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Do you believe in free will? (lemmy.world)

submitted 17 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

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?