I think I remember that one, unless it's a reoccurring element in choose your own adventures. It was about ice cream and parallel universes or time travel or something right?

How would you know when to turn to that page though?

If it tells you at the start to turn to that page and you do, does it tell you the story from 80-90% of the way through? Or is it a totally new short story since you haven't started yet?

F

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')

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

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?

Edit: how the fuck do spoilers work? They don't show up on liftoff

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.

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.

It's like the "are we living in a simulation" question. It's impossible to prove or disprove and ultimately does not affect our lives in any way that we can control. Just a thought experiment.

It can in theory be disproved - if we ever manage to prove that universe is deterministic, free will by definition cannot exist.

There are so many cases like that. For example, define intelligence. If you try to, you'll run in loops of equally undefined abstract concepts.

And that's basically what philosophy is about.

The Choose Your Own Adventure series of books, iirc.

Sam's explanation of free will is compelling and difficult to argue against. The way we feel about it reveals something about us. He cites examples of people who found comfort in the idea of an absence of free will but also people who are terrified of the idea. Meanwhile, the universe hasn't apparently changed. The more I think about this stuff, the more I come to believe that we construct the world in our imaginations and fit the data to that model, not the other way round. We see what we want to see.

It was predetermined that I replied to your comment.

A team has been dispatched to your location.

When I first played Life Is Strange I already knew about the choice at the end, but without context it didn't really mean much to me. I thought that over the course of the game I'd come to prefer one option over the other.

By the time the final mission started I was still very much on the fence, so I went and choose the third option: Closing the game and leaving it's characters in a limbo of uncertainty