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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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To be unfunny:
The whole idea of a balls hitting each other universe went out the window when we hit the quantum era. We have had to adapt to a reality where matter is somehow a statistical phenomena, and the details are always hidden from us in one way or another. Entanglement is another confusing thing, and its super common - not just some rare phenomena in a lab, it's more of a fact of particle interaction
So our brains are somehow statisical-chemical-electric sugar powered supercomputers that have entangled state. And the brain actually stretches across the body, with various chemistry being produced throughout
In short, nobody has any idea how brains really work, it's way more elaborate than current AI. It's also likely impossible to fully simulate a brain - it would have to BE a brain
There's a separate question about the nature of randomness in the universe, but all we can know is that follows a normal distribution over time. It seems truly random from our point of view. Of course, who's to say if God likes to fudge the numbers a little
Yes, but none of that refutes the argument that we lack free will. The trillions of interactions leading up to an 'action' on our part can be random, determined, or some mixture - but they still 'cause' our next action, rather than our 'free will ' causing the action. If you believe in free will, you believe in a magical quality we possess which is somehow neither random (else it wouldnt be 'will') nor determined (else it wouldn't be 'free')
I personally find all discussion around free will annoying. Whether or not I have free will I still have to decide to do shit. I can’t just go on autopilot.
It only feels that way 😃 But yes, there's no escaping the feeling
I mean yeah, I don't believe in free will, but in day to day life I still get annoyed at my friends when they can't seem to make simple choices and feel best when I feel like I'm making good choices.
Imho our language hasn't really caught up, someone mentioned the idea of distinguishing free will from agency which is intriguing, because at a fundamental level we still need to feel like we're making choices in day to day life because of our how our brains are wired, but at the same time from a moral and philosophical truth standpoint it's incredibly important to still consider the implications of free will not existing...
Society is just starting to wake up to the idea of "systemic issues", not believing in free will forces you to consider all issues as systemic, something a lot more intellectually challenging but that ultimately reveals a lot more truth and comfort about the world, and imho provides a very strong moral foundation.
So if there's more than 1 action that your brain can decide upon, does that mean free will because you have a choice, or no free will because you are confined within those finite choices?
There is no free will because who, what and where you are conditions you to make a certain choice every single time, and there is no will external to all that what you are and you experienced so far.
It's kinda related to the multiverse theory, where every choice or chance creates a new version of reality and if you had made another choice it wouldn't be YOU.
At least that's what they argue. I also think of it this way.
When you phrase it that way, though, it makes the ‘you’ part stand out and in that regard you do have free will to do as you choose, it’s just an internal lack of ‘ethereal choices’ we’re lacking. The fact that if the choice were somehow “replayed”, you would make the same choice is kind of meaningless since we don’t experience that….the point at the quantum/chaos theory level is that there is no way to look at the current set of circumstances and say with any degree of certainty what your decision will be. Whether this involves some magic autonomy ‘above’ the chemical and quantum nature of your brain is just semantics as far as whether we’re the one ultimately in the drivers seat or whether we’re just experiencing things from what appears to be behind the wheel. Maybe think of it as sitting on the lap of the universe while we pretend to hit the gas and shift the gears.
It depends on the context of the conversation though. Free will and whether or not it exists has massive implications on aspects of society like criminality and the justice system.
If we have the statistics showing the crime tracks with poverty, lack of education, etc. and we don't believe that that person is making a real "choice" in their actions, then we have to reflect on what purpose punishing them is even serving. The idea of punishment as retribution, or punishment beyond reforming them becomes nonsensical. You can imagine removing someone for the safety of others, but punishment for the sake of moral punishment or salvation (as advocated by many religious types) makes no sense.
Neither. The is no free will. You will think about which choice to make, and you'll make a choice. But not only your choice, but also all of your thoughts about what to choose, were the inevitable result of everything that has happened in the universe leading up to that point.
It feels like you could have thought different thoughts and come to a different conclusion, but actually you couldn't have.
