The soul and free will

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I have to pose this one and throw it out there because I'm pretty sure I've thought it through to completion but - why not check it. Here it goes:

1) I don't believe in free will in the material sense - matter is acting on matter in such a way that's by all intents and purposes infinitely clamped down by time and its own sort of reaction-based destiny.

2). I'm not closed to the idea of the soul as a spectator or even as a portion of personality.

3). If the spirit exists, even if not of the same type of matter as the brain and body, it would still exist with a certain sense of time or within a certain kind of timeline.

4). With time given, even with the soul separated from the body there is still no free will, best choices on given stimuli still remain a driving force that interact with the selfplex.

5) The existence of a soul technically shouldn't make any bit of difference regarding free will; it may be a much older component than its vessels, it may have had many prior vessels, but be that as it may its still bound to the same rules.

6) Hypothetically if words or thoughts can control how matter reacts - even this result, who will use it, and how it will be used, is still within time's accounting.

7) Even with helpers across the way trying to communicate or guide your spirit - they also exist inside of time. They have no free will.

8 ) If God may even exist outside of time and inserts himself into the timeline periodically - once within time his actions become a part of it (for him to translate himself in it much more likely means that he quite literally wrote himself in - Moses et. al. were dealing with him in the pen, not in person, or something to that general effect).

End result - the materialist and spiritualist views really don't end up anywhere different - anything sentient that exists within time does not have free will. Even with 8 having some wiggle room of perhaps being able to pull someone outside of time if desired, those acting in the material either would have no say in that or would have been predestined to ask him (and it would be a very strange request, when even 'heaven' and the afterlife would be within time - and then the question comes up is God all powerful and all knowing because he exists outside of time and is pulling someone out the unbreakable barrier?).

Can't help ya there...I'm not a dualist...I think what we perceive as a "soul" is neural activity.

~Kate

These free will topics are always a bit loaded, but:

I'd say that free will only exists within the context of personal experience.

I find no reason to believe that our behaviour is not essentially mechanic, and that any rules of nature are being broken when we feel that we are making a decision of our own volition, that any chemicals that make us up are behaving differently through the influence of some sort of "life force". But that doesn't stop oneself from experiencing free will, and the thing that we refer to when we speak of 'ourselves' is surely but the summation of personal experience.

And the idea that our sense of free will is determined by neural activity (I personally would never have suspected otherwise) does not break down the fact that we experience free will. The only thing I have come to realise is, that the concept of free will is only meaningful within the limited context of our experience.
Thus ,it would seem as if we are simply mannequins jerking about at the ends of strings manipulated by a mindless, reflex mechanism (which ultimately must be the case unless one wishes to invoke spiritualism - (of which I don't believe in )), the fact remains that the only context in which free will means anything is the personal context at the end of the strings.

Up until a few years ago I considered free will an illusion, because cause and consequence are so predictable in theory. I was basically a Determinist. I thought any decision made by a person would be entirely a result of their genetics, their brain chemistry, their past experiences, and their current situation.

However, more recently someone I know has semi-changed my mind, and I think about the way that the laws of physics break down on the quantum level, I think that maybe there is some random element to the universe. If the universe were restarted from the beginning, would events proceed in the same way? I'm not sure that they would anymore. Therefore, I'm now open to the idea of free will. I think that most of our lives are deterministic, but there may be certain times that two or more futures are equally likely to occur and it is our decision that is the tipping point.

Randomness does not grant free will, I agree with you wholeheartedly there Sand.

But it COULD open a door to the potential of free will. Without randomness I have to agree that there is no potential within the universe under which free will could exist or emerge, without invoking spirituality or mysticism, which I shall not do.

Using a priori reasoning, there is no reason why one would ever believe that "self-awareness" could exist or emerge. (at least none that I can think of, though please feel free to give me some, but you will have to abandon all precept of self-awareness to do so)

So, under the same a priori reasoning, as is forced upon us, by the lack of free will in our current state, there is no reason to believe that free will would exist or emerge.

Just as self-awareness DID emerge (or at the very least the ILLUSION of self-awareness did emerge) So too could free will, if there was a mechanism by which it COULD work, and yet be consistent with the laws of the universe.

If self-awareness is just illusionary, then so too will be any emergent free will. But if self-awareness is real, in any way, then, given the conditions for it's existence being met, a form of free will just as real as the self-awareness that we now possess could also emerge.

My belief is that humanity is on the verge of that emergence.

I think we have free will. You could choose to go shoot that guy you don't like. No one is stopping you.

There are some Christian sects that believe that you are saved or damned and there is nothing you can do to change the outcome.

They say this because God knows the future and he can see your whole life before you are even born so your life is predetermined and fixed in advance so you have no free will.
I.e. Jesus knew Judas was going to betray him so he told him to get on with it. Thus Judas had no free will.

But I think it is a bit more complicated than that. You read a history book about how Napoleon made certain choices and lost the battle of Waterloo.
If he had made different choices he would probably have won.

Just because he chose to do one thing it doesn't mean he was "destined" to do that.
If he had made the other choice we would be reading a different history book and the map of Europe today would be very different.

In other words we in "the future" see the results of the choices he DID make but that doesn't mean that he couldn't have made different choices at the time.