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Originally posted by Alchoholic Hero
That's a perception question. What are you considering "real"?
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I believe that reality is not contingent on our perception of it. I believe that there is in existence an objective reality, which we can, at least in part, experience.
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...threadid=21163
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Also, as long as I'm here, CSflim: I was not attempting to throw the quantum theory out as a be-all and end-all of the debate over free will, merely suggesting an option that I had not thought about for a while. Additionally, I was the first to reply, so I didn't have a feel for the forum, yet (I R teh n00b, of course.)
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I'm not really sure that I follow what you're saying. Nothing is being held against you for being a "n00b". At the heart of philosophy lies debate. Don't take it as a personal attack if I disagree with you.
I assume that you were referring to my post
"I always cringe when people make the claim that quantum mechanics shows that it is possible for free will to exist".
I wasn't actually making direct reference to YOUR post there, rather the general consensus that somehow non-determinism/unpredictability=free will
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Tertiarily (sp?) What I was suggesting was that the human brain has been designed as a system in which a magnification of the randomness of these particles could provide a basis action that does not (or cannot) be completely predictable.
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I feel very strongly that quantum effects do indeed come into play when it comes the brain. But I don't see how this gives rise to
free will. If you roll a dice, it cannot be predicted what number you will score. Does the dice therefore have free will?
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This means little to me, personally: I'm of the opinion that science is just as full of doubt as any religion: I simply thought that it was a valid answer to the question of free will; or, I wanted to provide a possibility grounded in science before people started breaking out their bibles and their Nietzsche.
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" I'm of the opinion that science is just as full of doubt as any religion" - well that's your opinion, but I believe few rational people would agree with you. Perhaps you would like to give an example as to why you believe science is so full of doubt?
Granted there are many questions which we cannot yet answer, but we have come a very long way, and now understand much, much more than we did a thousand years ago. I have yet to see a priest harness divine intervention in the construction of a jumbo jet.
If you are going to point to quantum theory as an example of scientists "not having a clue" then I would put it too you that you do not fully understand what is going on. Certainly there is an indeterminacy involved in quantum events, but it is a precisely well defined indeterminacy. For the most part a quantum wavefunction will act in a very deterministic manner as defined by the Schroedinger equation. There is a precisely "calculatable" probability involved when said wave function collapses, when its effects are magnified to the classical level, but that is all.