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] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here's the thing. At what point does the causal chain get interrupted, free will kick in, and then the old causal chain fires back up? Because that's what arguments like yours are implying.

The response is always that I don't understand the theory you have put forward. I'm grant that.

If the proof free will is tied to a seemingly stochastic system how is that "free will". If I replaced your decision making with a random number generator would that be free will?

I sincerely hope you will engage with me here.

To be perfectly clear, my view is that we do not have free will but our limited set of information makes it seem like we do and so it is rational to continue on despite this. Put another way, I know the latest Mission Impossible movie was made months before I saw it, and that the outcome was predetermined, but wow, what a ride.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

At what point does the causal chain get interrupted ( ... ?)

I'm working on an answer ; I should post it in a few minutes ... unless lemmy servers bugs again