatever I understand I doubtless understand rights, and it is impossible for me to be deceived in this. What then is the source of my errors? They are owing simply to the fact that, since the will extends further than the intellect, I do not contain the will within the same boundaries; rather, I also extend it to things I do not understand.

I should never judge anything that I do not clearly and distinctly understand.

…what I must do to attain truth…if I pay enough attention to all the things that I perfectly understand, and separate them off from the rest, which I apprehend more confusedly and more obscurely.

Free Will - Bertrand Russell

The free-will question consequently remains just where it was. Whatever may be thought about it as a matter of ultimate metaphysics, it is quite clear that nobody believes it in practice. Everyone has always believed that it is possible to train character; everyone has always known that alcohol or opium will have a certain effect on behaviour. The apostle of free will maintains that a man can by will power avoid getting drunk, but he does not maintain that when drunk a man can say "British Constitution" as clearly as if he were sober. And everybody who has ever had to do with children knows that a suitable diet does more to make them virtuous than the most eloquent preaching in the world. The one effect that the free- will doctrine has in practice is to prevent people from following out such common-sense knowledge to its rational conclusion. When a man acts in ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse to face the fact that his annoying behaviour is a result of antecedent causes which, if you follow them long enough, will take you beyond the moment of his birth and therefore to events for which he cannot be held responsible by any stretch of imagination.

Free Will - David Hume

It may be said, for instance, that, if voluntary actions be subjected to the same laws of necessity with the operations of matter, there is a continued chain of necessary causes, pre-ordained and pre-determined, reaching from the original cause of all to every single volition of every human creature… . The ultimate Author of all our volitions is the Creator of the world, who first bestowed motion on this immense machine, and placed all beings in that particular position, whence every subsequent event, by an inevitable necessity, must result. Human action, therefore, either can have no moral turpitude at all, as proceeding from so good a cause; or if they have any turpitude, they must involve our Creator in the same guilt, while he is acknowledged to be their ultimate cause and author.

Free Will - Frank Tipler

Indeterminism is a property of all quantum cosmological theories for which the universal wave function includes in its domain the set of all compact four-dimensional manifolds. Thus, indeterminism holds both in the Hartle-Hawking quantum cosmology and in the quantum Omega Point Theory. However, it may be merely an epistemological, and not an ontological, indeterminism in the Hartle-Hawking cosmology.⁷

Although it has been shown that the human nervous system can use nonrelativistic quantum mechanical uncertainty to randomize, it does not follow that it can access the quantum gravity regime. As I pointed out above, true ontological free will requires quantum gravity uncertainty, because there is a deterministic equation controlling nonrelativistic "uncertainty." There are two ways in which the human nervous system might be able to access the quantum gravity regime in the randomization process. The first is a mechanism suggested by Penrose, who in effect points out that, if a substantial portion of the brain were to act as if it were in a coherent quantum state, it might be able to amplify a signal from the Planck scale up to the macroscopic level. The known amplification power of the nervous system —amplification of a single photon energy to nerve pulse energies constitutes a magnification of 10²⁰—is insufficient by a factor of 10⁸, so Penrose's proposal is speculative, to say the least. The second possibility is that the randomizer may use vacuum fluctuations inside the brain. A system which is capable of detecting single photons is certainly sensitive enough. One of the most important unsolved problems in particle physics is accounting for the magnitude of the vacuum energy density. If the fluctuations in topology are neglected, the calculated value is too high by a factor of about 10⁵⁴. The most popular method of resolving this problem is to include the topological fluctuations: some calculations indicate that these can cancel out the factor of 10⁵⁴. But if this is the cancellation mechanism, then the residual fluctuations in the vacuum energy density would necessarily reflect quantum gravity uncertainties, and thus a randomizer based on the fluctuations would be ontologically indeterministic. A state transition of the human brain in this case would be totally unpredictable. In this situation, we would have ontological free will.⁸