78
Do you believe in free will?
(lemmy.world)
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
Yes.
I observe free will directly. Watch: I will choose of my own free will to type a tilde at the end of this sentence instead of a period~ Behold free will.
Everything that says we don't have free will depends on indirect observations that blatantly make faulty assumptions. Do our senses accurately tell us about the state of the universe, and ourselves within it? Are our interpretations of this infallible?
Most egregious is the assumption that classical mechanics governs the mind, when we know that at a deep level, classical mechanics governs nothing. Quantum mechanics is the best guess we have at the moment about how objects work at a fundamental level. Many will say neurons are too big for the quantum level. But everything is at the quantum level. We just don't typically observe the effects because most things are too big to see quantum effects from the outside. But we don't only look at the brain from the outside.
Nor can we say that the brain is the seat of consciousness. Who can say what the nature of reality is? Does space even exist at a fundamental level? What does it mean for consciousness to be in a particular place? What's to say it can only affect and be affected by certain things in certain locations? Especially when we can't pinpoint what those things are?
So yeah I believe in free will. It's direct observation vs. blatantly faulty reasoning.
Quantum mechanics only says that you can't predict the spin of certain particles. Those particles are at a vastly different scale of the things we see in everyday life. Yes, a photon might suddenly change direction and I won't see it because it's a wave function, right? But only at a really small odd. I bet it has never happened to me or anyone in my continent, if not the entire human race in all time. Let alone neurones in my brains experiencing quantum effects.
Quantum mechanics dismisses no argument of determinism because how low the possibilities are.
Even if macroscopic particles do behave randomly, it is still a random behaviour, not your decision.
But that's zeroing in on the idea that quantum mechanics directly affects neurons, which affect free will. Which is only one way one could conceivably argue free will exists. But I'm saying I don't need to come up with a specific way, because I observe free will more directly than anything else. So there's basically infinite ways it could happen, including for example: