According to Robert Sapolsky, human free will does not exist

[bilby]

According to Newton, a rock and a feather dropped from the same height will hit the ground at the same time, which is true, as an idealization. The experiment was conducted on the moon, but I forget what was dropped.

Galileo said it first, and it was David Scott who did the experiment on the Moon, where he dropped a hammer and a feather while commanding Apollo 15:


Scott is one of only four moon walkers still alive (he is 93).


ETA I see you already anticipated those points.

 

[bilby]

What shall I eat for dinner tonight? Ask Newtonian mechanics!

Jesus.

You don't ask a dictator. He just tells you.

Newtonian mechanics sent Alexandr Solzhenitsyn to the gulag...

 

[Elixir]

The system we are modelling is not just the raindrop, but also the falling - through an atmosphere made up of trillions of nearby gas molecules all moving turbulently, and hundreds of other raindrops, each evaporating water into (and condensing water out of) the air constantly during the fall.

That is why I TRIED to clarify that reliability of prediction has an inverse (probably to some power) relationship to temporal proximity.
Give me the millisecond before impact and I can “predict” whether the location of impact will be within a 1” square, with 90+% accuracy at least in some atmospheric conditions.
A useless prediction, but to make the prediction a full second before impact would feature accuracy of one-in-a-really-big-number.
To do so a full minute prior would be what Steve would call impossible. THAT would require modeling the whole system. I think it’s more like extremely impractical than impossible.

 

[Jarhyn]

The system we are modelling is not just the raindrop, but also the falling - through an atmosphere made up of trillions of nearby gas molecules all moving turbulently, and hundreds of other raindrops, each evaporating water into (and condensing water out of) the air constantly during the fall.

That is why I TRIED to clarify that reliability of prediction has an inverse (probably to some power) relationship to temporal proximity.
Give me the millisecond before impact and I can “predict” whether the location of impact will be within a 1” square, with 90+% accuracy at least in some atmospheric conditions.
A useless prediction, but to make the prediction a full second before impact would feature accuracy of one-in-a-really-big-number.
To do so a full minute prior would be what Steve would call impossible. THAT would require modeling the whole system. I think it’s more like extremely impractical than impossible.

Not to mention having the memory and access to it in a computational system capable of generating and transforming those sorts of phenomena.

Again, you would really just be calculating a second instance of the system in parallel. The predictions only hold, as well, if you don't alter it.

You could alter it, and then as discussed... That's another "deck", and alternative to the first.

 

[steve_bank]

As to randomness it is science not just engineering. QM is based on the fact at the quantum scale we can only predict statically. A wave function is a probability distribution.

Yeah, predicting quantum raindrops would be a trick. Fortunately for the prediction business, raindrops are massive objects that largely adhere to Newtonian mechanics.

Here is my question: Does Newtonian mechanics dictate what I will eat for dinner tonight, what time I will go to sleep, when I will awaken, what I will do tomorrow, what road I will travel, when I will die?

I believe Newtonian mechanics does dictate all of the above at its core. But, that would mean that my future is inexorably fixed -- as in fatalism, predetermined, etc. To my small mind, that also would mean that I lack Free Will to determine what to eat this evening. [And, before the detractors chime in, there is no modal fallacy in play if the presumption of Newtonian mechanics is that the future events are inexorably fixed by antecedent events].

If the answer is no, I can see how I might have Free Will. If the answer is no, that also leads to a truly chaotic state of affairs -- and not simply as a matter of prediction, but also as a matter of actuality. That, however, begs the question of how Free Will can exist in an universe in which human thought is indeterministic, random, and chaotic.

It seems to me that true Free Will (i.e., the Libertarian variation, and not the version that simply states that any unpredictable future decision is free) cannot exits unless we view humans as, somehow, divorced from nature and imbued with superhuman abilities. It is very spiritual and almost religious -- with a scientific fig leaf.

Science is descriptive not prescriptive.

Quantum, Newtonian, or relativistic mechanics do not dictate behavior. They define a model that in an experiment that predicts results.

You have to be careful to avoid conflating a deterministic math function in Newtonian mechanics such as speed = distance/time with philosophical Determinism applied to the universe.