this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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Free will.
It's hard to accept, but free will is just not compatible with reality. It's like geocentrism. It seems obvious on its face because of our limited perspective, but nothing else in the universe makes sense if it's true. We live in a mechanistic universe and cause and effect doesn't suddenly stop when the atoms are part of a human.
I freaked out for about a week once I came to realize how much of our society is based on a scientific impossibility. Redesigning justice, ethics, healthcare, the very concept of blame, etc. to account for this is a daunting fucking prospect.
Subatomic particles act in insane ways that are absolutely not mechanical or predictible. A very limited size of object behaves "normally". I think believing that the universe mostly acts like our everyday objects is the skewed perspective.
Random behavior of subatomic particles doesn't make free will any likelier either though.
If they act at random on a makro level their randomness would average out to zero. And that actually checks out, since the mechanical forces of the atomic and molecular level are known, observable, and provable. An apple drops from the tree to the ground, every time. Causality is still a thing, even if not observable at the subatomic level.
The only way to imagine a subatomically based free will would be some mechanic over which we, at will, could change the randomness of subatomic particles to behave in a predictable pattern and on a scale that's grand enough to make the proverbial apple fall upward. Or at least make or synapses do something that they physically speaking wouldn't have done otherwise.
Free will is as likely as magic. In fact it would actually be some form of magic - a volitional breach of causality itself.
Not necessarily. An apple teetering on the edge of a cliff requires no grand change in initial conditions to have two very different journeys. If "you" are a metaphysical entity capable of altering the signals in your physical brain, your brain could deterministically amplify and enact your will, like gravity does to the apple on the cliff. If you have a metaphysical existence, this is a pretty reasonable mechanism for it to work.