To say that this is hard to think about is an understatement. I ...

2026-07-16T11:41:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…vs3r
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To say that this is hard to think about is an understatement. I had that belief as well, where now I honestly don't know.

Let me give you somewhat of a counter argument.

There are "emergent" phenomena that don't appear dependent on lower levels of explanation. They appear at higher levels of explanation.

For example, you take two atoms and bump them into each other. They follow deterministic dynamical laws. Fancy way of saying they are like billiard balls on a table. You send them in a particular path, they bump, and will follow a particular path out. The path out depends on the path in.

If you took a film of the two atoms bouncing off each other, and reversed it, you could not tell which film is the forward film and which is the reverse. The laws of motion are symmetric. There is no way to distinguish between the two. You can not see the direction of time in the film.

Great.

But now take a whole bunch of these atoms and put them together, and somehow the second law of thermodynamics emerges. Overall, entropy increases for all these atoms over time. That means that if you take a film of all these atoms, you can tell which way is forward in time and which way is backward. You see an egg break and you know that is forward in time. See an egg come together, and the film is running in reverse. Zoom into the individual atoms of the egg, and you can't see it.

The second law of thermodynamics is an emergent phenomena. You look at deterministic laws of motion of atoms and you don't see it. Put a bunch of deterministic atoms together and it appears.

It is possible that "free will" is like that. That even though the atoms bump around deterministically, free will appears as an emergent phenomena.

Nostr notes by

To say that this is hard to think about is an understatement. I ...