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

submitted 1 year ago by CodingAndCoffee@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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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[–] charonn0@startrek.website 35 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I have a theoretical degree in nuclear physics, and it seems to me that sub-atomic scale events like quantum tunneling suggest that reality is neither fully determined nor fully chaotic, but something in between: probabilistic. Whether we can consciously affect the probabilities of our own actions remains an open question, but we can at least say that causality is not the whole picture.

[–] bia@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Do you have a degree in theoretical physics, or do you theoretical have a degree. ;)

[–] charonn0@startrek.website 8 points 1 year ago

I'm a theoretical theoretical physicist. That's double the theory.

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