You react to choices the specific way you do because of experiences you’ve had previously.
Reverse time without changing anything, you’ll always make the same choices because you’re having the same thoughts each time every time, because you’ve been conditioned the way you are.
The universe doesn’t “know” where it’s going, but the plan is already in action. You can choose whatever you want to do, but if you were the same person in the same circumstance, you would and will always make the same decision.
The question is underspecified. Why do you want to know if free will exists? What will you do differently if it does exist vs if it does not exist?
This is similar to questions like, “is water wet?” You can generate endless debate on the topic, but it’s all intellectual masturbation until you are genuinely looking for the answer to a specific question.
I like this point of view. Also because it reminds me of Douglas Adams with his “42” thing.
I think it’s important because it affects how we treat each other. If there is no free will, Heaven and Hell make no sense and nobody is “evil”. People like sociopaths who deliberately harm others for personal gain don’t deserve to be punished. They deserve empathy like everyone else, becase if we had their genetic make-up and their life experiences, we would be sociopaths too. I believe people who commit crimes should be helped rather than punished, and that’s partly because I don’t believe in free will.
No.
My brother and I have been having an ongoing debate about this and Simulation Theory for a good few years.
In my mind, it’s a pointless question to try and answer. It makes for a nice thought experiment, but actually having a belief in it is useless.
Hard determinist here. It doesn’t make the future predictable by me, but I don’t see how randomness could really occur. And then likewise there’s no such thing as free will.
I think it’s more complicated than free will existing or not.
If you knew every single possible value about the universe at its start and had a perfectly accurate model of physics, you could theoretically predict/simulate everything that would ever happen. For practical reasons, though, that’s impossible, even ignoring weird quantum effects, for the simple reason that that is a lot of data points, more than any of us could reasonably keep track of- it’s like how, in sufficiently controlled conditions, a fair dice can roll the exact same number 100% of the time, but there are enough variables that are hard enough to control for in a normal situation that it’s basically random.
Similarly, if you knew everything about every human on Earth, you could theoretically predict exactly what any of them would do at any given moment. Of course, that’s just not practical- the body and brain are a machine that is constantly taking in input and adapting to it, so in order to perfectly predict someone’s thoughts and actions, you’d need to know every single detail of every single thing that has ever happened to them, no matter how small. Then, you’d need to account for the fact that they’re interacting with hundreds of other people, who are also constantly changing and adapting. It’s just not possible to predict or control a person for any reasonable length of time like that, because one tiny interaction could throw off the entire model.
Just look at current work with AI- our modern machine learning algorithms are much more well-understood and are trained in much more contained environments than any human mind, and yet we still need to manually reign them in and sift through the data to prevent them from going off the rails.
So, technically, I suppose free will doesn’t exist. For practical purposes, though, what we have is indistinguishable from free will, so there’s not much point getting riled up about it.
I live my life as if I have unlimited free will, and I view the world as if everyone else is fully determined by their circumstances. And then I just ignore the contradiction. Ez pz
Best answer.
You forget, the underpinnings of physics involve a heavy dose of randomness. Contrary to the opinion of a certain famous scientist, God does, in fact, play dice. Lots and lots of dice.
So no, the universe is not deterministic.
Note that this doesn’t mean free will exists. Your decisions may not be entirely predetermined, but them being determined by random chance doesn’t fit the definition of free will, either.
Throughout human history we say things can’t be done until they suddenly get done. I’m half assing it for all free will discussions, and leaping to the conclusion that its deterministic in a way we haven’t yet discovered. My shortcut is wrong, but in such an oh-so-right way! :P
So that’s a topic that fascinated so many people forever.
With all these people fascinated by it, some of them weirdos put their whole life’s at it.
And these weirdos came to a few absolutely terrifying conclusions:
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The ultimate future is predictable: 2nd law of thermal dynamics means the universe will eventually end with energy being equal everywhere, so there is nothing because there is no difference. That’s the heat death of the universe.
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Otherwise nothing is absolutely predictable: the uncertainty principle says you can either know the precise position of a particle, or you know the precise movement of a particle, you can’t know both at the same time. So yeh if you know the initial condition you can make a prediction, but you can’t know the precise initial condition at particle level, and since the world is made of particles, you can only make imprecise predictions without 100% certainty.
You could argue that the human mind is a quantum machine. You don’t know it’s initial condition. Nor do you know the precise initial condition of every human mind in the world. The impreciseness of any prediction, even if it could be small individually, adds up in the scale of the world, the universe. So that can be you foundation of free will, up to the heat death.
The fact that something is random doesn’t really mean that it is under some sort of conscious control of the individual whose tiniest constituent parts behave in random ways though.
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Free will is way too vague of a concept, that it’s probably not worth pursuing the answer.
That’s a wild question.
And I asked myself this earlier in the shower.
I decided I would probably never know, and ended up upset I needed to get out and get ready for work.
Sometimes I wonder if the cosmic joke is we could comprehend a situation like free will, but never actually find out of it exists.
Also, specifically addressing your spoiler,
spoiler
Any quantum mechanical interpretation of the world (read: any valid interpretation of the world) finds that it is provably impossible to know the full initial conditions of any system, even a single particle, sufficiently enough to make any predictive model of it, soooo
It can still be deterministic I guess, just not knowably.
Deterministic with no actual free will, but complex enough that we’ll never be able to tell the difference. Essentially, our choices may technically be predetermined but for all intents and purposes, they are indistinguishable from free will and can’t be predicted.
I have the feeling most people cling to free will as a concept because not having free will raises questions if a “self” truly exists. However the existence of free will can be as scary if not more, since how could we define a “self” if it could freely do something not based on what defines it.
Here is a good lecture from Robert Sapolsky on Human behavioral biology that will replace your question with more questions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fAI’m fairly certain free will does not exist. There’s really no solid evidence for it, and no credible scientific mechanic by which it could operate.
Quantum physics provides strong evidence that the future is not deterministic, though it can produce deterministic-like results in larger systems.
