Sunday, December 30, 2007

Free Will vs Determinism

Do we have free will or not?

I was watching a lecture on quantum mechanics and the subject of free will came up. It's a subject I had not thought alot about since about 10th grade religion class. It's also a subject that can give you a pretty good head ache if you think about it enough. Anyone got any good websites on the subject of free will to recommend? I've just started exploring spaceandmotion.com, but the fact that it is a dot com worries me somewhat.

Here is a paragraph from an article published in the New Scientist last year.
"When you choose to eat the chocolate cake or the plain one, are you really free to decide?" asks Conway. In other words, could someone who has been tracking all the particle interactions in the universe predict with perfect accuracy the cake you will pick? The answer, it seems, depends on whether quantum mechanics' inherent uncertainty is the correct description of reality or 't Hooft is right in saying that beneath that uncertainty there is a deterministic order.

Looking further into the subject there is the Skeptics Dictionary but that site doesn't seem to provide any easy answers either. The internet encyclopedia of philosophy will require some study but I'm guessing I won't find an answer there either.

Maybe it's just not worth worrying about.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

All I can say on this subject is,
Have a Healthy and Happy New Year