do human beings have free will?

[hmkpoker]

no

[MidGe]

It doesn't matter since we cannot guarantee, or know, the outcomes of our choices (except in very limited fields). Intention/motivation is what matter, not choices or their consequences.

[Shadowrun]

I think there is free will but not in the terms that we are used to it.
If a time traveler goes back in time he knows exactly what you will do and yet you have free will to me that is how g-d and free will exist.

[mikeevans12]

Very difficult and controversial question. For one, we have no choice but to beleive that there is free will to some extent. If you do not, then you could not rationally get mad at another for doing something bad to you. The world operates on the assumption that people do have free will, and all of us adhere to that principal in at least a minimal fashion.

Now the arguement against free will is usually, given in the question "If you could live this moment over again, in exactly the same circumstances, would you make a different choice?" The answer is no, but in no way does that entail free will does not exist. Action or choice is a two step process. 1. the formulation of a course of action. 2. the execution of the action (the exercize of will). Some can say that the world, and laws of science dictate the process of step one, however, the decision to act is the purest exercise of free will. By the nature of the world, we will be presented with situations that offer options supierior to all others. We don't control the options we have, but we control what options to consider, and in the end the option we take.

Many might explain free will as an illusion that appears to be choice, but is rather a function of the ongoing mechanistic world, that is inevitably determined for ever. Even if the physical universe is controled by these forces, free will can still exist. What makes the physical world "physical"? Matter. Matter plays to these rules, that alledgly make free an illusion. Think about this though. The thoughts in your mind and imagination, what are they made of. I did not ask where they came from (the brain), I asked what are they made of. I don't know. But what I do know is they are not matter. When I was a child day dreaming that I was superman, that dream was not matter. It was made of some other substance. Let us think of it as mental substance. If mental substance, is not matter, then it is not completely controled by any scientific or deterministic laws. In this world of mental substance, free will, emerges and is exercised in the physical world. It could be quite possible that if there is a god, this is where he would be as well, in a mental world, that is without limitations. In this world people truley create and think, and in this world free will has its place.

[soon2bepro]

It's a matter of definition. If you want to define free will as some mystical force that escapes causality, then no, there is no evidence for the existence of that. But if you define it as the fact that there is an internal choice taking place, then yes, it exists.

All this means is that you, while governed by the same laws of causality, are a part of that chain. Yes you choose, but also, given a particular situation, there's only 1 choice you can make. It's still a choice.

[soon2bepro]

Ethical/Moral implications are irrelevant here. We blame people instead of rocks not because they have some kind of mystical responsibility that rocks lack; but because rocks won't learn to stop doing what they do when you blame them. (or not continue to do as they do if you don't recognize their good doing)

[Dan.]

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no

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[Riddick]

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I grudingly took on a deterministic philosophy

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[DMACM]

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on a side note can anybody give me an example where only the "illusion" of choice exists.

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Determinism has made "me" lazy so i cut and pasted this from this site :

Another side of free will is the “confabulative” aspect emphasized by Michael Gazzaniga in his discussions of his famous split-brain experiments. These experiments demonstrate that, even when there is a clear external cause of a human taking some action, it is possible for the human to sincerely and thoroughly believe that the cause was some completely internal decision that they took. The left hemisphere of a split brain has no experience of stimuli delivered exclusively to the right hemisphere (e.g. through the left eye). However, the left hemisphere has such a strong motivation to create explanations that it will make up “free will stories” corresponding to behaviors initiated by the isolated right hemisphere. For example, in one experiment, a split brain subject's left eye received a command to stand. The person stood – and then, when asked why she stood up, she responded (using the language center of her left hemisphere) that she wanted a soda. In another experiment, when the left and right hemispheres were each asked to pick an appropriate picture to accord with an image flashed only to that hemisphere, the left selected a chicken to match the chicken claw in the picture it saw, while the right hemisphere correctly chose a shovel to remove the snow it saw. When asked why the person chose those images, he replied that the claw was for the chicken, and the shovel was to clean out the shed (Gazzaniga, 1989).


This is just one example cognitive science has others.

[DougShrapnel]

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For example, in one experiment, a split brain subject's left eye received a command to stand. The person stood – and then, when asked why she stood up, she responded (using the language center of her left hemisphere) that she wanted a soda.

[/ QUOTE ] How does this exaclty disprove free will. It merely shows that standing was not against this persons will, and that the person has learned to stand up when given the instruction by her subconcious. It tells us nothing more then the quite fascinating fact the we all try to make sense of the world by making up cohenrent stories. (The implications this fact has in regards to religion is vast.) If a subject was routinly given the instruction to stand up, eventually the subject would not respond to the stimulus. When asked why she no longer stood up. She might respond "Because I didn't feel like it". Free will exists in the long term, it is the ability to control the stimulus-response/cause-event chain. Some people rarely use it, others use it often.