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Originally Posted by Mike 5

We seem to have struck a golden topic - does this normally happen that people start the debate here? Perhaps we have no choice

Antonio - I do not think this can be resolved by any God's eye view. By this I mean that it is one thing to imagine some alien film crew making a documentary of the human race and then wondering about the mechanics and observed behaviour. But from this outside view, you can know NOTHING about the CHOICE or will, is this not obvious? From a God's eye view or alien film crew we surely would all look like so many ants in a nest.

So do ants in a nest have free will? Do ants in a nest have choice? It seems to me that the very perspective of academic discussion, outside and remote in some stillness beyond our world, the alien film crew return and edit their story, but there is NO WAY to talk of free will or choice. Do dolphins have a choice or do we train them to perform for us? There is no real meaning from this external camera angle

So the dynamic of the question - and free will is a question of dynamics - forces us into the first person. We have to look into our own personal experience, however subjective and unscientific that may seem at first. The only possible place to resolve this question is MY experience in MY life and then to perhaps ask YOUR experience within YOUR life, and so on. But choice can only be known as EXPERIENCE, not as logic viewed by the fool on the hill as it were. What if the ants all took off their masks and said, yeah they were just acting in a play? Surreal thought, but you get my point, there is truly no way to "know" from the outside, it is an inside question only.

Now, I cannot say I have ever met anyone who from birth thought there is no such thing as free will. It is an intellectual puzzle that some people solve AGAINST the apparently obvious fact that we all FEEL we have free will.

However the same logic ultimately can be applied. To simplify, I will introduce an artifice. For a moment, imagine that all reality occurs 8 seconds before you cognise it. Or 3 months. Clearly if there was such a delay, then whatever you observe already happened.

So we have a rough model of how to imagine a world without any free will, just as an approximation. So my question is the following: HOW could we be sure, totally beyond doubt, that this is not actually the case? Is it possible that our mind is what I have called elsewhere on this forum an "I" machine, that simply and MECHANICALLY attributes a flavour that "I" did that, "I" knew that, here "I" am, making my free choice, "now"... In fact, our mind could be subtitles on a flim that just goes by, why not? Yes, the very mechanical way that we are forced to have this sense of "I" and this sense of yes "I" chose that, this is almost suspicious by it's relentlessness. The more closely you observe your own mind, the more automatically it just does what it always has done. The only possible way to prove there is free will is the freely be without it and then compare, and that is simply not available to us. Suspicious, in a way... but I am deliberately using reverse logic perhaps to stimulate fertile arguments, maybe.

Can anyone of us will themselves into a clear and sure denial of free will? Well, there are specific tricks and techniques, I know them and enjoy them, but they rarely last. The nearest experience of No Choice is too obvious - dreaming! There is a distinct lack of personal choice, relatively speaking, in your nightmares... Another is extreme sado masochism, or master slave relationships, I have spoken to such people, seen the TV documentaries and I feel I see what that is, but still, it's a choice. Pol Pot was quite another thing, or the Spanish Inquisition, I can see this is truly a complex topic, perhaps the central topic from which all else hinges.

ROBERT - and everyone else - THANK YOU For this excellent opportunity to enjoy the sheer bliss of thinking - I am floating in inner space here... I simply don't want to resolve this, it is so juicy just losing myself in the labyrinth.

...to be continued ...

I think it is clear we are dealing with an issue of belief, and therefore the Axiom of Choice may come into play. The problem with free will as an experiment is that you never get to do it over. You never have a chance to say, "oh, well I'm gonna do something this way instead to see if things would be different." In this manner time to a conscious being happens once and once only, so there is absolutely no way to prove that you COULD have made a different choice in any given event of time. We make a choice, which we feel is volitional, but in the end we cannot prove that it really was volitional or not. When all's said and done time only happens once, in one way, and thus the idea of free will vs. fate is unprovable by nature.

So the ideas of free will and of destiny (which is my preferred term for determinism) are purely matters of belief. One can choose to believe whichever one one wants, or he/she can choose to believe both. That's the beauty of it. The Axiom of Choice says either or, or both. SO does the axiom of choice imply free will? Well, since the choice we make doesn't matter, perhaps it implies destiny, i.e. not free will. So what if you look at it that way? What if free will exists but doesn't matter because the choices we make all lead to the same outcome eventually?