Follow-Up to the Last One: Indeterminacy and determinacy, kinda
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/04
If the universe is determinate, we need supernatural intervention for free will. If it is random or indeterminate, we have indeterminacy in the entire system and no free will, as the system is not built that way.
The notion of freely willing from a self seems to have no place in this context. What we actually observe is indeterminacy at small scales, with higher-order regularities at the larger scale that appear as if they are determined. These large-scale events, such as the Big Bang and the origin and evolution of life, are part of the cosmic happenstance, further complicating the concept of free will.
Hence, the term ‘imply,’ when we look at the apparent randomness in life around us, to observe an effect of freedom of the will can be understood as ‘infer.’ We can infer the existence of free will from randomness. However, we can also infer the absence of free will, as in the case of pure randomness. This latter inference follows more logically from the implication when we talk about a random event or a happenstance.
Even further, it provides no frame upon which to ground the will. It adds more premises for the argument, hidden premises, to get to a will. Even if you could argue from a mechanism for that will, it is another leap to free will, which leads back to the point, “Of what is the will free?”
The universe is one system. Unless, we want to assert that human beings have a magical self and a supernatural will for true freedom of the will. If we do not and assert a magical self and a natural will, then the self is differentiated somehow while the will becomes constrained by the mathematical principles of the universe once more, whether determinate at the large scale or indeterminate at the lower magnitudes leading to the same issues mentioned before.
It would be bound by the determined physics of a mind, the indeterminate elements leaking into the mind from lower magnitudes, and weird quantum indeterminacy in spatiotemporal events.
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