Poll: Do you believe in free will?

[Golden Gryphon]

I don't believe in free will but nor do I think it matters much. I think that everything you do is determined by a combination of your genetics and your environment and that if your life was run again everything would be exactly the same. I was thinking about this because I vaguely remember reading something about a study that showed that given a choice between two cakes the people participating would start reaching for one before their brain had registered a choice.

So what do other people think and does anyone know anything about the study I mentioned?

 

[Arkhangelsk]

I think we all live in the illusion of free will, that the brain rationalizes what would be the optimal choice, which we think is free will. Or "free will" is just the brain making calculations of what is good for the mind, and taking risks are merely the brain making approximate guesses of ohw big the chances are that we will get the most optimal result. It takes the weight of the outcome versus the chance of success.

 

[walkingdead127]

Free will is a nice concept but I don't think it exist. The closes thing to free will is complete apathy.

 

[theComposer]

Everything that ever was, is, and will be is decided by the quantum behaviors of subatomic particles and has been since the Big Bang. The world as we perceive it and our own thoughts, opinions, feelings, and existence are the sum of an essentially infinite amount of these quantum decisions. Because of this, we are able to live and act as if we had free will, but it is in fact an illusion.

So, there's your theoretical physics lesson for the day. In other news, Greedo shot first!

 

[Gerazzi]

I believe in the search button...
no, I'm kidding, it's been a couple of weeks, I'm not that much of an idiot.

I don't and never will believe in free will because everything you ever do can be done with lots of math and algebra. I'm going with my theory that the Earth is just one big math problem.

 

[Cpt_Oblivious]

Only the end is fixed. Not the journey.
[sub]C'mon! Even The Doctor believes in Free Will![/sub]

 

[Nmil-ek]

I dont care really, anything above my concept of free will is far beyond our capability to understand at the moment so why worry about it. Ill live my life like I have it and be happy at that, even if it all turns out to be predictable strings of variables and numbers.

 

[Kazturkey]

Free will is a nice concept but I don't think it exist. The closes thing to free will is complete apathy.

Which is why it's my favourite thing to be Take away my vowel and I'm just pathetic

 

[Dorian]

Meh. Free will exists, but so does destiny.

Destiny is what DOES and WILL definitely happen, which is dictated by your free will.

A complex opinion that I can't explain that well.

 

[Lord_Panzer]

Schrodinger's cat is a zombie.

But... if that's true, then... then... [small]ahhhhhh[/small]hhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!

*head explodes*

 

[KaZZaP]

To quote Forest Gump "maybe its both" Maybe certain events have been decided by fate but the decision the person makes at the event isn't.

 

[SamuelT]

Perhaps.

Best to see whatever drives you as free will now, because if someone finds out that Free Will is actually invisible parrot-ninjas guiding our every movement the idea of free will seems a lot more plesant.

 

[Iron Mal]

I choose what I do, I may be influenced in my choice by others but ultimately I make the decision.

Even if the reason for your choice isn't apparant (even to you), you still made it.

 

[Verp]

Destiny? Bah. But this I know: humans are very impressionable and they're almost always incapable to detect when they are or are not doing something upon someone's influence. You can see it best as you grow up, you realise that you hadn't been as independent and impervious as you thought you'd have.

 

[Bob the Average]

my reasoning is very simple without free will things like justice, guilt and innocence are meaningless if these concepts are meaningless than society and governments are meaningless and we might as well all just go on killing sprees and heroin binges till we die.

 

[SultanP]

I don't think I do. I'm fairly sure that I believe that every single one of our actions are the products of everything that has transpired to put us in the situation that we find ourselves in.
Everything that happens to you shapes you into a specific kind of person, and this person reacts in a certain way in certain situations.

 

[wewontdie11]

For the sake of my mental happiness I've got to believe in it. If everything was pre-ordained then I don't see a great deal of point to existence to be frank.

 

[Zyxzy]

Free Will is like Pascal's wager: Might as well believe in it, because you lose nothing if you're wrong.

 

[A random person]

Free will's simply causality. Every decision you make is caused by something, and that something was caused by something else, and so on in a chain of cause and effect that has gone on since anything has ever existed.

To put it simply, Dr. Manhattan was right.

 

[Golden Gryphon]

Free will's simply causality. Every decision you make is caused by something, and that something was caused by something else, and so on in a chain of cause and effect that has gone on since anything has ever existed.

To put it simply, Dr. Manhattan was right.

This is kind of my point. It isn't really free will because there is no chance of it being something else since it is determined by everything that has gone before.