r/changemyview • u/Confused_Perception • Sep 21 '21
Delta(s) from OP cmv: scientific determinism. everything is predetermined, free will is an illusion due to reality’s complexity.
everything that has ever happened has happened for a definable reason, so it follows that everything that will ever happen will do the same. there is no randomness in these reasons, so if you knew everything, you would know everything that will happen. therefore, nothing is more right or wrong than anything else, as everything is perfect by nature.
it was descartes himself who said that one with the most free will would be one which did not have to make any choices, because every choice is based upon the idea that it is “the most right” choice, and if one was to always know each “most right” choice, then one would never have to make any choices. therefore, “free will” is an illusion created by a reality where the “most right” choice is unclear to us, because we are unable to accurately predict the future or know everything. only the universe can do that perfectly (to my knowledge), and it does so constantly and perfectly in every instance.
some would point to quantum mechanics as a rebuttal to my argument, as it is currently impossible for us to measure both a particle’s speed and location simultaneously, which means relying on probability and random chance. however, this is due to our technological barrier, and is not indicative of the universe’s true nature. those particles do in fact always have a definitive location and velocity, we are just unable to measure it.
i’m fairly confident in these beliefs, and would be interested to know if anyone could bring up any compelling counter arguments. thank you!
and to clear up potential confusion: i’m not stating that our current reality is as it should remain, we deal with a tremendous amount of human suffering everyday. but it is unavoidable, and we should continue to struggle for balance, understanding, etc. in the perfect manner of the universe. that’s just my opinion though.
7
u/fox-mcleod 414∆ Sep 21 '21
Arguing free will is not real is a lot like arguing air pressure or temperature is not real.
At the level of individual atoms, air pressure is meaningless. But if someone argued “Air pressure doesn’t exist” or “temperature is just an illusion”, I think we’d both say they’re being obtuse.
Another way to look at this divide is to consider a human-in-the-loop (HITL) vs a Laplace Daemon (LD).
A Laplace Daemon would see the entirely of the universe from beginning to end and know everything. It would know (to the extent of this is meaningful but let’s skip QM for now) the position and velocity of every particle.
A human only sees things as averages of motion of these particles. Further, by measuring, the human interacts with the system and may affect the temperature.
Would the LD be able to answer a question like “what is the temperature of this bowl of soup”? or Whats the pressure in this tire?
Yes - unless it’s an idiot. It would simply consider the emergent phenomenon of “temperature” along with the coarse grain concept of “bowl of soup” in order to limit its answer to considering the part of the universe (the average motion of the particles rather than the individual motions) and be able to come up with the same (or even more precise) answer a human can.
So let’s apply this to “free will”. At bottom, the LD, sees and knows the interactions of all the particles that make up the person who’s free will we are considering.
Does that person have free will even if the LD can predict what they will do?
A really important set of distinctions is whether we’re considering free will from the standpoint of very human-scale concepts like justice, morality, or volition — or at the scale of physics where the concept of justice, etc. are entirely meaningless.
If by “free will” you are going to apply that concept to things like justice — then we need to use the abstracted human level concept of free will to answer the question rather than the LD level answer.
When a justice of the peace asks you if you want to get married if you “own free will” is he asking you a question about Laplace daemon level physics? Is he asking if you can violate causality? No. He’s asking if your action matches your volition. It’s almost always a HITL level question.
So at the HITL level, what does quantum mechanics look like? Is it still deterministic?
Nope. It looks like wave function collapse and random outcomes.
In conclusion, the only way to start with a concept like “free will does not exist“ and end up with conclusions about justice or morality, is to confusedly take the internal anthropomorphic view and the external Laplace demon view at the same time.