[tpetrina]

They aren't predetermined, free will is not the opposite of determinism.

You cannot have process interacting with itself in non-random and non-deterministic way. It's a contradiction! I mean, it's basically an infinite regression: either something happens outside of your control or you control what you control what you control...

[gerbilly]

> It's a contradiction! I mean, it's basically an infinite regression: either something happens outside of your control or you control what you control what you control...

But you can have a process interacting with itself in a nonlinear way, and the outcome of those types of processes are difficult to predict.

Even if you write a small non linear program, with each instruction completely simple and clear, it's still very difficult to predict the outcome without running the program.

Now imagine that at a scale ten or twenty orders of magnitude higher.

[tpetrina]

But then free will requires you to mentally conceptualise future events like "I want to go to cafe" and then translate them into interaction between trillions of neurons, 10 to the power of 29 atoms in that exact non-linear fashion!

So freely chosen decision is actually a translation of human-level concepts to non-linear highly complex set of neurons/atoms/particles and it is working flawlessly?

Wow!

[gerbilly]

Yeah, free will is perhaps our sensed experience of the process you describe (the interaction between trillions of neurons, 10 to the power of 29 atoms in that exact non-linear fashion!)

[amazingman]

So not free, then.