today's will

Free Will vs. Fate. A couple problems i run into when i'm trying to figure this one out -- first, it's easy to get into clever verbal one-liner solutions that aren't meaningful, like "I think you have the free will to determine your fate" - what the hell does that really mean, and even if you figure that out, what does it add to the debate? I use this example because I think I said it once in a college discussion class, and felt then like I'd made a very sound point. c'est la me...

second, and more importantly, you run into problem eventually where you can't find the entry point for freedom of choice. sure i can move my arm like this, in some woohoo! unexpected direction, but where exactly did that exertion of free will express itself in the physics of all of the interactions that made it happen? I mean, I felt the exertion of will, but I don't believe that my will did everything - some of the processes (e.g. muscle contraction) seem to happen as a result of the exertion of will, not as an active/ongoing part of the exertion of will. I couldn't will my muscles to contract without triggering the neurons between my brain and my arm (as far as I know).

So that second problem is the meat of the issue. Something i thought of this morning was the idea of free will within boundaries - probably not a new concept, but with the (plausible to me) addition of this - those boundaries are eigenvalues of the current state of your body at any given moment. You are free to make any choice that you can imagine, but your imagination is limited to a specific group of possibilities for any situation.

This flows nicely with the 'consciousness is an emergent property' theory - we're made up of many smaller systems, stacked down to whatever level of granularity physics has comfortably theorized. The most successful theories on the smallest known systems are within the realm of quantum mechanics, which, among other things, postulates that these small systems have a distinct set of options for any situation in which they are forced to make a choice of some sort (and that choice has measurable effect). Those choices are the eigenvalues of a function representing the choice/measurement. If you assume that for each choice we make, that choice is a biological --> chemical --> physical process, then that process would include the 'uncertainty within a given range of choices' behavior, which may translate to a sense of free will on the macroscopic level.

Physics has already demonstrated to my satisfaction that it's possible to have a system that obeys these rules containing uncertainty, yet still get the 'classical-physics' predictability that we see on the macroscopic level and our intuition tells us must be a part of any accurate model of the world.