Free Will

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw
back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation),
there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and
splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence
moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's
favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance,
which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. ...
(W. H. Murray in
The Scottish Himalaya Expedition, 1951. See http://www.goethesociety.org/pages/quotescom.html )

Scott Adams recently posted a blog, I can't stop myself, about a scientific article posted in the NY times, Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t.

The first question that needs to be answered is "What is free will?" Is it the ability to make decisions? If so, we all have free will since we all make decisions about lots of things. But then computers must have free will since they can make decisions as well. One of the great advances in computer science is the ability for computers to calculate solutions faster then any human can.

Some might say that the computer is only doing what it's told. It has no free will since it can only figure out what it has been programed to solve. However, are humans not the same. You can't preform most tasks without training in how they are done. Some things can be learned through trial and error, but computers are capable of this too.

perhaps we need to look at what it means not to have free will. What is it we are slaves to? Are we slaves to our passions? To some extent. for example, we can't choose who we fall in love with. However, we can choose that to do with those passions. We are capable of denying them.

The article suggests that we are controlled by our subconscious mind. Often we react to things before we even realize that we need to react. But doesn't that require the subconscious to make a decision? In essence, that means that the subconscious mind must have free will - free even from ourselves. We can veto our subconscious if we are aware of its actions but often the subconscious is better at doing things then our conscious mind it.

This is especially true with art. Good art is always a subconscious process. We dream or enter a trance like state and suddenly good ideas come. When we try to force ourselves to come up with good idea, we dry up and can't produce anything. The best we can hope for is to remember an idea we can up with in the past or which someone else came up with and reuse it. Original ideas can only come from the subconscious mind.

Some what is the subconscious mind and why does it have so much power over us? It seems to be a collect of everything we have experenced throughout our lives. When bad things happen to us, our subconscious remembers are trys to avoid those situations in the future. Conversely, we want to repeat events that had positive results in the past. Our subconscious uses all this information to guide us in the best direction for your personal happiness. Making or keeping others happy can contrubed to our own happiness, so we are not totally selfish but it is the general tendency for most people to think of their own well being first.