this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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What are some physics-based arguments against hard determinism? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I don't believe free will is real. I'm not a deep physics person (and relatively bad at math), but with my undergrad understanding of chemistry, classical mechanics, and electromagnetism, it seems most rational that we are creatures entirely controlled by our environments and what we ingest and inhale.

I'm not deeply familiar with chaos theory, but at a high level understand it to be that there's just too many variables for us to model, with current technology, today. To me that screams "god of the gaps" fallacy and implies that eventually we WILL have sufficiently powerful systems to accurately model at that scale...and there goes chaos theory.

So I'm asking you guys, fellow Lemmings, what are some arguments to causality / hard determinism, that are rooted entirely in physics and mechanics, that would give any credit to the idea that free will is real?

Please leave philosophical and religious arguments at the door.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

One argument that might be made is that inconsistencies at the quantum level create an element of randomness that, while miniscule, could create massive cascading butterfly effects over the course of a large enough timespan. Whether those inconsistencies are enough to make more than a minimal difference in a single given lifespan is debatable at best, and the entire idea could be debunked if quantum physics was proven to be deterministic.

However, as it stands, we don't have accurate methods of predicting quantum behavior.

[โ€“] DeusHircus 1 points 1 year ago

Honest question but does that change anything? We're on a one-way trip through time and the "dice" on each quantum event are only getting rolled once. The results may be probabilistic but they happened that way. The outcome is shrouded by randomness until it happens but that's the way it was always going to happen. Unless there are some supernatural forces that are outside of the quantum realm or some meaningful way to observe future events and react to quantum observations before they occur, reality will keep propagating as it always was going to unfold