The debate of free will is an age-one one that encompasses what seem like eons. Ancient philosophers have battled with this concept for thousands of years. I would like to discuss it here, so I am listing the argument below.
The argument of free will is fairly easy to understand. It goes something like this: Do I have free will or is it an illusion?
Now lets break this up for a minute. There are two types of free will in my argument and I want to explain what I mean.
The first type I will call soft free will. This is because, in one context, you of course have free will. Reading this sentence right now was your choice, was it not? You freely chose to open up this link, or type in the address, and read it!! Nothing made you do this.
The second type I will call hard free will, as there is another sense of this notion and is much more difficult to ascribe a sense of agency of a certain type. Let me extrapolate, because free will is often spoken of in the context of a deity giving it to the subject, as agency, to exercise as they see fit, usually to be judged thereon after death. But theres a problem. This breaks down once we think of causation and the unbroken chain of stimulus and response that plays an integral role in your choices.
Lets back up a little again. The term 'atom' means indivisible, because you can break an element down further and further until you reach it; once an 'atom' is cut the element ceases to be and you have the constituents of an element. So let us take an atom as an example of a small particle. This particle, like others, obeys physical laws of nature, much like everything else. A ball rolling down a hill, is obeying one of the 4 fundamental forces of nature: gravity. This can be empirically tested and replicated, and we understand these forces (in the sciences) very, very well.
Now an atom, although playing on a different type of rule-set, still obeys a number of physical laws of nature. Interacting atoms will affect each other based on these laws, so therefore, they are somewhat (lets not get into semantics here) predictable. If we had a supercomputer to map out each atom in a given system, both position and velocity (we will come back to Heisenburgs Uncertainty Principle later, because it plays a relevant role in this conversation), we could simply run a simulation in fast-forward to assess what is going to happen.
Now imagine, that we could do that with your adrenal glands. And your other hormone glands. And all other bodily systems that make up human physiology. And finally, your brain. The brain is a complex system, yes, but fundamentally is made up of the same elements (atoms) as the rest of the universe. Your neuron firings, the synaptic cleft housing the transfer of neurotransmitters, your 'feelings' (chemical reactions registered by the brain and produced by genetic and environmental variables by a stimulus and response system), and all other bodily chemistry, is made up of these atoms!
So, if that is the case, why then, could we not, once computing power is sufficient, map the human body, map environmental factors, and process it within a simulation program to predict an outcome. I could, in essence, tell you what you are going to do before you do it!
This poses many disturbing questions about religion and human nature. Namely, that a god who constructed us (violating the Uncertainty Principle), would have flipped on a switch, then forgot how the human worked, therefore blames it for making mistakes or being evil. Somethings wrong here/
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