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Dd_8630 t1_j9gajj6 wrote

Reply to comment by slithrey in Often mischaracterized as a rather debaucherous, hedonistic philosophy, Epicureanism actually focuses on the removal of pain and anxiety from our lives, and champions a calm ‘philosophy as therapy’ approach in pursuit of life’s highest pleasure: mental tranquility. by philosophybreak

>I don’t see how random deviation of atoms would cause free will. It would break determinism, but only so to cause random behavior.

It's easy to take random noise and turn it into meaningful results. Look at Perlin noise generators or how video games use seeds.

I can happily believe that true random 'swerve' of simple elements can be exploited by evolutionary processes to lead to a sort of 'weighted decision maker'. Couple that to consciousness and you've got free will.

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ADhomin_em t1_j9hei2k wrote

How are we to judge those deviations to be free of anything? Deviations from what we expect, but suggesting that is the same as deviating from causality suggests also that we have a perfect grasp on all things down to the most basic and miniscule of scales, and that we understand 100% all things and their infinitely interconnected causal relations. I do not believe we are that all-knowing.

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Dd_8630 t1_j9hg2va wrote

>How are we to judge those deviations to be free of anything?

We can't.

Remember, I'm responding to the 'what if' of 'what if there was truely random swerve'. If there was true random swerve, then I could see how evolutionary processes could exploit that. I'm not say we can determine whether or not atoms have truely random swerve.

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slithrey t1_j9ohs0z wrote

You seem to redefine free will here. Even a ‘weighted calculation’ wouldn’t amount to free will. That’s just another bias our brains would use when making calculations. Free will would require that against all odds, you still possess the ability of choosing your future out of multiple possible futures. That the responsibility of the situation you’re in lies mostly on yourself. That at any point in your life, you could have made a decision differently via unbound will. If you replayed a choice in your life like chocolate vs white milk at lunch, say you chose chocolate, determinism would say that you could replay infinite times and you would choose chocolate every time. With your suggestion of the weighted calculations based one random quantum probability, if replayed, and the quantum probability was like 70% odds chocolate, 25% odds white, 3% odds strawberry, and 2% you don’t take a milk, then when replayed an infinite amount of times over, your behavior would match that spread. Where is the free will in that? It happened according to a mathematical function that existed well before and after your existence. Just laws of a universe much bigger than the individual self.

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