Memories of the 28th Century

I was wondering whether “free will” exists, or if that is just another of many pleasant fictions that humans have made up to keep going. While it feels like I am actually deciding what I do, I know and can readily see in some cases, that my decisions are results of things that came before, just more links in the chain of cause and effect. The question of whether humans have free will or are directed by destiny has never been answered with certainty. Philosophers have long said that people create their own fates or destinies. On the other hand, scientists and other Philosophers say that everything is caused by causes that preceded the event, and those causes go back to the beginning of this universe and even before, if there was anything. Individuals do not control their actions, because their apparent motivations were caused by causes that are part of the interwoven web of chained causes and effects that goes all the way back. The causes are often locked within DNA and in our surroundings and in history and other places where it is not immediately apparent.

Religion doesn’t help, because it is ambiguous in regard to free will. Some religions, such as Christianity, assert that people have free will but that the God knows everything, which seems to be a contradiction. Other religions are explicitly deterministic, such as Islam, which teaches that everything is the will of the God, and Hinduism which says that we are tied to the chain of cause and effect called karma.

Another consideration involves uncertainties in the physical universe. For example, someone recently mentioned to me that the radioactive decay of a single atom was unpredictable, as with Schrodinger’s cat, and there may be some other examples of uncertainty in physical phenomena. All of the sources that I know of state that the process of decay of a single atom is truly unpredictable, but I have my doubts. The results from a roulette wheel are also said to be unpredictable, but if one knew the conditions of the spin, insertion of the ball, etc., then the result can be predicted. I can imagine knowing enough about the condition of a nucleus that one could predict when it would decay and what form the decay would take. Alas, the instruments necessary for making such predictions do not exist at this time.

But is determinism on the subatomic scale necessary for determinism on the macroscopic scale to be true. I started to write about a situation where the subatomic scale of the universe was not determined while the atomic and larger scale is determined, but that can’t be, because the radioactive decay of nuclei alters atoms.

Logically, the Gods and Goddesses are uncaused causes that put into motion the chain of cause and effect that has resulted in me writing this foolishness. The more basic question may be: Does it make any real difference whether our actions are determined? On one level it makes absolutely no difference at all. We would act the same whether the unbreakable chain of cause and effect required each and every keystroke and the falling of every leaf from a tree that no human has even seen, or if those events were determined by ourselves and the tree respectively. But would we act differently in the two scenarios? This is why I love time travel stories. Theoretically, travel through time at other than the ordinary speed and direction is possible. The Standard Model and General Relativity require reversibility, so the universe doesn't care which direction we are going. Many people complain that time travel would create paradoxes, but a paradox is an apparent contradiction, and, when we look more closely, we find that the contradiction is not real; that there isn't a contradiction in reality. There are some things that might become possible with time travel that would seem very strange, Time travel would violate the chain of cause and effect; causes could come from after the effect; thus allowing for a “time out” in a determined universe. But the actions would still have been determined by experiences that preceded the events, as far as the individual(s) who travelled in time were concerned.

The more I think about it, the more I think that bootstrapping is possible and would not violate any laws of science or of the universe. I'll have to check that out by sending some useful information back to myself. Or am I mistaken?