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.

  • burningquestion@lemmy.world
    10·
    1 year ago

    Quantum mechanics presents the most meaningful challenge to determinism because unlike chaos theory it asserts that reality really is indeterminate. Physicists have been wrestling with this problem since quantum mechanics was formulated. Even Einstein tried to prove quantum indeterminacy was false, but he shrank from the implications of his own solutions.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory

    Spoiler: there’s no strong evidence for most hidden variable theories. There has been a revival of interest in some deterministic re-interpretations of quantum mechanics over the last few years (recommend Lee Smolin, he has a book and some talks on Youtube re this discussion), but right now, the prevailing theory is that reality really is just fundamentally indeterminate. Hey, I hate it, makes my skin crawl, but that’s most likely the way it is based on the science.

    EDIT – I’m not a strong advocate for free will in the abstract, but I do think the basic worldview underpinning certain forms of hard determinism has been superseded by a non-deterministic view in physics.

    EDIT – for greater precision/clarity

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
      2·
      1 year ago

      You don’t need a hidden variable for determinism though. Multiple worlds theory has no hidden variables but also no non-deterministic processes.