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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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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.