A very simple philosophical question that can trigger an existential crisis. Do not sue me if you do get an existential crisis, that was probably a pre-determined event… or is it?
spoiler
I mean I personally don’t see why the universe is non-deterministic, every time you flip a coin, or roll a dice, if you knew the initial conditions and the forces applied to the coin/dice, the atmosphere, wind, etc., you could predict the results with absolute certainty. And free will does not exist. But that’s just my view on this matter, who knows what the universe really is.
So that’s a topic that fascinated so many people forever.
With all these people fascinated by it, some of them weirdos put their whole life’s at it.
And these weirdos came to a few absolutely terrifying conclusions:
The ultimate future is predictable: 2nd law of thermal dynamics means the universe will eventually end with energy being equal everywhere, so there is nothing because there is no difference. That’s the heat death of the universe.
Otherwise nothing is absolutely predictable: the uncertainty principle says you can either know the precise position of a particle, or you know the precise movement of a particle, you can’t know both at the same time. So yeh if you know the initial condition you can make a prediction, but you can’t know the precise initial condition at particle level, and since the world is made of particles, you can only make imprecise predictions without 100% certainty.
You could argue that the human mind is a quantum machine. You don’t know it’s initial condition. Nor do you know the precise initial condition of every human mind in the world. The impreciseness of any prediction, even if it could be small individually, adds up in the scale of the world, the universe. So that can be you foundation of free will, up to the heat death.
The fact that something is random doesn’t really mean that it is under some sort of conscious control of the individual whose tiniest constituent parts behave in random ways though.