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If anything, it seems like QM existing makes a pretty good case free will also exists looking at more recent tech developments. We have virtual worlds that cou
by kromem 3y ago
If anything, it seems like QM existing makes a pretty good case free will also exists looking at more recent tech developments.
We have virtual worlds that could be described deterministically, such as with procedural generation and a seed function.
Often, these functions are theoretically continuous.
But also often, there's a mechanism by which the continuous function converts into discrete units.
Why?
In order to track state changes to what would otherwise be deterministic by free agents (i.e. players changing stuff).
That reality goes from continuous behavior to discrete upon interactions with free agents, and then goes back to continuous if the persistent information about those interactions is erased, looks a lot like what we might expect from a universe that needed to keep track of changes by free agents in an optimized manner (such that information erasure resets behavior back to functionally defined continuous behavior and not tracking discrete units).
Interestingly, this was predicted by the earliest philosophers thinking about quantized matter being solely governed by natural laws. They reasoned that if the laws of motion governing quanta were singular outcomes, that free will could not exist, thus given their belief in free will they hypothesized that quanta had variable outcomes which they likened to a 'Swerve' moving in a different direction suddenly from the other option. Over 2,000 years before we had experimental evidence that not only was matter made up of quantized parts, but that those parts were best described as moving probabilistically with variable outcomes.
That the behaviors of these quantized parts is time reversible seems less indicative of determinism and more like they serve the function of state tracking for interactions.