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 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.
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.
No.
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.
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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Indeterministic + free-will doesn’t exist and can’t exist. You literally end in impossible contradictions if you entail its existence in a consistent universe (as in, one where everything that exists is subjected to the same natural laws).
As a side note for OP, Hisenberg has proven there’s no such thing as “knowing the initial condition”.
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
The concept of belief is rooted in free will, is it not?
Not necessarily, no. You may believe something and yet not be free to believe otherwise.
Free will would mean that you believe in something without any ties to your environment, how were you raised up, your mental state, biological factors… etc. It would mean you started believing in something without any of those factors and just the concept of believing is predetermined by the fact that you are a human.
I don’t think you can defend such a crazy ass huge concept as free will by such a simple argument. You need to start with definition, what do you understand by free will. Is it a binary state? Or is your will free only to some degree?
I’d say free will exists. Sure, you are shaped by your environment, your genetics and so on, but in the end you can still decide what you want to do. In theory I could simply quit my job tomorrow, wander off into the sunset and then drown in the next ocean. Or as someone brought up criminals, you could stab someone just trying to disprove the universe is being deterministic.
If you know every single atom in this moment and had unlimited computing power, you’d probably be fantastic at telling the weather. Or if you map every neuron in someone’s brain you might know what they are about to do next. But at this point you are just looking at the present data and can maybe calculate the next few seconds (but not even that is 100% sure, just a very good guess).
The question is how far forward would you be able to look just based on current and past data? A minute? A day? A month? At that point the whole thing breaks apart in my opinion. It’s like looking at the stock market where you have tons of past data and think you can predict the future simply based on that.
There’s so many complex sources of randomness, the most likely solution is that things are just that, random. And you can decide what you want to do with your own life, at least until you die (or don’t, who knows what the future brings). Honestly the whole question is dumb, there is no single being that knows everything, so it really doesn’t matter. In the grand scheme of things even humanity is just a tiny blip on the timeline and we’re with very high probability not unique. Just based on numbers there is a high chance other life forms have existed before us, might exist right now with us (somewhere else in the universe I mean, there’s also plenty on Earth) and will exist in the future.
What makes you think anything you could do is not based on previous conditions? I don’t think any of your examples, by themself, say anything about determinism or free will.
If the universe would be fully deterministic and you’d have all Data and unlimited computing power you could predict any point in time.
That’s just saying a being with perfect knowledge knows everything. It’s nonsense.
We already know systems change when observed (See the current work on quantum physics). But there is no all-knowing being who could do the observation.