Free will

Sunday, January 7, 2007
Does Free Will Really Exist
While we continue to unravel the mysteries of the human brain and try to replicate it in machines and learning systems,consider this.As per Freudian psychology there were three basic drives that kind of dictate human behavior. 1)Super Ego - (Value Systems,Ethics etc) 2) Ego - (Logic, Rational etc) 3) Id - (The drive of pleasure)These are controlled by different areas of the brain and the relative dominance of them can be traced to neural networks formed in a person's brain,in addition to the physical and chemical properties of the repective brain cells.Neural Networks can be traced to the experiences that the person has had .The properties of the brain cells can be traced to the person's genes, physical environment and also may be his neural networks.All of these are factors external to the person.A persons decision given a certain sittuation is a direct function of his drives and by the above arguement his drives can be attributed purely to factors external to him.Just like a neural network is trained by inputs given to it by its training algorithm,a human being is trained by nature (On a higher dimensional level evolution of species,if Darwinism is true, itself is like a neural network).So can we say that a neural network has free will?.I guess no. For example if we consider beings having lower intelligence than us,we can kind of predict and control their behaviors (like domesticated animals).A neural network at any point has a given transfer function(Input Output relationship) which can be determined by analysing the structure of the network and the inputs given to it.So if a human brain also has a fixed transfer function can her input output relationship be deterministic and as a corollary can it be absolutely controlled.SO WHAT IS FREE WILL? DOES ANYTHING OF THAT SOUGHT REALLY EXIST?
11:39:30 AM
Posted By Srinivasan Krishnaswamy Comments (1) Uncategorized
Comments
K.Venugopal Sunday, January 7, 2007 9:47:24 PM
It is said that everything is consciousness, the multiplicity being only dependent on the coarseness or fineness of consciousness. Our coarser self, the body, has less an element of free will than our mind. They say at the spiritual level, our finest self, we are absolutely free with even a will being unnecessary.