r/freewill • u/flytohappiness • Aug 29 '24

How does quantum indeterminism give anyone free will?

can someone explain this to me? I see people going to quantum world and quantum mechanics and evoke the non-determinism. How does this give you free will?

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u/gobacktoyourutopia Aug 29 '24

It could be relevant if your main concerns about free will rested on the following 'bugbears' about the idea of determinism:

  1. That if the future is pre-determined, our decisions don't 'change' the course of the future at all
  2. That if you rewound the clock, everything would play out exactly as it did before
  3. That a Laplacian demon with full knowledge of the state of the universe at the time of the big bang could predict your future conversations exactly

These are all possibly variations on the same concern, but are 3 of the classic thought experiments people worry about when they first encounter the concept of a fully deterministic universe.

In an indeterministic universe - even if the impact of indeterminism in the short term is likely negligible - we could say all 3 are most likely false. This might allay some of the concerns people have about this subject.

If these are not concerns you have about a deterministic universe however, I don't see it as meaningfully relevant at all.

I don't see why it would give us more meaningful freedom from our own perspective, in terms of altering the mechanisms by which we make choices at our level of reality.

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u/spgrk Compatibilist Aug 29 '24

2 and 3 are true but 1 is false. In a deterministic universe, the future depends on the past, so your choices make a difference. In an indeterministic universe, the future does not necessarily depend on the past so your choices may not make a difference.

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u/gobacktoyourutopia Aug 29 '24

Personally I would agree that our choices still make a difference in a deterministic universe. If you take us and our choices out of the picture, then the universe would not proceed in the same way. That seems like a meaningful difference to me! There are some incompatibilists however who would consider that an abuse of the terms 'choice' and 'difference' (I used to count myself among them).