skullfunk

OK here's my look at free will (this is not prewritten, so excuse me that the story is long-winded).

Free Will and the Chess Game
Let's say you are playing a game of chess against a friend. You make a single move in this game. This single move can be described as one of a thousand thoughts of possible moves that danced around your head before you acted. These thousand thoughts lead to the state of your brain before you made your move. In other words your brain, after all your thinking, reached a moment when it achieved enough clarity to which it felt prepared to make that move.

Well, let's go a millisecond before that moment. Did you have a choice whether you decided that the knight move was inferior to the pawn move? I say you don't, because the same brain would have made the same decision given the same situation every time.

Let's go even less backwards, though: a planck time (the shortest amount of time within which physics can accomplish anything) before that moment. Let's not think of this time period as the time in which you had a thought, but instead the time during which a thought was in the process of being thunk. Over the course of this Planck time, electrons moved according to physics. Chemical processes were happening according to the rules of chemistry. Neurons were in the midst of interacting because of electrochemistry. The question is, could any of these actions be defined as free will? Can physics equations be a tool of free will? I don't think so. And if you look at any planck time, these are the only things that are happening: physics and chemistry.

To summarize, I think that if you disprove determinism, you can prove free will, but I believe determinism, when the universe is looked at in its smallest quanta, must exist.