In 1814, the French astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined a vast intelligence that knew every natural law as well as the precise location of every constituent of the universe, and he wrote that such an intelligence would be able to calculate every event at every juncture in time, past and future. This thought experiment has been known ever since as Laplace’s demon, and it encapsulates the problem of free will. For someone to act freely, most people would agree that two conditions must be fulfilled: 1. The person must have the possibility of acting differently. 2. The person himself must choose how to act—he cannot merely be the last link in a chain of events that has already been set in motion and that can only occur in one way. Even if an individual attempts to wrest himself free from his upbringing and the immediate expression of his genes, the impulse to do so must itself come from somewhere. Nothing arises from nothing, for that would violate the very nature of our universe. Every single choice he makes is made in an interaction among countless influences of varying strength—and nothing more. He is in no sense master of the struggle among these influences, so how can one say that he acts freely? Or that it would be just to punish or reward him for what he chooses to do? Most people have an intuitive sense that they act freely and that others do so too. Yet if these same people seriously consider Laplace’s demon and the way the universe is constructed, they normally conclude that it is impossible for us to possess free will. And that it may very well be possible that what we so convincingly experience as our own freedom is in reality an illusion. La Places Demon--from You Disappeared by Christian Jungerson
Posted on: Sun, 02 Feb 2014 09:14:52 +0000
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