Reply #51: The 'not a real atheist' line was to illustrate this point: [View All]

[Random_Australian]

(Ok, to be honest, I am just testing it out on you before I use it in general)

Because yes, to be an atheist, all you need to do is not believe in any God.
To us, all you need to do to be Christian is to believe in God/Christ.

Thus, the 'not a real Christian' thing gets very annoying sometimes.

Anyway, free will.

Just suppose for a second that Newtonian Mechanics solved all of science. There was no Einstien, Bohr, Planck, any of that, because all the things guided by Newtons Laws hapened, and nothing else did.

Then, in this modified reality, if you knew all about the universe at any given time, you could predict with absolute certainty what it was going to be like at any other given time. As this involves humans and animals and all that, and our decisions, you could predict someones decision before they made it with absolute certainty. In other words, there would be no free will.

Now, we move to the real world.
If you know the maximum amount of information you can, Quantum Physics will systematically randomise it as it goes along, but following the laws of probability completely.
Therefore, if you knew all about someones brain, that is you knew what they were thinking, you could, because it takes a little while to get significant amounts of randomness, predict what they were about to do, and if you made a prediction for the first second, you may even have a 99% chance of bieng right. The second second, 93% and so on.

All brains share this, so everything with a brain has some slight degree of free will. (I'll go into the extremes more some other time), and there are a few things that set humans apart.

1) Big Brains. We don't have the biggest brain (blue whales do), but it certainly adds to how quickly we become unpredictable.

2) Planning brains. One part of the brain, using other parts, is planning ahead our future and whatnot. Small changes in one can have larger effects elsewhere.

3) Cognition. The amount of information we go through each day in words, symbols et cetera is enourmous.

4) Complex society. A small failed prediction in someone very powerful's brain will change the world, in time.

In conclusion, with unpredictability is the seat of free will, humans have rapid, above and beyond free will, but the animals still retain some.

ugh! That was not neatly put. My apologies if my rather clumsy post has confused.