Oh, I know that how you perceive the world around you and how influential you can be is tied into your ability to change things. But there are some parts of my life that are just totally not changeable-- for example, having a physical disability. Or having a lot of family problems that have radically altered my ideas of love and relationships with others. My life happens to have a lot of factors like that. I'm not really bitter or angry about it, I just try to be realistic because trying things beyond my capabilities would just be a waste of time (such as if I wanted to be an olympic athelete-- that's just not ever going to work because of my body).
Do we live in a snow globe or not? That is what this thread seems to have turned into. Do physical laws operate exactly the same in this tiny sphere of the massive cosmos as in every other sphere? Or is it possible that light may move faster in another? The answer does not matter. You have the "Free Will" to decide and that is as far as it goes. There is evidence supporting each side. And it is *Not* a binary question either. I will not derail this thread fully yet again. But that question of physical laws that define limits being static or not is essential for this discussion. Back to the argument! Have at it!
Let's take a calculator. Does a calculator have free will? Obviously not, since we can distinguish its actions from those of a being with free will - namely, we can tell exactly what makes it act the way it does. But a sufficiently intelligent and knowledgeable entity could look at your advanced mechanical being and do exactly the same. So to it, your mechanical being would have exactly as much free will as a calculator. "Indistinguishable" is a property of the act of observation, not of the thing being observed. Are you saying the amount of free will you have depends on who's looking at you?
I think free will is a property of complexity. Enough complexity always equals what I would define as free will. That said, the calculator has free will once it is complex enough. Animals have free will. So do plants. Plants just exercise their free will slower in most if not all cases. If ever we make computers with thousands of multi-gigahertz cores and make programming complex enough to make more programming by itself in spare CPU cycles, we will have manufactured artificial intelligence with free will.
The factor of free will realy an oddity which ever way you look at it, though two major aspects are internal free will or external free will. The human (and most likely alot of other creatures on the planet) brain is prone to patterns, mostly allot because of how the learning process works on our neurons (the more a certain path is stimulated the more likely that path will be used). Given the sheer size of the network of paths a typical brain has and the ability for it to mutate and change realy does make the internal free will murkey to the point of it almost being insignificant as logical (and illogical for that matter) cases can be made both for and against it. Free will is more quantifiable an impact of external factors as well, though no less murkey. There are many situation we dont have 'free will' while others we do. We also live in a cosmos of laws and rules, both pyhsical (such as gravity) and non-physical (such as legalities and other do's and donts), which impact what can and cant be achieved that impact the discussion. Free will is a concept, as a concept it will vary allot from individual to individual as well. The end query I guess is can one have free will only if they can percieve the concept of free will, or does free will cease as soon as an individual has the concept of it.
