free will

hello everyonei noticed some discussion re free will around here ... it was mostly about the fact that the free will and original sin are mutually exclusive ... hmmm i'm not sure if i'm getting the concept of original sin right, so i'll better skip this ... well, my question is: have you ever thought that our world is deterministic? like that everything in this world is following certain rules and if you know these rules and somehow collect all necessary information, you could predict the future? ..... e.g. you could predict what happens to the apple falling from the tree if you know the law of gravity plus some measures of the tree etc ... also more complex predictions could be made ... e.g. calculating how some molecules will react ... concerning the really complex ones i think there are computational problems .. and also that ppl don't know all the rules and that it's not possible to gather all the input data ... but this only means that we cannot predict the future -- not that it wasn't determinedalso some related question for the religious folks: how would you distinguish a mind of a human from a mind of an extremely smart computer? wouldn't it be possible for a computer to act like a human?well, hope you find it challenging
dents

hello You,thanks, i appreciated that answer ... i think i should make couple of comments* free will vs. original sin ... my current opinion is that they are technically exclusive because if someone makes free decisions then he/she could choose the right way and avoid sin (well, unless there are situations in which there is no such way .. but it seems there are no such situations because person in such poor situation could always sit down and do nothing which doesn't sound like a sin)
on the other hand i see the rationale for the other side ... ppl are not fully rational and do lot of mistakes (like they intend A and do B) some of which lead to sin .. and still could have free will (really?) ... like in that pulp fiction situation "ouch, i didn't mean to shoot out his brain but there was a bump on the road!" the gangster didn't intend to kill the guy (if i remember right) but he wasn't smart enough to think of the bumps .. i.e. what he did was different than his intension
the problem "at the other side" seems to be that we don't have the choice to become fully rational and anticipate everything .. we just have to accept our bounded rationality and do mistakes .. which means that we could choose our intentions but not always the actual results/deeds .. is that a free will?
and of course there are such poor kiddies who die without commiting any sin ... isn't that against the definition of original sin?
hmmm i think i need to think more about this .. and read the suggested reading .. also will comment that QM and AI things next time

* free will vs. original sin
hmm if you don't mind i would like to refine my answer a bit ..... i think that the free will could be stated either as
A1) "we are free do choose our deeds from number of possibilities and sinless life IS among them"
or
A2) "we are free do choose our deeds from number of possibilities and sinless life IS NOT among them"
further the original sin could be stated as
B) "it is not possible for us to choose sinless life"looking at the statements the A1) and B) are clearly contradicting ... A2) together with B) is possible but it means there is no sinless path in our decission tree ... which means that there is no way for us to avoid sinning at least once and that it's not our fault ... perhaps we should be sorry only for that excess sin between our actual path and the best possible path* QM vs deterministic world
if i'm getting it right then under QM things are described by probability functions .. e.g. there is chance C that particle P is currently residing in the space S ... then the fictional supercomputer would be calculating these probability functions ... e.g. probability function showing position of a rubber ball thrown against the wall .. 99.9999% would be in the "bounced back" area and 0.0001% in the "tunnelled through" area ... but it would be a real computational difficulty/impossibility as you stated beforewhat seems to be the possible disagreement here is that how much of the world is deterministic and how much is random ... hmm ... i think that vast majority is deterministic because that QM randomness usually gets aggregated and somehow cancels out ... the exception i could think of are the quantum physicists making bets on outcomes of their experiments ... but these are not the kind of events influencing our daily lives ... if we take our bodies then there don't seem to be any 1 atom small structures influencing what we do (maybe there are?) .. it rather seems that we are kind of deterministic biological computers with all that networks of neurons ... but back to QM ... i think that if the QM randomness is the only way in which god influences our lives then he influences them very little, almost not at all* AI
i know about this more from sci-fi than elsewhere but i suspect there is no objective test to tell human from a very smart computer ... turing test takes a human interviewer to make the decision so it's not objective ... if there was such closed test then the computers would be taught how to respond and it wouldn't work anymore .....
i was rather trying to imply that it's not such a mad idea that humans are only kind of very smart computers

* free will vs original sin
i would still stick to my previous statement ... free will and the original sin are incompatible regardless how the sin is defined ... or there is both free will and the original sin but that's only because the sin is on every possible path we could choose from ... is there any mistake in this reasoning?
btw how is the sin defined .. is it more about literal rules or one should decide him/herself?
btw what about the unlucky innocent babies .. isn't this denying the original sin?* quantum mechanics world
ok i agree that quantum mechanics is widely accepted theory ... rather i would like to hear if you think it truly brings randomness into our lives .. and how much if so* AI
i looked at the article and the psychology pov was bit new for me but interesting ... it rather states that we do lot of decissions automatically but if we really try we use some free will as well