Mallory's Musings & Mischief
"Is free will real?"
Wrong question. A better question is whether it is possible for someone to predict your choices with high precision. Or worse, whether it is possible for someone to direct your choices with or without your awareness or consent. In practice, those are the only factors that matter.
I don't care whether or not I technically have "free will". How much agency I have in a situation seems to matter a lot more.
Rich Felker
@malcircuit This. It's one of those made-up problems where the whole problem is the ill-posedness of the question.
Rich Felker
@malcircuit Indeed the boring but only physically meaningful/falsifiable version of the question of "free will" is whether you can deterministically predict the behavior of some subsystem from within the system, and of course the answer is no. (IOW rocks have free will)
This is essentially just a consequence of Bell's Theorem.
But it doesn't tell you much useful, compared to your questions.
Rich Felker
@malcircuit Yes, the question those folks are debating is in a non-falsifiable domain of beliefs about things outside the system. 🤷
Mallory's Musings & Mischief
@dalias Yeah, the "question" of free will only remains a question if you are a dualist or whatever. For a materialist like myself, who believes that the mind is what the brain does and is fundamentally just a physical system like any other, quantum mechanics is pretty clear about how there is always at least a small degree of uncertainty involved. And even if you ignore quantum effects, a perfectly deterministic chaotic system (eg, the weather) is fundamentally unpredictable too.
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