Look at it this way. A supernova is the end result of an unimaginably large number of complex interactions, some of which may have been random. But there's no reason to suppose any free will is involved. Your brain is not, philosophically speaking, meaningfully different
Ridiculous, this is like some facebook post from my religious uncle. Brains are quantum entangled with the body? Bro you don't even know what that means or that information is not preserved in entanglement
I almost want to ask for a source but I shutter to think what might be dredged up
Yeah, well the brain actually stretches across the body. With various chemistry being produced throughout. So how do you like them quantum apples?
What? Every chemical reaction within every neuron is still governed by physics. Just because we don't understand how the physics works doesn't mean we get to throw physics out the window. Even then, even if we ignore the physical aspect of it, from a philosophical standpoint, you can easily argue that free will doesn't exist.
Let's say for a moment that I'm wanting to go get dinner somewhere, and as I'm walking there, I start to cross a street and get hit by a bus. I wake up and Death is laughing. Wiping tears from his eyes he says, "man, that'll never get old. Listen, I'll give you a second chance. I'll rewind time to the moment before you decided to cross the street without looking, and if you make it across, I'll leave you alone." I take the offer (who wouldn't), and time gets rewound. I'm now standing at the curb, getting ready to cross the street, with no memory of the events that transpired after I stepped off the curb. Will I try to cross the street again, or will I decide not to?
spoiler
The answer is that I'll cross the street again. Why? Time got rewound. I don't remember getting hit by the bus, nor do I remember talking to death. There's no reason for me to avoid the street because I have the exact same information I had the last time, so there's no way for me to come to a different conclusion about which path I should take. I wake up and Death is laughing.Edit: how the fuck do spoilers work? They don't show up on liftoff
Yeah, that's my understanding of it, too. If you go back in time to any point in your life, you'll be exactly the same, with all the same experiences and the exact same thoughts running through your head. Every single atom in the entire universe will be exactly the same as it was at that exact moment, so of course you'll make the exact same decision.
The universe as a whole is just a huge, insanely complicated chemical reaction. Ultimately, we're free to make whatever choice we want, but that choice was what we were always going to choose.
It's like how flipping a coin or rolling a die isn't really random - if it were possible to gain an insanely in-depth understanding of all of the forces acting on the object, and you had the power to manipulate your throw to give it the exact force needed, you could have it land exactly how you want it to every time. Instead, we call the act random because it's too complicated for us to manipulate it effectively.
To be clear, I'm not a scientist, so I was trying to avoid getting into quantum physics, however if I'm not mistaken, there are some processes on the quantum level that seem to be irreversible or wholly unpredictable. As such, going back in time wouldn't guarantee the same outcome on a quantum level. However, afaik the effect that it would have on humans is purely speculative.
Additionally, it could be that our understanding of quantum phenomenon is similar to our understanding of the universe back when astrology was all the rage and people believed the stars and planets were unpredictable. It could be that we're working from the wrong frame of reference and as a result, it only appears as though things in the quantum realm are hard to predict if not straight-up unpredictable.
The spoiler works for me on memmy
I don't wanna get into a whole thing about it, but physics makes no guarantee that events will play out the same way twice under time. The stochastic nature of the universe is that every particle interaction creates a whole universe of possibilities, virtual particles, and the tail ends of that possibility are almost endless. Physics may easily break its own "rules", with small probability
So your mechanistic view is that if you rewind time, all the billiard balls will get hit the same way. I my probabalistic view, something new will happen. Of course, we can't time travel, so the whole hypothesis is pointless and undefeasible
Do you have anything to back up this belief? I'm genuinely curious. Afaik the idea that we're affected by quantum phenomenon is speculative. Even so, it wouldn't necessarily grant us free will. Even assuming that we're directly affected by quantum uncertainty, it doesn't mean we have free will unless we're able to control how it affects us. Our neurons still have to follow the laws of physics, even if the particles within them occasionally appear to ignore them (and that's assuming we won't eventually discover that there are rules governing how and when particles are seemingly able to ignore physics).
