| This is a very common error people make when considering "free will". They mix in "predictability" to the concept. But predictability is not "free will". If I give you a choice between a million dollars or a painful lingering tortuous death, you will with for-the-sake-of-argument 100% choose the million dollars, of your own free will. It is no less what you will for the fact that anybody can predict it; it is certainly what you will. Will you deny that is what you will? Predictability also brings in a lot of contingency that people do not generally realize they are bringing in. If the universe is entirely material and there is no external reality, then good news! Your actions are already unpredictable. No conceivable machine built within the real physical universe could possibly fully predict your actions; you can prove this with some information theory considerations (the amount of information your actions leak about your internal state is not sufficient to nail down that internal state fully). So you have free will! Yet... if the universe is entirely material and there is no external reality, the universe may still be fully deterministic. Contrary to somewhat popular opinion, quantum mechanics is not intrinsically nondeterministic. It means you can't determine the outcome of certain events with any process we know from the inside, but the entire universe can absolutely have some sort of PRNG or something to determine everything that is going on and it could all be deterministic in ways that still work for QM. In which case, oops, no free will for you. So by this definition, the question is unanswerable from the inside. Unpredictability is not free will either. If by some amazing, but physically possible, set of circumstances, the decision about whether to turn left or right came down to one 50/50 outcome decided by a quantum waveform collapse, that still doesn't give you "free will" about the outcome. You don't get to pick the outcome. It was undecided and unpredictable, but it wasn't decided by your "will" either. If you're still not having enough fun yet, suppose "quantum" does "solve" free will. Which quantum outcomes make the difference? Suppose I build a perfectly-feasible quantum device[1] to flip a random coin, quantumly. Compare to a supposed quantum decision made "in" my "brain". How exactly is it that the latter is my "quantum free will" whereas the former is just a random decision made out in the universe? Just labeling a process "quantum" doesn't do anything. It's just wordplay in the end, substituting one undefinable term for another and calling it progress. There's still a crapton of work to show that the "quantum" provides the mechanism for "something else" to meaningfully interact with the world[2]. My "will" is not "randomness". And boy-oh-boy is that "something else" a can of worms of its own. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwIGnATzBTg [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41079700 |
I liked the explanation of kurzgesagt around this topic but it feels weird if our unverse is not random.
Like moving the goal post to 'what would a real random source look like' 'would that source be called god'.