Do you have anything to back up this belief? I’m genuinely curious. Afaik the idea that we’re affected by quantum phenomenon is speculative. Even so, it wouldn’t necessarily grant us free will. Even assuming that we’re directly affected by quantum uncertainty, it doesn’t mean we have free will unless we’re able to control how it affects us. Our neurons still have to follow the laws of physics, even if the particles within them occasionally appear to ignore them (and that’s assuming we won’t eventually discover that there are rules governing how and when particles are seemingly able to ignore physics).
At best I think you could say that we have free will at the individual level, even though in the background that free will is driven by chemicals and quantum interactions. Just like a car doesn’t have free will because it’s inanimate, it also isn’t solely jostled around by the environment because it is powered and steered in its own self contained manner. You can keep going down a level and point to this choice being driven by this neuron firing or that sensory input overriding some reflex, but since free will is just a an English phrase coined long before we had any idea of the mechanics, is fair to say that at some level we’re driving our lives in comparison to any external force, and that predestination is so incomprehensible at our level as to be meaningless and “that” is free will, while at the same time there’s nothing above or outside of our consciousness and physics literally steering our mind against the stream of physics allowing us to “decide” to make a decision, rather than simply making a decision based on the infinite flowchart the universe is following.
All of that, of course, is outside the argument of whether all of physics is really predetermined or if it really is just infinities relative dice rolls every time one quantum bundle interacts with other.
Do you have anything to back up this belief? I’m genuinely curious. Afaik the idea that we’re affected by quantum phenomenon is speculative. Even so, it wouldn’t necessarily grant us free will. Even assuming that we’re directly affected by quantum uncertainty, it doesn’t mean we have free will unless we’re able to control how it affects us. Our neurons still have to follow the laws of physics, even if the particles within them occasionally appear to ignore them (and that’s assuming we won’t eventually discover that there are rules governing how and when particles are seemingly able to ignore physics).
At best I think you could say that we have free will at the individual level, even though in the background that free will is driven by chemicals and quantum interactions. Just like a car doesn’t have free will because it’s inanimate, it also isn’t solely jostled around by the environment because it is powered and steered in its own self contained manner. You can keep going down a level and point to this choice being driven by this neuron firing or that sensory input overriding some reflex, but since free will is just a an English phrase coined long before we had any idea of the mechanics, is fair to say that at some level we’re driving our lives in comparison to any external force, and that predestination is so incomprehensible at our level as to be meaningless and “that” is free will, while at the same time there’s nothing above or outside of our consciousness and physics literally steering our mind against the stream of physics allowing us to “decide” to make a decision, rather than simply making a decision based on the infinite flowchart the universe is following.
All of that, of course, is outside the argument of whether all of physics is really predetermined or if it really is just infinities relative dice rolls every time one quantum bundle interacts with other.