I can't believe people still believe in free will and agency. I'm not aware of anything in biology or physics that suggests we have some magic spark in a mystical plane that gives us "free will". We just do stuff in response to stimulus. I would have thought this debate would die when neurologists started opening up people's brains and inducing massive personality shifts and various cognitive aberrations by poking people's brain meat with electrodes. It's just a false dichotomy left over from weird medieval religious nonsense.
God they're talking about choosing to act Killllll meeeeeee
I'm reading the intro to Infinite Thought btws feel free to check in here because I will be cataloging my distress relating to French people who spend too much time thinking and not enough time practicing with swords.
There is no mathematical trick to see when a ruleset for Langton's Ant will make a highway - the only way to know the ant's behavior is to run the process step by step. Physical constants seem to point towards a specific end for the cosmos. But the shape it takes between beginning and end? That is uncalculable. You have to let the process play out to know for sure. And that's before bits of matter start believing they can change the shape.
Maybe the only thing you need to make a free agent in a deterministic universe is the belief in free agency.
Sorry am I totally off base in my understanding of what is meant by "Free will" and it actually just means there's some degree of unpredictability at the micro scale?
No, you seem to understand the concept. I am attempting to suggest that the physical process of consciousness could create free will in an otherwise deterministic universe. Which is a pretty big assumption. But determinism itself is a rather large assumption, too. We can model the orbit of a planet or the chemical bonds of a molecule, and there is a predictive capacity in these models. An astronomer can tell you next when Mars and Earth are closest, a chemist how carbon will link up with various atoms. But it's still just a model; a simple story representing much more complicated processes. The position of the planets 100,00,00 years from now is unpredictable. Our models ignore quite a lot of gravity because it's very small and very inconsequential - in the short term. Maybe there is a mathematical formula to existence - all matter and energy accounted for and stuffed inside a formula. Or, maybe there isn't. All we know is, we haven't found it yet.