This is a topic that I enjoy mulling over from time to time (even though I know absolutely nothing about it), and I recently stumbled across it again when reading
this article. Do we really have free will? If the brain is just a big ball of nerve cells that follow set rules of action when receiving certain stimulation, then aren't we just reacting to stimuli in a preset way? If I had a box that had three levers on the front and three lights on the back and each time you pulled the red lever the red light lit up, you wouldn't say that box was deciding to turn on that light. You'd say that the light came on because the lever was pulled. Now take that same box and add trillions of levers and trillions of lights and the different combinations of levers you pull turn on different combinations of lights. Again, you wouldn't say the box decided to turn those lights on; it just responded to the levers being pulled. This should be just like the human brain, only a lot of the countless bits of stimulation we recieve are out of our control, and past experiences affect us too. So each time I make a decision, am I just responding to the levers being pulled? If I could somehow magically put myself back in that exact same situation again is there even the slightest possibility that I'd do anything different? Could I decide?
It seems to me that if the physical world around us is all that there is then we can't have free will. If our brains obey the rules of chemistry and physics and there's nothing else acting on them, then we're not really making decisions. I didn't decide to eat Quizno's for lunch yesterday, my brain just reacted to the inputs and spat out the idea that a honey mustard chicken sandwich sounds good right now. So as you read this you could do something like tap your head to prove you have free will; you're choosing to do that, right? Well no, you just read this blog post and were sitting in that chair and had eaten whatever for lunch and all of those levers being pulled in that exact order added up to the output of you patting your head.
But despite these thoughts, I still think we have free will. There seem to be two ways to take that; either my brain just tricks me into thinking I have free will (I've heard it suggested we may have evolved that illusion because it makes us happy), or we actually do have free will. If we do, it seems to me that it has to come from some input outside our current known universe. Our brains must be affected by some other stimulus that we truly control - what we'd probably call a soul. I don't think one needs to make the jump to heaven and angels and all that to image what a soul may be like. It could very well be that a part of our brain resides in another dimension that we can't perceive and isn't affected by anything happening in what we think of as the physical universe (of course, if that's the case our free will zone may be affected by other fifth-dimension levers). Really any attempt to think of a different plane can get a spiritual feel to it, even if you don't put it into any religious context. It's crazy stuff; I'll be pretty interested to see what happens after I die. (When is that again, Pat?)
