Asklemmy

43945 readers

716 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

What are some physics-based arguments against hard determinism? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by CodingAndCoffee@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

64 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] redballooon@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Slightly off topic, but the god-of-the-gaps has plenty of space in maths alone. The Incompleteness theorem by Goedel shows that in any mathematical system there will be unprovable truths.

I have no idea how to map that onto free will.

[–] CodingAndCoffee@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I've thought about this a little bit but again my math isn't so strong.

I guess approaching this more from computer science (something I'm more familiar with) you could compare with stuff like the NP Hard class of problems. And thus I offer that unproveable does not mean "wrong". We generally "know" that P=NP is wrong but we cannot prove it only because we lack omniscience. Us lacking the information (in the physics sense of the word i.e. Hawking radiation) doesn't mean the information isn't there to be quantified.