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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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[+] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (16 children)

[removed by mod]

[–] CodingAndCoffee 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (15 children)

I like this take, but it also makes me feel like I could do a better job describing the intent of my question in more scientific terms. I hope to do so, here.

If one were to have sufficiently advanced technology akin to future MRI machines that could image the state of the human brain at Planck time resolution, my argument is that the very process of "a decision" (act, choice, idea, etc.) could be quantified. And if that is the case, then there must be chemical triggers and causal events that could have predicted that state of the matter and energy. And if that's the case, then we must really be products of our environment in an (currently) incomprehensibly large chemistry equation.

If any one decision could be quantized, reverse engineered, and then predicted through such means, then it stands to reason every decision can be. And if that's the case, free will cannot exist.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I believe your scenario conflicts with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. As far as I know it's one of the most ironclad laws of physics. As a quote I found in Wikipedia puts it,

The uncertainty principle actually states a fundamental property of quantum systems and is not a statement about the observational success of current technology.

[–] CodingAndCoffee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Maybe? My layman understanding of that topic is that the act of observation collapses alternative waveforms down to a single observed state. And if that's the case, why couldn't you "observe" the whole brain?

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

I don't know enough to give details but I've watched PBS Space Time enough to know the answer is no.

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