Free Will

This is a very important article for me, as I see free will and responsibility as big parts of my philosophy, especially concerning morality/ethics.

First, I define free will as the ability to "act" against physical laws' prediction.

Thus it seems that quantum particles have some aspect of free will, as quantum physics in its current state tells us that it is impossible to predict the next state of a quantum bit after we observe it (decoherence from superposition). Furthermore, the Bell test (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test) is additional evidence that there isn't a physical phenomena behind these particles' "decision". "But wait, particples can't have free will because they're aren't conscious. Also, Quantum physics can predict their 'decisions' reliability over many trials" says the skeptic. However, what is consciousness? Furthermore, how can we "prove" particles don't have consciousness? This last point is of particular importance as I'll show later, we can't even prove each other (homo sapiens) conscious, nevertheless "lesser" creatures like primates and even less for atomic particles.

On the second point a skeptic may raise, suppose we we to poll every person on Earth to pick a number zero or one, but make sure to use your free will. We can easily predict that if we repeated these polls, they would look similar despite the polled using their free will as there are only 2 choices and people tend to not change their prior choices unprompted (just think of consistently one political party electoral college states in the US such as Texas). Therefore we can easily predict their choices as a massive group despite the individuals practicing free will.

For a more formal argument, you can read the proof of the Free Will Theorem that proves, using quantum physics, that particles have free will if we do.

Some may challenge my assumption that we have free will. However, if we reject free will in every sense of it, then it is impossible for science to sus out any truths: the very core of science is experiments that isolate for one variable to determine causation. However, if we reject determinism wholly, then it is possible for the deterministic universe to have established "instructions" beforehand to have us perform experiments precisely when those results happen. Thus without free will, we can never "catch the universe off-guard" so-to-speak to measure the truth. Thus unfortunately I'll argue from the consequences and accept free-will.

I'll post later about my prior beliefs on free will (they were that free will was binary). However, I now believe free will to be on a spectrum. I read this wonderful article https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/10/religion-for-the-nonreligious.html and in it the concept of consciousness as a spectrum was brought up. Now, I think that consciousness is a bad term for what they are describing, so I instead use free-will. Also, it would be extremely unfortunate if atomic particles trillions times less complex than us had the same amount of free-will we did. Thus this implies (arguing from the consequences once again :( ) that free-will can vary in level. Thus we can assume a sort of evolution of free-will, from the particles of the early universe with no humans to today with humans.

This fits in extremely nicely with the Theory of Evolution, thus suggesting free-will as a selecting force. This then explains the main argument against evolution: that it is impossible for complexity to arise out of nothingness. There is also a feasible surface-level "mechanism" for this ability of free-will to reverse entropy: free-will allows those agents to bring information into the system. This explains the information issue that is used to point to the existence of a deity (the TLDR of their argument is that DNA is data that can be encoded and decoded, and that this information/data could've have arisen out of nowhere). In addition, it was recently demonstrated that energy can be converted from information, thus allowing for the entropy for what would've been unspontaneous positive entropy reactions to occur. It is elegant that the universe begins with particles that have free-will and slowly evolve through increasing complexity into us and posthumans.

Admittedly, there are some drawbacks to this philosophy. This implies the egalitarianism is false as every body and all matter has differing levels of matter (in at least one pair, theoretically it is possible for two "things" to have equal free-will), implying a partial order on people and value. Of course, this doesn't necessarily imply discrimination as it is plausible for race/gender, etc to be invariant to this variation. But there is also the possibility of this philosophy being used to justify genocide as in an extreme view it implies that there is a duty to evolve the species' free-will, and that lower free-will agents are sucking away resources from higher-free-will agents. You can see why I liked the binary free-will better in my idealistic youth.

Another drawback is infeasibility of measurement. This is pretty self-explanatory. I did have some ideas on trying to run experiments testing people's self-restraint and seeing if race/gender/other factors influence it, but I didn't have a mechanism to measure restraint. People generally have different desires, but there is also the possibility of the subject playing 4d chess with whatever mechanism I devise. So this is a definite weakness.

There is of course, always the problem of the criterion, specifically the method of free-will's appearance in the universe. I have a gut feeling that it is possible for a contraction to arise from no free-will, implying a universe, but I'll have to mull on this. It does seem like an idea I had a couple years ago explaining the Big Bang's initiation may apply: if there is nothing, then it is possible to classify that "nothing" as a thing, thereby leaving to a contraction for true nothingness and implying there to be something, i.e. the universe. I need to see where free will fits into this.

Sorry for any typos, its fairly late at night and I'd like to sleep.