Reply To: Free anything never mind free will

[SteveInCO]

We certainly have the illusion of free will. Whether it’s just the fact that everything we’ve ever seen is interacting in a complicated way, too complicated for us to predict, so our actions seem at least somewhat indeterminate, is another question.

A lot of the arguments against free will are (ultimately) based on the premise that the universe is a gigantic mechanism, that given a set of states, you can predict all future states (in principle). The problem with that is, the universe is not, in fact, deterministic! Quantum mechanics introduces a fundamentally random element. It’s not like a die roll, where you could conceivably accurately measure the orientation speed, and direction of motion of the die and figure out how it will land. It just seems random to us because we don’t have the processing power (or measuring capability) in our heads to do it. QM is, apparently, *truly* random, with the equations describing the probability of different outcomes.

If there is a non-deterministic free will, this sort of thing might be what underpins it. It would mean that our free will isn’t a conscious phenomenon like we think it is, but it would also mean that predestination is false.