Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by DtnB 2697 days ago
how does basic physics tells us there is no free will? That is generally an argument about hard determinism which could be argued is invalidated by The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
1 comments

Randomness does not yield freedom. A robot connected to a truly random source (like a decaying radioactive substance) is no more free than a fully deterministic x86 chip.
no but the fact that something is not deterministic would preclude the idea that 'basic physics says there is no free will'
Sorry but that is exactly what I meant: the world is a) either deterministic or b) partially deterministic and partially random (for example quantum), and in either of these cases there's no way you can construct free will agents.

Arguably the b) version is not simple physics, but that's what I meant.