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What are some physics-based arguments against hard determinism? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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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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[–] 11 points 3 years ago (1 child)

Free will can be defined as:

A state of existence in which one’s decisions are a predictor of one’s actions.

I don’t see where that conflicts with determinism, honestly. It’s two different levels of analysis.

If you define free will as, by definition, something that breaks the laws of physics, then free will, by definition, does not exist.

Kinda like when someone defines “magic” the same way. If “magic” is by definition something impossible, then by definition it doesn’t exist.

The questions get a lot more interesting when you define these things in a way that doesn’t make them, by definition, non-existent.

Maybe this type of reasoning should be called Trivial Dismissal.

Another example. If you define God as a man in the sky who controls everything, you’re not really an intellectual tour de force if you conclude he doesn’t exist. It’s the more interesting definitions of God that lead to more interesting discussion of whether God exists.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years 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.

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