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If I have free will, then, when calling a flipped coin in the air, I am completely free to choose whether to uttering either the word "heads" or "tails". And, if somehow identical circumstances were to arise again, I would again have a free choice and could possibly choose to call out a different word, "this time around". But my act of calling out a word isn't just mental, it is physical. It causes physical vibrations in the air, and choosing different words causes different physical vibrations. And according to physics we can trace back the events leading up to the vibration in the air, which are caused by vibrations in my larynx and the shape of my mouth, each pulled in turn by contractions of muscle fibres that are happen when they are bathed in acetylcholine released by neurons attached to those fibers. The neurons are in turn linked together by electrical and chemical connections, all in turn following the laws of electrical and chemical potentials though their interactions with each other, each in turn following the laws of physics. If I had a free choice, then somewhere that free choice interacts with the physical environment. If the same situation were somehow to truly arise again, as in the state of my brain is the same, the wind touching my skin is identical, the radiation falling from the sun on my face is identical, and I have a free choice, then the evolution of the state of me and the entire worlds diverges at some point, the point at which I make a free choice. Quantum mechanics does allow divergence similar to this. In the observation of measurements in quantum mechanics, quantum theory says that identically prepared experiments can yield different results in which the probability of each result following the Born rule. However these results are random, and not based on a free choice. If we try to use measurement as a way to cause the state of the world to diverge based on my free choice, then I could be using my free choice to violate the Born rule, which could then in turn let me freely violate the conservation of energy and conservation of momentum, etc. I acknowledge that our understanding of quantum physics isn't complete. The so-called vacuum catastrophe remains unexplained as just one example. And what the heck is qualia anyways? So it may be possible that a later theory does, somehow, give an opening for free will. But just as the theory of the earth being flat was refined to be a sphere and then later refined into an oblate spheroid, each refinement of physics theories cannot stray too far from the previous one, as all the previous experimental results have to be maintained. Thus any updated version of quantum physics will need to maintain something close to unitary evolution of quantum states and it will need something close to the Born rule to make quantum events that appear to follow a random distribution, and will want to at least nearly respect conservation of energy and momentum. Thus I remain skeptical of any refinement of physics ever enabling free will. But yeah, maybe it isn't entirely impossible. |