I'm a little late entering this discussion on free will a preprogrammed
pattern of action. I've been traveling without access to my e-mail.
No one seems to have questioned the validity of Glenn's Sierpinski's Gasket
as an example of free will. As a mathematician who has used varied
programmed languages to create computer programs, I see no evidence that any
computer program could ever simulate the free will that humans all
experience. That free will always exists outside the computer in the human
designer of the program.
No random generator can create this free will. Just because a choice is
unpredictable does not establish human free will. We can not even create a
program for true randomness. Roger Penrose speaks to this problem of
creating random generators in Shadows of the Mind.
However, everyone seems to agree that the free will that humans do have is
constrained by programmed decisions both in our brains and by our
environment. Our freedom is bounded by both nature and nurture. Free will
decisions are not predictable. That is part of the gift of God, who used
God's free will to share it with humans. God knows what range of actions we
will do because of the fixed constraints. Within those constraints God lets
us shape our own futures. God chose to limit what God could know for a
reason.
Could it be that our individual and collective purpose in life is to learn
how to use that freedom?
Jim stark
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