zen_tom

I'm interested in this notion of predictability and its link with free-will. If we are 'machines' does that necessarily mean we are mechanical/predictable?

If we have free-will, does that prove that we are not 'machines' i.e. that we have external soul-like things pulling our strings? (I digress, but if we do have cosmic puppeteers, what are they made of, and where do they get their free-will from?...anyway...)

There's a problem called the three-body problem where 3 objects influence one another by gravity (imagine 3 planets, or 1 planet, a sun and a moon, or two suns and a grain of dust, whatever) While the maths are reasonably simple to do, tiny differences in the initial conditions rapidly spiral out into entirely different results. There are other examples of this kind of behaviour to be found in nature, where an unmeasurable difference in initial conditions causes two entirely separate outcomes - the idea has been called 'The butterfly effect'

Now consider the quantum world - a world you can never accurately measure because the act of measuring drastically changes whatever it is you're looking at (imagine trying to work out the contents of a china-shop while blindfolded by wildly swinging a baseball bat - Crash! "Ahh, that was a nice georgian vase" Crash! "Ohh, genuine China teacup" etc..)

Now tie the two things together 1) Many things in nature (possibly EVERYTHING in nature if viewed over a long enough time-period) deny prediction due to the butterfly effect messing up the results and 2) It's IMPOSSIBLE to collect EXACT information about anything in enough detail so as to avoid the problem of number 1)

This suggests that many things will always be unpredictable, and that many of natures systems could be said (either literally, or at least metaphorically) to "have a mind of their own". I'd go further and suggest that the whole of existance relies on this fact. But that's for another post.

So back to the point, is free-will distinguisable from 'non-computability', if so, how? And if not, doesn't it suggest that at least there is a possibility for conciousness to develop without the requirement of a soul?