free will

lets get on a topic that has been hotly debated.

is there such a thing called free will? as always you will find people from both sides of the camp.

in my opinion free will doesn't exist. it is analogous to the observations of a third party in an event or simply put, to the participant an action might seem random, but for an observer unaffected by the system of the experiment, the actions would be deterministic (chaos theory?)

my stand comes from the fact that our understanding of a state is causally ordered. and because of the dependence relationship, it is deterministic.

for e.g.:

you are reading this article. i didn't coerce you to read this article. it was you who chose to read this article (thus exhibiting free will). now lets make some assumptions. lets assume there is a guy named Fred who was created right after the universe was and is omnipotent, he knows all. thus he knows that you are reading this article because that is a fact. you are reading this article because you were led to it from somewhere. your actions were based on a certain influences (which is the cause). and if you walk back this causal chain, you eventually reach the start of the universe.

obviously there is no such guy named Fred, so the question remains, if you actually came here by your own volition or was it pre-determined? if you reason that if you had chosen not to read this article, what then? then the proposition that you read this article is a fallacy and hence would not exist in the causal chain.

along this line of thought, can this be associated to fate?

fate / destiny is commonly attributed to something that is laid out for you, in the shadows, revealing itself only when necessary. this is similar to the above discussion in that no matter how independently you think you are doing, you actually are working like a cog in a machinery.


so now i ask you, is there such a thing/concept of free will?

cheers