this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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What are some physics-based arguments against hard determinism? (self.asklemmy)
submitted 1 year ago by CodingAndCoffee 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€“] School_Lunch 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm far from knowledgeable about this, but the only thing I'm aware of that might disrupt determinism is quantum mechanics. Something about particles at that level not having set values until they are observed, making them truly random. I have no clue how that could lead to free will. We still have no control over it. It's more like they are the base that everything else is determined off of.

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

It controls us, so the randomness has free will, and since the randomness is a part of us, we have free will