From: utzoo!watmath!jagardner Newsgroups: net.misc Title: Re: determinism vs free will Article-I.D.: watmath.3151 Posted: Fri Jul 30 17:17:41 1982 Received: Sat Jul 31 00:11:51 1982 References: watmath.3150 It is ridiculous to say that determinism requires a God to make it work. Cosmology has many models of space-time in which the whole may be extrapolated from a single three-dimensional slice, in much the same way that you can use a Taylor series to extrapolate the behaviour of a function everywhere from its behaviour at a single point. If our universe actually is like this kind of model, physical laws dictate everything you will do. You can predict what you will do tomorrow from looking at the state of the universe three seconds after the Big Bang. Now, is there really such a thing as free will? I find it odd for someone to say that being an atheist means you believe in free will. Most atheists do not believe in a soul or any sort of spirit that transcends the bio-chemical body. If this is the case, all one's decisions are made by a very rigorous set of physical laws controlling one's synapses, fluid flows, and so on. This system seems highly antithetical to free will. Throwing in random quantum effects may make the resulting behaviour more unpredictable, but it certainly doesn't seem anything like free will. If there is something in humans that constitutes free will, it has to be something that is not subject to mechanistic predictability. Since I have no intention of opening up the PSI controversy again in net.misc, I shan't go further. --- Jim Gardner