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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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That seems to me like an entirely inadequate description of free will, because the interesting question isn't how decisions lead to actions, but where the decisions themselves come from, i.e. whether the decisions are made freely. Unfortunately I've yet to see any definition of free will that doesn't rely on hand-waving the definition of words like "free" or "could". We have intuition about what those words mean, but they don't appear to have any rigorous definition that applies in the context of defining free will.