Existence of Free Will in Determinism
Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2018 4:17 pm
One might intuitively think of determinism implying that free will does not exist; after all, free will contradicts determinism on face value because your entire history and the history of your environment, your genes and everything combined, influence the way your thoughts are generated in your brain through the influence of the atoms in your brain in the end causing your thoughts, which cause your actions.
But if you ignore your history/your environment's historical influences on you, to some degree, you can have free will because you will be left with only the desire, or mere thoughts felt as if it was genuinly your own to do certain actions.
It is essentially free will from ignorance.
But why would you ignore information? Because you cannot possible achieve it. There is a fundamental physical limit to how much we can know about the universe, and I am NOT talking about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle:
Imagine that you have to predict the future of every single particle in the entire universe from Big Bang. It would require computational ressources that would have to re-make the entire Big Bang from beginning to end. Because of the speed limit of light, computational ressources would be limited too, to well below the speed of light.
This means you will have to essentially make your own Big Bang from scratch, to accurately simulate Big Bang, you need a true (real) Big Bang, and you cannot have any equivalent of a true Big Bang corresponding to the one that caused our universe because we only have so much energy in our universe you cannot go above it. You need all the energy contained in our universe to re-create Big Bang. And it will take take 15 billion years to "simulate" 1 billion years into our future (from our current 14 billion years history).
It means nobody in our universe, not us, nor advanced aliens can ever predict the future. We can only make estimates, guesses, even though our universe is pre-determined.
But if you ignore your history/your environment's historical influences on you, to some degree, you can have free will because you will be left with only the desire, or mere thoughts felt as if it was genuinly your own to do certain actions.
It is essentially free will from ignorance.
But why would you ignore information? Because you cannot possible achieve it. There is a fundamental physical limit to how much we can know about the universe, and I am NOT talking about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle:
Imagine that you have to predict the future of every single particle in the entire universe from Big Bang. It would require computational ressources that would have to re-make the entire Big Bang from beginning to end. Because of the speed limit of light, computational ressources would be limited too, to well below the speed of light.
This means you will have to essentially make your own Big Bang from scratch, to accurately simulate Big Bang, you need a true (real) Big Bang, and you cannot have any equivalent of a true Big Bang corresponding to the one that caused our universe because we only have so much energy in our universe you cannot go above it. You need all the energy contained in our universe to re-create Big Bang. And it will take take 15 billion years to "simulate" 1 billion years into our future (from our current 14 billion years history).
It means nobody in our universe, not us, nor advanced aliens can ever predict the future. We can only make estimates, guesses, even though our universe is pre-determined.
