Existence of Human Freewill

I will take a moment to refute my opponent's claims. Rebuttal 1: Determinism This argument has completely fallen apart since the advent of modern physics. In Newton's time, and really until quite recently, everyone viewed the Universe and the bodies within as inherently deterministic: everything moved, everything acted, but some sort of equation. Gravity was of course bound by Newton's equation, light by Maxwell's equations, even the fundamental nature of energy and matter was described by Einstein in his works on Relativity. Your argument would be compeltely correct if this was the way nature acted. However, as physicists began to study deeper and deeper, they began to find that at the smallest levels,quantum levels, nature acted randomly. I hope I won't confuse anyone here because I will just be giving a brief overview of this randomness. At the smallest levels, particles are not particles -- they are waves of probability. Where nineteenth century scientists viewed a particle as a tiny bit of matter at a certain position in space, we now know that particles are really described by what is called a wavefunction -- a wave that can only tell you where a particle might be, and not where it is.1 It is not until this wavefunction is observed that the particle is forced to become the tiny bit of matter I described earlier. When we observe the particle, and yes, it is merely the act of observation, we collapse the wavefunction and make it one hundred percent probable a particle will be at a certain position.2 Before this, however, a particle is only described by probability -- a superposition of all possible outcomes in a wave. We know this mathematically by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: ΔxΔp ≈ h, or in other words the change in position and the change in momentum is roughly equals to Planck's Constant -- one is indeterminite, uncertain, if we know the other. Before the randomness of quantum physics was discovered, you could say that if we knew everything about the brain, everything about each particle in the brain, we could effectively determine what decisions a person would make, because we could determine the motion of the chemicals and how that related to the outside environment (even if it was nearly impossible to do the mathematics, the point was that it was calculable. When physicists discovered the wavefunction, and the randomness at the smallest level, they discovered that predictability was impossible. I really don't mean to confuse anyone with scientific jargon. This is the reason why determinism falls apart, and it is the reason why humans have free will; the wavefunction is uncertain until we collapse it. Rebuttal 2: Illusion of IndependenceThis is a very interesting point. If I understand my opponent correctly, he is saying that because the environment has an effect on the human, the human's free will is reduced. This is an erroneous statement, and is a very famous philosophical debate: nature versus nurture. Nurture may have an influence; in fact, it does, but that only reduces the free will, not obliterate it. While a person may have grown up in a 1930's Germany, and been influenced by Nazi propaganda, that only reduces their free will. It impacts them and their will to make decisions, but it is still them who make the decisions. The propaganda may influence the decision they make, but to reiterate, it is still people themselves that make the decision. References 1. . http://www.britannica.com...2. . http://www.fen.bilkent.edu.tr...