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.

  • 𝜏au@discuss.tchncs.de
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    11 months ago

    But does it really matter if it’s possible for us to make such predictions? If a hypothetical omniscient observer (i.e. Laplace’s demon) could predict all your decisions, then that already shows that they’re deterministic. Us not being able to actually do the determination wouldn’t change the fact that there is a definitive state of the universe for any point in time.