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

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Free will is tricky, but there's interpretations of quantum mechanics that aren't deterministic. (Although multiple worlds QM is deterministic!)

That's it. Everything else in physics supports determinism. The fundamental physics so far even conserves information/can be traced (CP-inverted) backwards.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

CP symmetry has been experimentally measured to be violated. What we still believe is that our world is invariant under CPT symmetry.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes. As I understand it, to preserve CPT during a T violation, you have to invert (break) CP, but it can be done.

So, you could theoretically make a kaon plasma with weird unidirectional (and so T-violating) non-thermodynamic behavior if you had a strong enough box, but in the process it would inevitably accumulate handedness and electric charge in a way that preserves information.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, when writing this I sort of had the notion that any argument against hard determinism using quantum mechanics would instead 1) actually prove multiverse theory, and 2) therefore still prove in favor of determinism.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Quantum Mechanics' hard indeterminism doesn't prove the multiverse interpretation, it's just one of several potential explanations for the randomness we see.