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by outlace 2756 days ago
The idea that randomness gives rise to free will is ludicrous. If my brain randomly chooses to eat an apple on Monday and randomly chooses to eat a Pear on Tuesday how is that giving me more free will than if my brain was predetermined to choose an Apple then a Pear.

There is no way to even conceive of what free will could be, determined or not. Either the activity of your brain is causally determined by previous brain states and interactions with the environment plus or minus randomness, neither option gives you the intuitive notion of free will.

Edit: also the Nobel winner Gerard t’Hooft argues that even these quasar experiments don’t rule out determinism. He argues that any closed deterministic system will have correlations across any distance in spacetime.

1 comments

You may or may not have "true" free will with randomness, you definitely can't have it with determinism.

Random just means unpredictable. It means that the information about whether your eat a pear or an apple is nowhere to be found in the universe. We can only see it after the fact. Something has been injected in the universe from outside.

That something is undecidable by definition, therefore, it is outside the realm of science, and it may very well be free will, god, a soul, whatever. Having that randomness leaves an opening for metaphysical free will.

On the opposite, without randomness that form of free will is impossible. Everything is determined and science doesn't leave any space for these concepts.

So if this metaphysical 'force' is deciding your actions, that still is not free will. You can posit anything as the ultimate cause of your activity but that isn't free will, it's just a higher-level cause. Either things are ultimately caused (at whatever level, metaphysical or not) or they're just acausally random or some combination. Pushing free will into the realm of souls and God doesn't help.

However, your point about unpredictability is right. There are some processes that are fundamentally unpredictable, but this unpredictability can and does occur in a completely deterministic setting.

A completely closed deterministic system will have processes that are unpredictable to agents acting within the closed system, this is the nature of computational irreducibility as elaborated by Stephen Wolfram and more recently Tim Palmer.

Personally, I certainly hope we live in a deterministic universe because a fundamentally random or a-causal universe would be nihilistic to me. If things just happened for no reason then that seems far more distressing than the universe following (possibly a few elegant) well-posed and deterministic rules, even if some aspects of its future evolution are unpredictable due to computational irreducibility.