Flotsam and Jetsam
Determinism in the fundamental sense has ceased to be a viable concept with the discovery of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Determinism in the sense of predictability has ceased to be a viable concept since our understanding of deterministic chaos started happening. Dualism (aka ‘genuine’ free will, magic-man-done-it, or ghost in my head) has ceased to be a viable concept since the last proponents died after publishing the last influential publication on dualism (indeed Popper/Eccles called it interactionism). What remains is to understand how the brain chooses between different options. How the brain generates different choices when faced with the same situation. How the brain constantly explores and probes the environment to see how it will react to its actions. Brains are constantly active and external stimuli are merely nudging this activity in our brains a little. For the most part, all brains, and not just our’s, are active, and only occasionally re-active. This is the only scientifically tenable definition of free will today and anybody not understanding this needs to read up on about 30 years worth of neuroscience. There is plenty of evidence that brains constitute more components than just one nonlinear system like the weather, but nonlinearity is definitely one of the defining characteristics of all brains.
Björn Brembs
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