Sabine Hossenfelder:
I wish people would stop insisting they have free will. It’s terribly annoying. Insisting that free will exists is bad science, like insisting that horoscopes tell you something about the future – it’s not compatible with our knowledge about nature.
According to our best present understanding of the fundamental laws of nature, everything that happens in our universe is due to only four different forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear force. These forces have been extremely well studied, and they don’t leave any room for free will.
There are only two types of fundamental laws that appear in contemporary theories. One type is deterministic, which means that the past entirely predicts the future.
There is no free will in such a fundamental law because there is no freedom. The other type of law we know appears in quantum mechanics and has an indeterministic component which is random. This randomness cannot be influenced by anything, and in particular it cannot be influenced by you, whatever you think “you” are. There is no free will in such a fundamental law because there is no “will” – there is just some randomness sprinkled over the determinism.
In neither case do you have free will in any meaningful way.
Sabine Hossenfelder on her Blog Backreaction
Hello! I agree with you that free will is an illusion.
I also mentioned and discussed some of these issues with respect to spacetime, past, present and future in a very special post relying on psychology, sociology, philosophy and other disciplines to present a multipronged journey through a series of motivational, existential and analytical accounts. It is somewhat intriguingly entitled “🦅 SoundEagle in Best Moment Award from Moment Matters 🔖🏆”.
LikeLike