Human beings are very complex organisms. It acquires, accumulates, stores and processes information unlike any other animal. It was believed that humans have freewill.
However, there is a notion that freewill is only an illusion, that all his thoughts and actions are automatic and are merely the result of his accumulated past experiences and knowledge.
Do you agree or disagree? Why?
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I disagree because we have the experience of having free will. We can doubt that the experience is real, but when we doubt things like that we doubt ourselves in the most profound way and occlude our hearts. This kind of scientism and rationalism is not healthy.
Science does not suggest that the universe is deterministic. Quantum mechanics is so deeply unpredictable that its randomness is often called "absolute randomness." Some people figure the random aspect is just the last bit of detail we haven't been able to model and predict yet, but science never *did* come close to suggesting everything was deterministic; it could only ever totally predict certain types of systems--simple and non-chaotic ones. And even in those cases the prediction isn't *total*. Things can break, things can be influenced by outside freak events, and there's always at least a microscopic amount of variance between the reality and the prediction. If there were an amount of fundamental unpredictability to nature the whole time, as people had thought there was before science ever started predicting some kinds of things, then the randomness of quantum mechanics is exactly the sort o thing you could expect to find when science eventually bumps up against this fact.
Some people figure that a small amount of absolute randomness isn't any more meaningful and doesn't give us any more freedom than total determinism, but I think this view is predicated on an assumption that's so deeply ingrained in our modern minds that we don't even see it and have difficulty shaking it when we do see it: namely, that the universe is 100% mechanistic. Only under such a mechanistic view does the dichotomy exist where any influence must be either deterministically caused or of completely meaningless origin.
I wrote more about free will here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2016/12/13/notes-on-free-will/
Past experience and knowledge help inform and contextualize our fears, desires, beliefs and decisions, but that doesn't mean that they do so without any wiggle room. Where freedom really shines, where there's a *lot* of wiggle room, is in spontaneous, unbridled creativity, or even just in creativity in general.