Quote:
|
Originally Posted by QuikSand
This, to me makes intuitive sense. I understand that greater minds than mine, and presumably demonstrable experimentation, suggest it's simply wrong -- but thus are the boundaries of intuition, it seems.
|
Well, if we think back to the "Butterfly in Tokyo, Tornado in Oklahoma" idea that little things make big changes elsewhere/when, that always made me extrapolate that to the idea of free will.
In reading these posts, for example, I got up twice to run to the kitchen and grab a handful of chips. Free will in action. But why did I get up? I was hungry. Why was I hungry? Because my stomach rumbled. Why did my stomach rumble? Becuase I haven't eaten in seven hours. Etcetera...
...or from the other side? Why did I eat chips instead of fixing a sandwich? Why did I pass up the candy bar that was sitting on the desk to leave the room? Why did I buy that particular brand of chips a week ago at the supermarket?
I could answer these questions - the answers would get more and more complex and esoteric, until I too was examining mesons and bosons on a quantum level. But it would take so much time to answer them, and so much effort and resources to predict that behavior, that I'd run out of universe to store the results in.
I suspect that if we were to take the time and effort to try to determine future events on a macro scale, we would be doomed not because the future is so unpredictable, but because the number of variables that would need to be accounted for to make any reasonable assumption is so large as to require more time and room than the universe provides. We can't build a model big enough to house the answers at anything more than an abstract probability.
More than anything else, I think THAT is why the clockwork universe is not a problem for us. No matter how deterministic the universe actually IS, we're inside it, and can't see the gears. For all intents and purposes, the complexity of the universe enforces free will on us.