Danny Chai
My impression is that the majority of philosophers and many scientists don’t believe in free will, that it’s an illusion. And the general reasoning is that as we understand science more, the more we see that everything is just a sequence of causal events. If we fully understood genetics and the environment down the molecular level, we’d see that everything is predetermined (Robert Sapolsky, whom I love, has especially been on this kick in recent years; his book on the subject is literally called “Determined”).
This might be a known issue but how does one reconcile multiverse theory with predetermination? Because they seem to me to be at odds? Determinism suggests that if you completely understand all the conditions in the state of a system you can fully predict everything that will happen going forward. But multiverse theory says that’s not true at all, that the exact same state spawns many (possibly infinite) worlds. That’s the opposite of deterministic. How do people reconcile that?
One possible response I can see is that in the many worlds hypothesis it’s not that the state of the world is singly determined, but that since every possible quantum state exists in a spawned new world, it’s still in some sense deterministic. Every possible future state exists in some world. While you can’t predict the future world, every future world will exist, and that’s in some sense deterministic? That doesn’t quite feel the same as deterministic to me.
I also recognize that quantum randomness is not in itself a proof of free will either; adding randomness to strict causality isn’t itself a reflection of will. But still, it does seem to me incompatible with determinism, and I’m wondering what other people think.