Do we have FREE WILL?

[MineralMan]

83. Yours is not a new idea, of course.

It is, however, not my experience with the world. Decisions I have made have often been made after very careful consideration of all options. Some have worked out well; others not so much. Some have proven to be good decisions; some bad.

While some believe all of our decisions are made based on things like cognitive biases, that is not my belief. Some decisions, of course, are made without much consideration and are based on little more than actions of our most primitive parts of the brain. However, that is not always the case, by any means.

Any self-aware person can recognize the difference. I am such a person.

As someone who created many computer programs, including some that were experiments in AI language creation, I know exactly how software programs make "decisions." No free will is involved, except when I determined how the program would choose one out of many options. Generally, in the AI software, I used weighted pseudo-random routines to control decision making. The actual decision was unpredictable, but was always within the parameters of the programming.

I am not a computer program, though. My brain is not digital. It is also capable of self-altering decision methods.

And with that, I'm done with this subthread discussion.