Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Free Will?

Is Free will a Myth?

I am sure everyone must've come across this question. It's not the question itself that triggered the thought process, but the nature of the question. How do we try to understand something which is beyond perception by definition?

It's the same case when we debate about the existence(and nature) of God. The main problems with the existence of God is with logic, we do end up with many contradictions.
Some Classic contradictions are
- can He create a stone He can't lift(omnipotence)
- can He change the past/future (omnipotence and omniscience)
and so on..

Coming back to free will we see that this is not very different.
- we either have free will and choose our paths or
- we don't have free will, all that we do is predetermined and unchangeable but still we have an illusion of free will giving the impression that we do choose our paths

I tried to initiate this discussion with my roomie but he was busy with Rubik cube I got a few days back. For the past few days all he does is sit in front of the monitor with some cube solving tutorial with the cube in his hand. It's been real fun watching him break his head over the cube :D

I personally choose to believe in free will only because of the reason that it appears to make more sense. With Occam's Razor on my side I at least have some basis for my belief.

4 comments:

Sepsis said...

maga...
1>assume there is no free will.
2>assume that you assumed right.

with these two assumptions you can prove to yourself there is no free will.

Now since everything is predestined nothing is your fault. And nothing is your responsibility.

you have done nothing wrong. can do nothing wrong.

sleep in peace :)

Hail Occam ;)

Optimist.. said...

What if I assume that Occam was wrong?? >:)

Harsha Shastry said...

the reason why the assumption "Occam is wrong" could be right is that its so simple... ;)
Probably Occam was wrong...
he studied math and logic and reason instead of watching movies listening to music reading novels henda haaki malkolodu...gaandu avanu...

Harsha Shastry said...

but hey where did i use Occam's Razr... i dont even know what it is.... sumne nan proofnalla corrupt maadi haal maadbeda :D