Sunday, October 16, 2005

Probability and human will

I had several thoughts going on while I was blabbering about probability. I was thinking about human will. How do we choose? Is it governed by our upbringing? Is it governed by what we are offered? Is it governed by the situation and timing? Is it governed by our mood? Is it random?

Or to put in other words, it seems to be such a complex process and it seems to be governed by so many factors that can it be modelled as a random process.. similar to our modelling the coin tossing as a random process??

Hmm.. I guess in most situations, it's heavily influenced by our upbringing and surroundings and it's not really random. So given that, we can say that we can model how we choose as a function of our upbringing and similar factors with some randomness associated with it. Given this model, we can safely predict, within the limits imposed by the randomness, how we choose in any given situation. However, the knowledge we require to model this correctly is enormous and complex.

Now imagine a world in which wehave all the knowledge that is there. What then? With this knowledge, we can model everything perfectly without a random term in the model. Now, every choice of every human being can be predicted with our model without resorting to any randomness or probabilistic explanation.. what does this imply?

Doesn't this imply there is no such thing as human will?

In effect, does it not mean we are all doing what we are predestined to do? May be, it's just our incomplete knowledge of the world that's not letting us know what we are going to do in the future.. in other words, our concept of human will seems to be just an illusion.. (like the Oracle says "Choice is an illusion")

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