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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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I am genuinely and in good faith interested what you think about quantum mechanics and that there seems to be an element of true randomness there.
I was pretty much a determinist until an actual physicist that I know and respect told me that he is totally convinced that there is stuff in quantum mechanics that just cannot be predetermined.
And if anything can be undeterminable then by influencing other things there would exist true randomness and then a fully deterministic world cannot exist in my eyes.
But I am very willing to learn more if you know a good counter-argument since I always thought determinism is quite an elegant view of the world.
I just cannot follow it if I am not convinced it is true.
Randomness doesn't really save traditional free will. A robot that selects its actions by rolling dice is not any more "free to choose" than a robot that selects its actions according to a deterministic program. There isn't any free-will juice that gets introduced by adding randomness.
Your "free will" is the process by which you select actions. For humans, that's a bunch of physics and chemistry happening in your brain; it receives influences from your senses, your body, and its own self-awareness (i.e. its model of you, your actions, tendencies, etc.). Whether that process depends closely on QM, or is boringly classical, doesn't control how "self-determined" it is.
I am not sure you replied to the right comment since I never mentioned free will at all but was more interested in how a person believing in determinism handles the current state of science that at least suggests the existence of true randomness.
In my eyes true randomness contradicts a deterministic world, but I am interested to learn more from anyone who is more educated on this topic.
If I understand you correctly I agree with you though that what might be called free will is what happens in an individuals brain when they make a decision.
The discussion whether this decision making process in the brain can be truly free is a very interesting one, but not the one I wanted to have.
My personal layman's opinion is that my brain has enough uniqueness to it that the decisions I make are individually mine and there are other unique people that make their own individual choices.
If those choices and decisions are truly free matters less to me as long as they are truly individual.
I’m not the other person, but I think you might be confusing the term “determinism.” I think you might also have a bit of an over-enthusiastic understanding of quantum mechanics, which is a very common problem when people have QM explained in lay person terms I’m not going to get into the QM stuff because I’m a biologist and not a physicist, and I think your world just became more interesting with your new information. I’d just say hold off on the conclusions until you read a bit more, and start sliding towards the actual science books rather than the pop science books as you get your feet under you. You’ll have a different appreciation once you can read an advanced undergraduate textbook on modern physics.
Determinism as used here means behavioral determinism. There is significant evidence that a large number of our actions and reactions aren’t thought through, but rather are “automatic” responses. In fact, some neuroimaging work on decision-making has indicated that we reach a conclusion and then reverse-justify it by thinking we’re thinking about it. My subconscious mind has already decided to buy the bagel, but my conscious mind is still talking itself into it.
Again, people can take that kind of thing to an unjustified extreme. I think free will exists in a limited sense, but that it is highly constrained. In this case (the original question, not the person to whom you’re replying) is using their own misunderstanding of behavioral determinism to excuse their misbehavior. It’s a self-indulgent philosophy that you can probably pick apart if you really wanted to spend the time and effort in making them meticulously explain every step and aspect of their position, but it’s probably easier to just drop the person or to deal with them while remembering they’re possibly clinically psychotic, but almost definitely at least an asshole.
First off, thank you for the detailed response.
I recognize that you know more about this than me so I am happy to learn.
There are a couple of points in your post though that I want to reply to.
That is explicitly not what I want to talk about.
I might have misworded my first post or misunderstood op but I understand determinism as the view that with perfect information over any system it can be predetermined what will happen in the future of this system. Wikipedia says: Determinism is the philosophical view that events are completely determined by previously existing causes.
I thought that to be the case for a long time.
If I could control all the variables I could roll a die to a 6 every time or at least tell the outcome as soon as it's thrown if I know everything else there is to know.
I also recognize that my understanding of modern physics is minimal at best.
But a physicist friend of mine told me that there is stuff that is truly random, so in gross simplification if I throw the exact same die in the exact same way under the exact same conditions it could still show different results making it impossible to predetermine the result.
If that is the case I don't think this world is a system where it is possible to determine the future even with perfect information.
And maybe you are right that my knowledge is just too superficial to hold a real opinion in the debate between determinism and indeterminism, but I also don't really have a horse in this race.
Just if you were to ask me as a layman I would think indeterminism to be more plausible given the (grossly simplified) information above.
The OP that I replied to described himself as a determinist, so I was just curious of their response.
But now I got a lot of other input to think about so I am happy either way.
Again, none if this is meant to attack you and I realize to someone more informed this might just seem as random rambling, but I was just honestly interested so thank you again for the response.
One interpretation would be Many Worlds; that is, every quantum possibility is real in its own multiversal branch. So, to assign moral agency you would need to show that I chose the world I'm in now, over some other version of my life in which different choices were made. Although, I'm not certain you even need to go that far: I have no idea to what degree quantum randomness can actually affect our choices. But, in any case, that too would be out of our control.
There are layers to the universe. While you can't predict everything you don't usually need to. The object is dropped and therefore it falls. If you zoomed in deep enough you would see the chaos that is going on in the subatomic but the object still falls all the same.
Not being able to predict everything does not mean we can predict nothing.