So you're saying free will exists outside of the action of the atoms, impulses, and waves in our brain?! Because I'm saying that if I had a perfect snapshot of your brain, and a perfect model based on time of the future of that brain, then I could predict 100% what your "free" decisions would be. So do you have free will? What if I speed up time on my simulation and see your decisions before you make them? Could you make a decision outside of my prediction?

Of course you couldn't - because my model incorporates the stimuli you'll receive and your response to them. We're just dumb animals pulling levers for food/sex/whatever. I mean I realize that no such "perfect simulation" could ever exist due to needing an outside frame of reference - but you're pretty egotistical if you think your brain is some metaphysical powerful object capable of bending the universe to its own will. It's like a single wire on a computer chip thinking it's capable of changing output by choice.

delusions of grandeur, my friend.

Of course - my little experiment above would take a frame of reference existing outside of our universe. Then you have the whole problem of "changing values by measuring them" so you could never get an accurate picture of the universe. A little uncertainty at the beginning could butterfly-effect itself into totally different outcomes for the simulation.

So I'm both saying that free will doesn't exist, and that from our point of view, it absolutely does exist. :) To me, the universe is deterministic, but from inside the universe, it would be impossible to realize.

Imagine we could take a snapshot of every location, velocity, and energy of every atom in the universe. Our calculations are absolutely precise. (Quite a stretch here!)

Now we use those values as our input to a computer model of the universe. We run the simulation for 5 minutes.

Is it possible, running the exact simulation for the same amount of time with the same input values, that you can get different outcomes?

In my opinion - nope, that's not possible. The calculations will look at 1's and 0's and produce an outcome. People's brains existing inside the simulation may think they're making a "free choice", but in reality, from the second they make that choice, they were always predestined to have made exactly that choice. In making a decision, you change the probability to 100% that you would choose that decision. :)

So making a "choice" in itself means we have no free will.

"The jury is still out on free will."

I want to throw in my two cents!

Schrodinger says that the large scale laws we observe in nature are due to chaos on the smallest scales... so we essentially have order coming from disorder. In one of his books, he talks about how diffusion is a very highly ordered and measurable process even though it's caused by the completely random movement of atoms.

In other words - subatomic chaos magnifies into something humans define as "order" - mostly because we ignore the fact that we're completely composed of it. :) We're big, walking, talking versions of the subatomic chaos that confuses us so much.

In order to make any kind of deterministic evaluation, I think you would need a completely-removed frame of reference. Existing in and being made of the particles that we view as "chaotic" makes us completely unreliable to define order and chaos.

In short - I very much believe in free will. Humans can be just as "chaotic" to the universe as electron clouds. Because we are both made from them AND equally chaotic if we were viewed from a much grander scale. Maybe we make our choices based on unknown and unmeasurable (from our frame of reference) statistical distributions just like electrons do - but hey, that's still free choice by our definition baby!

:) I wish I was more eloquent with the ideas I want to express - moral of the story: read Schrodinger.

Human beings reached our "modern" state of evolution over 100,000 years ago, but we only have ~6,000 years of recorded history. Who possibly knows what civilizations could have existed and been wiped out prior to that? It's very possible that, for example, 10,000 years ago a large civilization collapsed and survived through legends to modern times. It's unfortunate that we have such a lack of recorded history from those early times.

Of course we lack the evidence to show early civilizations - but look at Central America for an example. You have the Aztecs, and before them you have much less evidence of another Toltec civilization, and even remnants of yet another pre-Toltec society under those ruins. People building on top of people. :) We're great at wiping out evidence of previous civilizations.

So there's your answer ^ there were probably a hundred different Atlantis civilizations that have disappeared from human history, and our current civilizations and records are a lot more vulnerable than we like to think.

Energy is not equal to electricity... you seem to use the words as if they are interchangeable, and they absolutely are not. Not even close.

Where does a newborn baby's first energy come from? A digestion process from nutrients fed to the fetus from the umbilical cord from its mother's diet.

What jump starts the baby's heart for the first time? The heart muscles are biologically programmed to beat - when they develop to the point that beating is physically possible, they start up!

Energy isn't positively and negatively charged. Energy is just energy. Atoms and molecules can be electrically charged depending on their composition of subatomic particles. That's unrelated to energy.

Our electric energy is not the same as the energy in the equation e=mc^2. You're really mixing vocabulary here. Our electric energy comes from digestive processes within our cells. When we die, our fuel just stops being converted into functional electricity. Imagine a car when you turn it off - the fuel tank doesn't suddenly disappear, it just sits.

And finally - reincarnation? I think you technically mean resurrection. And the problem there is that our cells degrade and die so immediately quickly after our heart stops beating, the same body functions become impossible. They depend on the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to survive - as soon as that delivery halts, they begin to decay and are very quickly irreparable.