If I'm being completely honest, I dont really believe we have free will. Or we do, but in an almost entirely meaningless way on a civilizational scale. While you might be able to make small choices, material conditions and the flow of history ultimately decide the course of your life. We're all just products of our environment which none of us can change on our own, and as much as we can change our environment as a collective is decided upon by current conditions which are determined by oast conditions, etc. Basically i think the entirity of history was determined at the big bang, and were all just along for the ride.
The universe is not deterministic. Quantum mechanics tells us that at a very small scale, things seem fundamentally probabilistic. This means history was not determined at Big Bang. However, there's some bad news: this still does not mean free will exists. Anyone claiming that free will arises from quantum mechanics is a complete quack.
A lot of people discussing this seem to have this strange "negotiation" strategy, where in place of trying to prove free will exists, they take something that exists and then jump through a million hoops to claim it is free will. In my view, free will would require an interaction that only goes one way, something that changes the world but is not changed by it. This would break Newton III, and generate energy out of nothing. Believing it would require a lot more proof than it feeling like we have free will.
What are the implications of there being no free will? I don't think it means that choices don't matter (or exists), or that morality isn't real. You just have to take a bit of a different perspective on them, see them as models instead of physical reality existing outside ourselves.
I mean you're pretty much right but I wouldn't completely discount all of the non mainstream interpretations of quantum mechanics. Penrose (a nobel laurelate in physics) seems to be pretty convinced consciousness plays some role in quantum mechanics and I wouldn't just completely discount his opinion.
There are still a whole lot of unresolved questions when it comes to this stuff and I think we're in for another paradigm shift at some point in the future provided we don't capitalism ourselves back into the middle ages.
Yeah. David Chalmers, who's a big name in the philosophy of mind, has also been looking into this "quantum mind, free will through probability manipulation" idea. Seems unlikely to me but I wouldn't dismiss him out of hand.
It's getting likelier IMO.
I think materialist science ignores the mind-body problem too much, it cannot really be dismissed out of hand like it is today by most scientists. I have a feeling at some point in the near future quantum mechanics and/or neuroscience is gonna hit a wall and then it's gonna be back to the drawing board.
I agree that the question of consciousness is fascinating and isn't talked enough about by scientists, but I'd argue that free will (quantum or otherwise) isn't necessary for phenomenal experience and the quantum hypothesis doesn't look like the best shot at explaining consciousness.
deleted by creator
Kastrup is pretty dope. I'm not sure I agree with all of his conjectures about the nature of consciousness (idealism, universal consciousness etc.) but I feel like his base argument against reductive materialism is rock solid. I'm still pretty agnostic what metaphysic is actually the most coherent answer but I'm pretty sure reductive materialism is a dead end.
I had a conversation about it here a few days ago and it was pretty frustrating honestly, it's almost as if staunch materialists are unable to metacognize their own awareness. They just keep missing the point in ever more innovative ways.
deleted by creator
:zizek-fuck:
I agree with you but quantum bullshit soul doesn't necessarily need to brake laws of physics to affect outcomes.
The closest view I hold that could be considered spiritual in any way is this: For every probabilistic quantum superposition collapse, each outcome does happen, in proportion to the probability of each outcome. For example, if at a given moment, there is a 25% chance one quantum event happens and a 75% chance that the event does not happen, the universe branches into 4 child universes, 1 of which where the quantum event happened and 3 where the event did not happen.
I believe theoretical physicists refer to this as the Many Worlds Theory. And the implication of it being true is that every possible state of the universe from its initial conditions actually happens.
In terms of "free will", this would imply that you could not possibly exert influence over the collective system of states, as every branch that physics allows your consciousness to traverse gets traversed, but you can only perceive the one this instance of your consciousness resides in.