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this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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I'm mostly with you except for the determinism. Not only do we KNOW that the universe is fundamentally probabilistic and not deterministic, all our technology works extremely hard to combat random errors because small electronics are absolutely not deterministic, they are just engineered to have a low enough randomness so we can counteract it.
Did something change? Last time I checked we didn't know whether in the grand scale the universe is or isn't deterministic.
That we know that the universe isn't (seemingly) deterministic locally doesn't change anything about that.
I'm pretty sure it is essentially that any propensity the macro-scale universe has for the appearance of determinism is an illusion since the fundamental scales of the universe and everything it is built on are probabilistic. Nothing built on probabilistic foundations can be deterministic. It can appear to be. In large enough samples the law of large numbers smooths all the chaos out, but that is all our world is. Mathematically smoothed chaos. We as a species have known that for a very long time, but it has only begun to permeate the social zeitgeist in recent years and there is still a lot of pushback from certain sections of society.
The best theories are non-deterministic, but of course we don't know if they are the last word about reality. To put it another way, we don't know why the math is non-deterministic in our best equations.
The old equations were deterministic, but they turned out to be wrong. Something similar may happen here.
Allowing for quantum randomness does not help the free will argument. Randomness might be "free", but it is certainly not but "will".
But it does. If the universe was deterministic, choice would be impossible because all outcomes would be predetermined.
Quantum randomness may not directly provide free will but it does exclude determinism, which would make free will impossible.
This "choice" is just the manifestation what you are at that moment, the sum of everything that has influenced you up until this point. Whether that complex tangle of cause and effect was "determined" a million years ago or affected by random fluctuations the whole way, including a moment ago, doesn't change anything. "Free will" just doesn't make any sense, regardless of whether one considers predeterminism to be the alternative.