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

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

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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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[–] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 2 points 1 year ago (1 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@lemmy.world 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?

[–] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 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.