So that’s a topic that fascinated so many people forever.
With all these people fascinated by it, some of them weirdos put their whole life’s at it.
And these weirdos came to a few absolutely terrifying conclusions:
The ultimate future is predictable: 2nd law of thermal dynamics means the universe will eventually end with energy being equal everywhere, so there is nothing because there is no difference. That’s the heat death of the universe.
Otherwise nothing is absolutely predictable: the uncertainty principle says you can either know the precise position of a particle, or you know the precise movement of a particle, you can’t know both at the same time. So yeh if you know the initial condition you can make a prediction, but you can’t know the precise initial condition at particle level, and since the world is made of particles, you can only make imprecise predictions without 100% certainty.
You could argue that the human mind is a quantum machine. You don’t know it’s initial condition. Nor do you know the precise initial condition of every human mind in the world. The impreciseness of any prediction, even if it could be small individually, adds up in the scale of the world, the universe. So that can be you foundation of free will, up to the heat death.
The fact that something is random doesn’t really mean that it is under some sort of conscious control of the individual whose tiniest constituent parts behave in random ways though.
So that’s a topic that fascinated so many people forever.
With all these people fascinated by it, some of them weirdos put their whole life’s at it.
And these weirdos came to a few absolutely terrifying conclusions:
The ultimate future is predictable: 2nd law of thermal dynamics means the universe will eventually end with energy being equal everywhere, so there is nothing because there is no difference. That’s the heat death of the universe.
Otherwise nothing is absolutely predictable: the uncertainty principle says you can either know the precise position of a particle, or you know the precise movement of a particle, you can’t know both at the same time. So yeh if you know the initial condition you can make a prediction, but you can’t know the precise initial condition at particle level, and since the world is made of particles, you can only make imprecise predictions without 100% certainty.
You could argue that the human mind is a quantum machine. You don’t know it’s initial condition. Nor do you know the precise initial condition of every human mind in the world. The impreciseness of any prediction, even if it could be small individually, adds up in the scale of the world, the universe. So that can be you foundation of free will, up to the heat death.
The fact that something is random doesn’t really mean that it is under some sort of conscious control of the individual whose tiniest constituent parts behave in random ways though.