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.

  • @[email protected]
    3•9 months ago

    TL;DR: Tiny differences in input become huge differences in output in a chaotic system

    You’re missing a “can” there. Tiny differences in input can become huge differences in output in a chaotic system. (Infinitely) many chaotic systems are structurally stable. For example consider systems that have the Anosov property.