Rasputinunleashed presents THE PHENOMENON OF FREE WILL with the help of Mr.Stephen Wolfram

It has always been a great mystery how the universe can follow definite laws while we as humans still manage to make decisions about how to behave and act in ways that seem quite free of obvious laws...The answer is that even though a system ( our brains ) follow definite underlying rules, it's overall behavior can still have aspects that fundamentally cannot be described by reasonable laws...The ultimate origin of the apparent freedom of human will is the phenomenon of computational irreducibility...Even though all the components of our brains follow definite laws their overall behavior corresponds to irreducable computaions that can never be in effect bound by reasonable laws...If you look at individual nerve cells in our brains you can plainly see that they follow definite rules with no freedom at all, yet somehow as a whole our brains still manage to behave with certain apperant freedom...As a practical matter, what usually seems to happen is that we receive external inputs ( such as this blog ) that leads to some train of thought which continues for a while but then dies out until we get more input...Often the actual form of this train of thoutht is influenced by our stored memories from inputs in the past... Individual steps in each train of thought follow quite definite underlying rules...The computations performed by our brains applying these rules is often sophisticated enough to be computationally irreducible.....Producing the results that it must intrinsically account for behavior that seems to us free of obvious laws.....thereby seemingly appearing to be FREE WILL....