At best I think you could say that we have free will at the individual level, even though in the background that free will is driven by chemicals and quantum interactions. Just like a car doesn’t have free will because it’s inanimate, it also isn’t solely jostled around by the environment because it is powered and steered in its own self contained manner. You can keep going down a level and point to this choice being driven by this neuron firing or that sensory input overriding some reflex, but since free will is just a an English phrase coined long before we had any idea of the mechanics, is fair to say that at some level we’re driving our lives in comparison to any external force, and that predestination is so incomprehensible at our level as to be meaningless and “that” is free will, while at the same time there’s nothing above or outside of our consciousness and physics literally steering our mind against the stream of physics allowing us to “decide” to make a decision, rather than simply making a decision based on the infinite flowchart the universe is following.
All of that, of course, is outside the argument of whether all of physics is really predetermined or if it really is just infinities relative dice rolls every time one quantum bundle interacts with other.
Yeah but you are still going to die. I don't get how everyone decided that just because we can't know anything means we can know nothing.
I can't tell you what the weather will be like on this day ten years from now exactly, but I can tell you that it highly likely to be hot and dry. It might not be possible to ever fully fully predict what a human would do but some level of prediction will always be possible and is gradually rising over time. Hence the social sciences.
Looking past the technobabble...
The implications of quantum mechanics just reframes what it means to not have free will.
In classical physics, given the exact same setup you make the exact same choice every time.
In Quantum mechanics, given the same exact setup, you make the same choice some percentage of the time.
One is you being an automaton while the other is you being a flipped coin. Neither of those really feel like free will.
Except.
We are looking at this through a kind of implied metaphor that the brain is some mechanism, separate from "us" that we are forced to think "through'. That the mechanisms of the brain are somehow distorting or restricting what the underlying self can do.
But there is no deeper "self". We are the brain. We are the chemical cascade bouncing around through the neurons. We are the kinetic billiard balls of classical physics and the probability curves of quantum mechanics. It doesn't matter if the universe is deterministic and we would always have the same response to the same input or if it's statistical and we just have a baked "likelihood" of that response.
The way we respond or the biases that inform that likelihood is still us making a choice, because we are that underlying mechanism. Whether it's deterministic or not it's just an implementation detail of free will, not a counterargument.
Absolutely. And to add to that: quantum mechanics doesn't disproof determinism either. The fact that we use a probabilistic model to some success does not mean the universe has a probabilistic nature. Perhaps the process that determines the outcomes of quantum mechanics is a well behaved random function that can be understood in principle, but is computationally irreducible.
Cool so you have awareness of and/or control over the quantum particles that make up the baryons that make up the matter of your brain? No? Then you don't have free will.
Even just from a biological perspective the idea of free will is iffy.
Any decision you make today is influenced by a chain of decisions going back to the beginning of all decision making. Everything from what you had for breakfast to what your great grandfather had for breakfast to what tiktaalik had for breakfast has affected your own individual biology and internal chemistry to lead you to any choice you're about to make. Even locally there's so much going on in our bodies that we're not aware of and don't have control over and which are influenced by things we don't have control over that directs our daily lives in profound and complex ways.
The eminent Robert Sapolsky is able to put this idea into better terms than I am if anyone wants to peek into this area further.
Sure, we don't know everything and quantum mechanics deeply relies on statistics, but you'd be clutching at straws if you want to use that to hold on to the notion of free will or a god.
Not saying that there are no deep mysteries left and that neuroscience is right, but the notion of a free will is fairly obviously the last hold out of the geocentric model of the universe.
To be even less funny the ideal gas law is a single result from a subject that used to fill at least one huge dense textbook, produced in the 19th century. It is a statistics based branch of science.
Citation need on the entanglement part.
I like that idea, that quantum entanglement and free will are related :)
They aren't
That’s joyless of you
You should join scientology. They've got many interesting ideas you might like :)
The religion started by a science fiction author? Yeah, I’m sure there’s lots of cool ideas in there, but that doesn’t mean they’re believable. Keep that superiority complex high though