If you know the positions and velocities of every atom in a box of gas, then with enough work you can predict its future to arbitrary precision
I’m not a physicist but aren’t such things inherently unpredictable?
At any given moment what you will think next in your brain is random, and there is a very small chance that you may be thinking literally anything at all and there is even a chance that your brain vanishes into thin air in any given moment.
They might be “chaotic” in that tiny errors rapidly amplify into huge ones; but for any finite amount of error you consider tolerable in the simulation, there still exists some finite level of precision in specifying the initial conditions to achieve that error rate. So, practically speaking unpredictable yes, theoretically unpredictable no.
Oh, or were you talking about quantum non-determinism? If so: I bet there is a deterministic physics very much like “ours minus quantum” ~= “the way people thought the world worked in 1890″, which could support human civilization as it existed when people were talking about free will a thousand years ago. In which case, people would be talking about free will in the way they do in our universe, with the same intuitions about it, and they wouldn’t have QM to fall back on to break free of determinism.
In which case, I don’t think QM can be relevant to any sort of discussion of free will that people were having before the 20th century.
I’m not a physicist but aren’t such things inherently unpredictable?
At any given moment what you will think next in your brain is random, and there is a very small chance that you may be thinking literally anything at all and there is even a chance that your brain vanishes into thin air in any given moment.
They might be “chaotic” in that tiny errors rapidly amplify into huge ones; but for any finite amount of error you consider tolerable in the simulation, there still exists some finite level of precision in specifying the initial conditions to achieve that error rate. So, practically speaking unpredictable yes, theoretically unpredictable no.
Oh, or were you talking about quantum non-determinism? If so: I bet there is a deterministic physics very much like “ours minus quantum” ~= “the way people thought the world worked in 1890″, which could support human civilization as it existed when people were talking about free will a thousand years ago. In which case, people would be talking about free will in the way they do in our universe, with the same intuitions about it, and they wouldn’t have QM to fall back on to break free of determinism.
In which case, I don’t think QM can be relevant to any sort of discussion of free will that people were having before the 20th century.
(I also subscribe to an interpretation of quantum mechanics that contains no non-determinism, but I expect that to be a harder sell than the “people would talk the same way about free will even with deterministic physics” argument.)