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Free Will

Free Will, a human ability for free thinking, imagination, desire contradicts an established scientific view that human is built from atoms and molecules, which follow laws of physics, and therefore every next moment is determined, caused by what happened in the previous moment. This causation could be like in deterministic, as in classical physics or probabilistic, as in quantum physics, but either way there is no room for freedom. Because freedom is opposite of both determinism and randomness.

Attempts to resolve this fundamental contradiction of the idea of Free Will unifies psychology and physiology (Libet’s experiments and extensive related discussion), mathematics and mathematical models of brain-mind (Perlovsky paper in this journal), as well as philosophical discussions.

Since publishing the paper about Free Will in WebmedCentral (WMC) I received letters from colleagues and just people thinking on this topic. One of us suggested than rather than keeping this correspondence private, it could be more interesting to start a Forum discussion on WMC. So, with this short note (+ the WMC paper) I hope we could start the discussion.

Leonid Perlovsky

 

• 07/03/2012
  1 comments
  Early and Late (in Perlovsky's scheme and others) (ConalBoyce)