There is an argument that free will doesn’t exist because there is an unbroken chain of causality we are riding on that dates back to the beginning of time. Meaning that every time you fart, scratch your nose, blink, or make lifechanging decisions there is a pre existing reason. These reasons might be anything from the sensory enviornment you were in the past minute, the hormone levels in your bloodstream at the time, hormones you were exposed to as a baby, or how you were parented growing up. No thought you have is really original and is more like a domino affect of neurons firing off in reaction to what you have experienced. What are your thoughts on this?
In a deterministic reality, where all things are due and subject to causation, there can be no free will. If we did not live in a causal reality, we’d never be able to make accurate predictions or models.
“Randomness” is not free will either. If you’re not in complete control of your influences, then you can not be said to have free will. Randomness does nothing to help the argument for free will.
With that said. Regardless of the existence of free will, what does exists is your awareness of what it’s like to be you. To be in the circumstances that currently govern your life. And in that awareness exists the boundless capacity for compassion. Once you understand that no one is in control of their lives, that all things are causal, it allows you to be less judgmental.
"If a man is crossing a river and an empty boat collides with his own skiff, he will not become angry. He will simply guide his boat around it.
But if he sees a person in the boat, he will shout at the other to steer clear. If the shout is not heard, and the boats collide, he will curse the other person.
Yet, if the boat were empty, he would not be angry."
— Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi)
I wrote a simple explanation of determinism in a blog post earlier this year (there’s an audio version available as well.) https://mrfunkedude.wordpress.com/2024/12/03/following-the-strings/
Just pointing this out - we don’t live in a deterministic reality. Quantum interactions are inherently probabilistic and can’t be predetermined. This usually doesn’t matter, but you can chain larger classical systems onto quantum interactions (i.e. Schrödingers cat), which makes them non-deterministic as well.
Thanks for the reply.
“inherently probabilistic and can’t be determined” is just another way of saying “random” or “we don’t know yet”.
If reality was not deterministic, the reliability of models and predictions in physics would be upended.
Well yes, it means “random”. Of course there’s always a chance that we’re just missing something fundamental, but it would mean that literally every model we have is completely wrong. Unless we find indications for that (and there don’t seem to be any so far) I think it’s fair to assume that quantum interactions are actually random.
No, because reality is not deterministic, yet the reliability of models and predictions in physics is not upended. There simply are enough of these interactions happening that, in the “macro” world, we can talk about them deterministically, since they are probabilistic. But that doesn’t mean the “micro” interactions are deterministic, and it also doesn’t mean it’s impossible for a “macro” interaction to be non-deterministic - again, the example of Schrödingers cat comes to mind.
You could literally build a non-deterministic experiment right now if you wanted to.
In a sense it is deterministic. It’s just when most people think of determinism, they think of conditioning on the initial state, and that this provides sufficient constraints to predict all future states. In quantum mechanics, conditioning on the initial state does not provide sufficient constraints to predict all future states and leads to ambiguities. However, if you condition on both the initial state and the final state, you appear to get determinstic values for all of the observables. It seems to be deterministic, just not forwards-in-time deterministic, but “all-at-once” deterministic. Laplace’s demon would just need to know the very initial conditions of the universe and the very final conditions.
Hm, I’m not sure if I understand the abstract correctly.
Say I build two Schrödingers cat experiments next to each other, and connect them so that each vial dispersing the poison also makes the other vial disperse poison. I go away, and come back to both vials having triggered and both nuclear decays having occurred. How could I determine the path the whole system took?
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