I’m not sure if there are holes to poke so much as this is currently a field where unfalsifiable hypotheses are easy (for theoretical physicists) to come up with. I don’t think the probabilistic nature of quantum particles excludes the possibility of either free will existing or not existing. For example: either you placed your chips on the wrong bet in roulette or the ball landed in the wrong slot on the board. Both are based in probability and it’s really impossible to tell if the ball was always going to land there, or if you were always going to put your chips there, or both, or neither. That however is where I would disagree with the “‘you’ aren’t even you” sentiment, because at the very least you were there to observe it. It doesn’t matter that in actuality it’s just a bunch of oxygen and nitrogen atoms moving along a temperature gradient, it’s still the wind. And it doesn’t matter if on a quantum scale you are just a flow of quantum particles that are bottlenecked at what you call a mouth only to be temporarily stored and expelled, you are still you.

I like to think of it like sailing: you can’t control the direction of the wind, but you can move the sails. On a certain level that is not an entirely random event because you are making decisions that will benefit yourself, but on another level even with free will you only reacted to the wind because you knew what to do based on what the wind was doing. Even still I would consider self preservation and altruism to be “proofs” of free will, because in a situation where the two choices are to fight for life or blindly accept death nearly everyone chooses to fight. And if serving yourself was just a probabilistic likelihood then that would be a cascade of factors leading to apparent decision making. Maybe you didn’t have any options other than fight the wind or be swept out to sea, but either way you can still choose to do the Macarena while reciting Shakespeare. And if that’s not free will then it doesn’t matter much, because the universe just so happened to make it likely which is good enough for me

Also I didn’t state the silt, sand, pebbles thing just today, just to say. This must have been copy and pasted from a while back. Iirc the original post was about how quantum particles change what we think