That’s the free will of the universe in action.

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Yes, but none of that refutes the argument that we lack free will. The trillions of interactions leading up to an ‘action’ on our part can be random, determined, or some mixture - but they still ‘cause’ our next action, rather than our 'free will ’ causing the action. If you believe in free will, you believe in a magical quality we possess which is somehow neither random (else it wouldnt be ‘will’) nor determined (else it wouldn’t be ‘free’)

Ridiculous, this is like some facebook post from my religious uncle. Brains are quantum entangled with the body? Bro you don’t even know what that means or that information is not preserved in entanglement

I almost want to ask for a source but I shutter to think what might be dredged up

What? Every chemical reaction within every neuron is still governed by physics. Just because we don’t understand how the physics works doesn’t mean we get to throw physics out the window. Even then, even if we ignore the physical aspect of it, from a philosophical standpoint, you can easily argue that free will doesn’t exist.

Let’s say for a moment that I’m wanting to go get dinner somewhere, and as I’m walking there, I start to cross a street and get hit by a bus. Death comes for me and he says, “listen, I’ll give you a second chance. I’ll rewind time to the moment before you decided to cross the street without looking, and if you make it across, I’ll leave you alone.” I take the offer (who wouldn’t), and time gets rewound. I’m now standing at the curb, getting ready to cross the street, with no memory of the events that transpired after I stepped off the curb. Will I try to cross the street again, or will I decide not to?

Edit: how the fuck do spoilers work? They don’t show up on liftoff

Looking past the technobabble…

The implications of quantum mechanics just reframes what it means to not have free will.

In classical physics, given the exact same setup you make the exact same choice every time.

In Quantum mechanics, given the same exact setup, you make the same choice some percentage of the time.

One is you being an automaton while the other is you being a flipped coin. Neither of those really feel like free will.

Except.

We are looking at this through a kind of implied metaphor that the brain is some mechanism, separate from “us” that we are forced to think "through’. That the mechanisms of the brain are somehow distorting or restricting what the underlying self can do.

But there is no deeper “self”. We are the brain. We are the chemical cascade bouncing around through the neurons. We are the kinetic billiard balls of classical physics and the probability curves of quantum mechanics. It doesn’t matter if the universe is deterministic and we would always have the same response to the same input or if it’s statistical and we just have a baked “likelihood” of that response.

The way we respond or the biases that inform that likelihood is still us making a choice, because we are that underlying mechanism. Whether it’s deterministic or not it’s just an implementation detail of free will, not a counterargument.

Cool so you have awareness of and/or control over the quantum particles that make up the baryons that make up the matter of your brain? No? Then you don’t have free will.

To be even less funny the ideal gas law is a single result from a subject that used to fill at least one huge dense textbook, produced in the 19th century. It is a statistics based branch of science.

are somehow statisical-chemical-electric sugar powered supercomputers that have entangled state.

Citation need on the entanglement part.

Sure, we don’t know everything and quantum mechanics deeply relies on statistics, but you’d be clutching at straws if you want to use that to hold on to the notion of free will or a god.

Not saying that there are no deep mysteries left and that neuroscience is right, but the notion of a free will is fairly obviously the last hold out of the geocentric model of the universe.

I like that idea, that quantum entanglement and free will are related :)

It’s like the “are we living in a simulation” question. It’s impossible to prove or disprove and ultimately does not affect our lives in any way that we can control. Just a thought experiment.

It can in theory be disproved - if we ever manage to prove that universe is deterministic, free will by definition cannot exist.

There are so many cases like that. For example, define intelligence. If you try to, you’ll run in loops of equally undefined abstract concepts.

And that’s basically what philosophy is about.

I think the the divide in this is Thought vs Action. You can choose to think of whatever. Imagine things whether possible or not.

To be able to act on those thoughts could be an entirely different thing.

But even with thoughts, we’re still limited by our humanity. For you and I, we could likely find common ground on many things. Come to similar conclusions. But trying this with any other animal and it all falls apart.

Absolutely right. There are of course definitions of free will that would grant us free will, like one could argue that a traffic light has free will, but there is no reason to believe that humans are not just reducible to a set of (complicated) biological processes. People of all religions and even plenty of atheists believe that somehow human consciousness is something special that transcends the material laws of the universe. That is what most people still seem to think, so it seems. Even I would dare to say that most people, including you, who know that this is likely false still have some deep rooted belief in the illusion. You may not believe in truly free will, but that is only the top of the iceberg part of your mind. The rest is deeply invested in the notion.

Interestingly Buddhists have as one of their central tenets that there is not only no free will, but not even a self. The idea of a self is nothing more than an idea. It has a function, but is inherently an empty construct. What it means to be a human can only be experienced in the moment. If one looks closely enough at that experience, the illusion of free will can be relented even at its deepest root. Paradoxically, I can report, this is incredibly freeing.

The Choose Your Own Adventure series of books, iirc.

Sam’s explanation of free will is compelling and difficult to argue against. The way we feel about it reveals something about us. He cites examples of people who found comfort in the idea of an absence of free will but also people who are terrified of the idea. Meanwhile, the universe hasn’t apparently changed. The more I think about this stuff, the more I come to believe that we construct the world in our imaginations and fit the data to that model, not the other way round. We see what we want to see.

When I first played Life Is Strange I already knew about the choice at the end, but without context it didn’t really mean much to me. I thought that over the course of the game I’d come to prefer one option over the other.

By the time the final mission started I was still very much on the fence, so I went and choose the third option: Closing the game and leaving it’s characters in a limbo of uncertainty

A team has been dispatched to your location.

I think I remember that one, unless it’s a reoccurring element in choose your own adventures. It was about ice cream and parallel universes or time travel or something right?

Although it’s worth mentioning that randomness doesn’t make “free will” real.

No. On average things are average. So while not everything can be fully predicted you don’t usually need to. A laser, a transistor, a diode are all devices that depend on QM theories being true. We have lasers, we have screens, we have neat flashlights, we have computers. Just because we can’t say everything doesn’t mean we can say nothing. Every time your lungs fill it is only because vacuums are unlikely, not impossible just unlikely.

Uncertainty doesn’t save free will, at most it sets limits to it.

There is a level of uncertainty and probability and the smallest level of our universe. The deterministic model of the universe has been put to rest a century ago.

This is true, what we instead have is a probabilistic model of the universe, which still obeys very clear statistical rules and probabilities, also seemingly leaving no room for free will.

A dice roll doesn’t have more free will just because it’s random.

I think you are not getting it quite right. Those “low level” things are predetermined. Where you get the uncertainty is that there is always a bigger or smaller picture.

Determinism and uncertainty are both perfectly compatible with each other.

• if you agree to this hypothesis, turn to page 72 70% of the times
• if you disagree, turn to page 72 40% of the times
• if you’re viewing this through polarized glasses, turn to page 72 80% of the times

Unless superdeterminism is true. But does it make a difference anyway? “Free will” is overrated.

The fact that quantum mechanics models physical processes stochastically does not mean that there is free will neither that the universe is non-deterministic. This statement is strictly true.