this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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What are some physics-based arguments against hard determinism? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I don't believe free will is real. I'm not a deep physics person (and relatively bad at math), but with my undergrad understanding of chemistry, classical mechanics, and electromagnetism, it seems most rational that we are creatures entirely controlled by our environments and what we ingest and inhale.

I'm not deeply familiar with chaos theory, but at a high level understand it to be that there's just too many variables for us to model, with current technology, today. To me that screams "god of the gaps" fallacy and implies that eventually we WILL have sufficiently powerful systems to accurately model at that scale...and there goes chaos theory.

So I'm asking you guys, fellow Lemmings, what are some arguments to causality / hard determinism, that are rooted entirely in physics and mechanics, that would give any credit to the idea that free will is real?

Please leave philosophical and religious arguments at the door.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The problem with your simplification is that it loses all predictability.

We can't predict an electron on a miniscule scale. But we certainly can predict the rock it is a part of falling.

We can't predict an electron. But we can determine and estimate with some probabilities. And on a higher scale the summation of individual behavior becomes quite predictable.

If we were to take only your electron argument, it implies we can not predict any material movement.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

But the macroscopic universe responds to the subatomic universe because of the existence of chaotic systems which can amplify the tiniest difference. The prediction of the rock breaks down over time because it’s interacting with macroscopic inputs from chaotic systems around it.