From chaos to free will
A crude understanding of physics sees determinism at work in the Universe. Luckily, molecular uncertainty ensures this isn’t so
George Ellis at the aeon website
Again, if you are a free will skeptic isn’t this “confounding thing” no less only what it could ever have been? Either from inside your head, inside the heads of others or wholly in sync with nature going back to the explanation for nature’s existence itself.
Thus, once we admit that we are all stuck here until “I” itself is understood definitively, these “intellectual assessments” can only be but one more component of what seems to be an inherently problematic examination itself. Unless, of course, I keep missing something here that makes my own ambiguity/ambivalence go away.
And what might that be?
Constraints would become but one more domino toppling over in a causal chain that includes all of the dominos in all of the material interaction that there ever were, are now or ever will be. Sure, one can speak of them in assessments such as this as though one might have “chosen” not to have spoken of them at all [or spoke of them differently], but nothing in the assessment itself is an actual outlier given what would seem to be a seamless intertwining of all matter in sync with the laws that compel them over time and across space.
Okay, suppose he had done that. So what? Given the assumptions of those who suppose that all interactions – from what Newton did then to what we are doing now – are at one with the only possible reality. What constrains everything that everyone of us think and feel and say and do are the laws of matter. If…if those laws are no less applicable to the human brain configured into mind configured into consciousness configured into “I”.
Yes, given the laws of physics, the apple on the string would behave differently from the apple not on a string and just falling to the ground. But how is this applicable or not in turn to Newton either tying the apple to a string or not tying it?
And it’s not like the atoms involved in either context get together to decide this.