Are our thoughts deterministic or do they have some unavoidable randomness due to quantum effects?

Question

If there is some fundamental randomness, is there a lot or only very little? This may perhaps be answered in terms of the brain physiology, but I will also be glad to have answers that take into account our day-to-day experience. Smell, color, sound, taste and touch create a representation in the mind of the classical world. Thoughts are like internal sounds or images. It seems to be all classical. So, I tend to believe that thoughts are totally classical objects. I am interested into this question in the context of free will and determinism. Any opinion is welcome.

What is evidence exactly do we have in favor of free will? Isn't this totally in opposition to a classical view of the thought process. Isn't this also in opposition to a quantum view of the thought process because, in accordance with quantum mechanics, we cannot cannot choose to collapse a wave function in a given state.

I mean, it all depends on our definition of free will. If you say that the evidence is strongly in favor of free will, you must have a scientific definition to provide.

Oh well, I suspect that "free will" is not very well defined. For me, it corresponds to the notion that our thoughts do not follow any fixed laws, including unknown laws that we might never be able to write down. We would have the power to break any law whatsoever at the level of our thoughts. I don't believe this.

To gliss: QM does not help to explain free will. There exists a wave function of your entire physiology and it is deterministic. Some external measurement may collapse it in a random way, but then you have no control whatsoever. Otherwise you could break the laws of QM by changing the probabilities at will.

Answer 1

Thoughts are not physical. We don't know enough about the physiology of the thought process to know whether any quantum effect is involved. So far, quantum considerations haven't been necessary to understand brain processes. The empirical evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of free will.

Answer 2

Interesting question. First of all I disagree with Frank that thoughts are not physical. Brain funtion is electrochemical and thought is a process of the brain.
As far as deterministic, hmmm...I think I'm on the fence about this one. One camp says that quantum theory shows that we can never know with certainty the present or future location of even one particle therefore the future is random. The other camp says that our lack of ability to know or predict does not mean that it could have unfolded in any other way.
I'm not sure who is right but I hope it's random. The thought of not really having free will is just disturbing.

Answer 3

The Cartesian motto "I think therefore I am" is typical of Western man's getting the cart before the horse; the erroneous rationale is analogous to believing that seeing an image of yourself in a mirror is CAUSED by the mirror.

The truth is "I AM therefore I think", following the divine pattern. The Reality of Being is a priori to its reflection in ANY "medium", even the medium of Mind.

Hopefully this answers your question, in which you have indicated that "Smell, color, sound, taste and touch create a representation in the mind of the classical world. Thoughts are like internal sounds or images. It seems to be all classical. So, I tend to believe that thoughts are totally classical objects."

It would also help to consider that our experience of these phenomena is not realized because the experience happens "to" us, but because the experience happens "as" us.

We may look with our eyes, but we "see" with our i-deas.

As to the ideas of determinism and randomness, try to “see” these ideas as choices to examine one or the other, as merely differing aspects of one's self.

.....and the answers found thereby would simply be yet another reflection in the mirror of experience of one's own sense of I AM, which is too encompassingly vast to consider all at once, but can certainly be appreciated through our ideas.

If you believe you are not limited by your ideas (much like any Nobel laureate or researcher whose breakthrough observation changes previously sacrosanct paradigms), then you'll understand that the ideas you assign to your experience, define your experience......until you change them. Is the Earth still flat?

....and you can change your ideas an infinite number of times to experience the omnipresence of Who you are an infinite number of ways.....

Brother, there ain't nothin' random 'bout that!

Orin