Zenofex said:

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At the atomistic level, yes. But ensembles generally behave predictably.

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Mostly this. Until there is a unification theory that explains both quantum-level phenomenons and large-scale phenomenons (as they are defined nowadays), it's purely a speculation to claim that what you observe on sub-atomic level also applies as-is to the "big world".

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Baronus said:

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No! He gives us Jesus and salvation! We lost He recover!

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JollyJoker said:

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It's not.

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Zenofex said:

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JollyJoker said:

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It's not.

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What I was referring to is the lack of physical theory which explains things from sub-atomic level to galaxy level without any gaps, like "where do I put gravity in this?". There's no such theory at the moment, even the most hardcore string theorists (the main should-be unification theory candidate) admit that the string theory is not good enough at its present form to explain anything beyond its mathematical constructs of this or that, many of which are virtually impossible to prove empirically, or at least they won't be in any near future. In other words, just because "particles" (assuming they are indeed something like... bricks for example) behave in a non-deterministic manner when zoomed all the way in electrons, does not mean that the system which these particles compose is unpredictable. Strictly speaking, it may not be 100% predictability but in many cases it's pretty close to that. On macro scale you deal with systems, not with constituents and systems are not just the properties of what they are composed of.

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JJ said:

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We must make a difference between decision making. deliberate choice and the concept of free will and its meaning.
The concept in effect means just that there is no thing like fate. That, while there is a prophecy that Oedipus would slay his father and marry his mother, it's meaningless and if Oedipus really ended up doing that it wasn't fate (or something like that) at work, but happenstance - or, a mix of decisions that can be called unlucky in hindsight, and that needs more than a couple of people making decisions.

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I don't see the connection. We know that the brain imvolves quantum processes. We know the universe isn't deterministic. We don't need the great unifying theory to come to conclusions.

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artu said:

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JJ said:

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We must make a difference between decision making. deliberate choice and the concept of free will and its meaning.
The concept in effect means just that there is no thing like fate. That, while there is a prophecy that Oedipus would slay his father and marry his mother, it's meaningless and if Oedipus really ended up doing that it wasn't fate (or something like that) at work, but happenstance - or, a mix of decisions that can be called unlucky in hindsight, and that needs more than a couple of people making decisions.

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Not really, free will literally means you make deliberate choices, not just lack of fate. To simplify, think of animals with low-level brain activity, say, lizards. They have no free will for sure but their life is not a deterministic line of “fate” either, there’s still room for coincidence.

“Once we know the process, we can object to it just for the heck of it” doesnt cut it either, because modern neurology is like, “oh, you think you decided to do that just for the heck of it but we scanned your brain and this signal indicates, ten miliseconds before you thought you made that decision, your brain already did.” Which would make you a lizard with a bigger, more sophisticated brain.

Here’s the catch, the more abstract and long-term things become, the more you can talk about free will. To give an example, you’re in a bookstore, you are about to buy this book or that one. When it comes to instant decisions such as this, your free will is not in play, even if you happen to think you choose the book you normally wouldn’t just for the heck of it. You cant trick your brain into reverse psychology. But when it comes to writing an essay about the content of the book, things change. Then, it is really you who is connecting the dots, not some subconscious process.

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Zenofex said:

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I don't see the connection. We know that the brain imvolves quantum processes. We know the universe isn't deterministic. We don't need the great unifying theory to come to conclusions.

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If it was that simple, physics would have stopped existing as a science along with many other sciences some 100 years ago. We actually know nothing, at best we can make educated guesses about the things we think we know. Just because we know one thing (i.e. that educated guess, to what extent we really know it is another matter) does not mean it can be extrapolated at will to whatever you like, there are processes, interactions, emerging forces, etc. which make the end result qualitatively different from the sum of its components. Or, as Hegel/Marx put it in a simple way nearly 2 centuries ago - changes in quantity lead to changes in quality. Which is one of the reasons why physicists don't state things like "we know that X works in quantum fashion, so Y, which is X multiplied by a billion, should work in quantum fashion as well". At the present moment science just cannot connect the dots between the quantum world and the macro world and that alone speaks a lot. That includes how the human brain works - we actually don't know that either. Sure, you can write a ton of paper about neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones, specialized compartments and whatnot, i.e. you can explain what the parts do but you cannot explain how they turn into a system which produces reason. And that's because our understanding of physics is still too rudimentary for such a task.

As for the macro-scale determinism - you can buy a truckload of hen eggs, go to the roof of your house and start dropping them to the ground - you can be sure that all of them will break. Theoretically, if you had enough eggs to fill the Solar system (we're assuming that they won't turn into an egg black hole ) and some place where you can drop them from and to in a similar way, at one point one of the eggs won't break. But that hardly makes the result of such an action unpredictable.

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