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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Also not very educated on this, but just throwing out what i thought was the outline here:

  1. Tiny differences in position or speed can lead to drastically different outcomes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
  2. We can only know position or speed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle Thus, predicting the future cannot reach 100% accuracy.

If this means that we might have free will i cant say, but if the world is wholly deterministic, the above at least underlines our lack of ability to predict it.

Regarding god of the gaps, annoyingly, the claim here is actually that we ”know” that we cant know:

”Thus, the uncertainty principle actually states a fundamental property of quantum systems and is not a statement about the observational success of current technology.”

Of course, only until falsified - field is always changing: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/common-interpretation-of-heisenbergs-uncertainty-principle-is-proven-false/