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