Free Will

[grobblewobble]

I was thinking mostly of the latter type of case. While there are people who argue that you can't be truly free without essentially godlike (or at least dictatorial) powers, I don't find this reasoning terribly compelling. I suppose if the degree of freedom you have is a continuum, a being with those abilities would certainly be more free than we are.

I will stick to the example of being forced with a gun, then.

My feeling is that such a situation does not conflict with the concept of free will at all. You are not truly forced; it is just that certain choices will very clearly lead to very bad outcomes. Very few people prefer to die if there is an alternative at all. But you do have a choice. Some people may choose to die if the alternative is to do something terrible. Or choose to attack the person with the gun, even if this means a very high risk of being killed. Heck, some people volunteer to blow themselves up.

It's just the extreme end. Every choice has more preferred and less preferred options*. If someone "forces" you to do something, it just means he tries to make one option as unattractive as possible. But in the end it still depends 100% on the internal evaluation of the person how he responds.

*unless you're indifferent of course, but usually this is not the case

[Stingray1]

Wrt there not being any 'random' processes.
I'd like to rephrase: Every outcome is deterministic. Maybe not now or ever by humans, but by an agent that knows everything but the future. Which implies that it knows the future, oh my.

Sorry, guys I misunderstood what random means.

[grobblewobble]

I'd like to rephrase: Every outcome is deterministic. Maybe not now or ever by humans, but by an agent that knows everything but the future. Which implies that it knows the future, oh my.

Sorry, but no.. even if you do know everything about the present and even if you have infinite computational power, it is still impossible to predict the future.

By the way, even Einstein found this hard to believe.

Here is a good article from Stephen Hawking where this is explained: http://www.hawking.org.uk/does-god-play-dice.html

[Stingray1]

True, but I wasn't referring to me or you or anyone or single or collection of physical agents. Sure, nothing can determine the future, but that does not imply that it is not deterministic.

Edit - I'm not giving up reality just yet.

[KyoShinda]

So that would pretty much mean random is when you can only see the outputs and the mechanics are hidden or too complex. So if we were to understand the human brain down to every movement of particle, we would know every choice it would make in the future, but since we don't know that deep down how it works, it can only be looked at statistically and it's choices, to that extent, are considered random.

Edit: Holy cow, found this video and it's pretty interesting, they talk about a bunch of stuff then tie in it in with free will in the end http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbh5l0b2-0o