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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Someone I used to work with went through a period where they were overworked and stressed out, but at the same time having some really bad thoughts about free will being an illusion. The theory was something like this:
It sounds kind of plausible to be honest, but there is just no point in entertaining it. If we don't have free will, we'll never know for sure and cannot change it. If it feels like we have free will does it matter? Anyway, my colleague quit a short while later and went on to do other things and seemed much happier, so I guess it was just a weird period in his life.
That's basically my argument aswell. This however doesn't imply fatalism. It's not like you can just sit around and see what happens. Or you can but nothing happens except you'll just get bored and then the desire to do something else appears. Then you get up and go do that all the while thinking you made that choice.
I just chose to downvote your comment /s
Lack of free will doesn't mean choices aren't real. Just that what ever you choose is the only thing you could have chosen. You could not have done otherwise.
That doesnt make sense ๐
If you're standing in line at the grocery store looking at the chocolate bars next to the register you can either grab one or not. These are your choices. If you just ate a huge pizza before you probably don't feel like eating chocolate too but if you're hungry you can't resist it. In both cases you're making a choice but in both cases the choice is influenced by outside factors that you did not choose.
What does it mean when you say that you could have done otherwise? If you're super hungry and can't resist buying the chocolate bar then that's the only thing you could have done. If you go back in time to the same situation and nothing else changes then you're still hungry as fuck and are going to grab the chocolate bar. Something in your circumstances has to change in order for you to act differently but it's still outside force affecting your behaviour.
The problem there is that if you want to compute the behaviour of say 2 electrons, you need a huge computer with avagadro number of particles. Now imagine the number of particles you need to simulate the numbers of particles in the universe we observe. That number is mind bogglingly big. If we had the that much stuff lying around, it would interact with things and we could observe the consequences of these interactions.