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I'm... not really sure what argument is being presented here. There's some weird accusations of vagueness, yet I see no proposition for a definition of free will here (and in the original comment, there was never attempt to provide one, since it had little to do with the content of the comment as a response to a tiny claim made in a sentence or so), and I just see a lot of random attacks against a position I don't even hold ("People with similar SamHarris-esque arguments seem so happy that they have proven that there is no "free will"", "Do you have a disdain for the fact that actions are being based on external stimulus?" the latter of which I have no idea if I even understand).

So what's the point? If you'd like to reason with me, at least give me a starting point, rather than accusing a comment I wrote in less than a minute of not being "scientific" because it doesn't define all of the terms it makes use of; even if the statement within it is correct with most definitions, discarding chaos theory and ‘practicality’ issues (which the statement above is totally unconcerned with).



Well I'm sorry you feel attacked.

The arguments (even though written in a quite short form in your post) are indicative of a much bigger and broader discussion taking place right now in the intellectual/philosophical world. This gives people the ability to infer a lot of information from even small statements, because the exact forms and phrases that you use are used in exact same manner by other people who have gone much deeper into this discussion and have a lot of thoughts about these things.

Sometimes on the internet one has to infer, because otherwise you would need every participant to first write a 100pages essay of all of their thoughts about the matter, before anything can be reliably responded to them without inferring.

In this case it seems you don't wish to have a well structured and formulated position with deeply going implications into this matter, which I inferred from your post. I guess sometimes inferring just backfires.

Coming back to having some kind of grounded argument, I would say that

> Non-determinism (as in QM non-determinism) still has deterministic evolution, since specifying the wave-function at any one point in time is enough to specify it for all of time via evolution by the Schrödinger equation.

is not really the case. Specifying anything in this matter (including evolution) works in theory and not in practice. There is no physically viable way to do this. Since science deals with physical reality first and foremost (math does not, but we talk about physics and the nature of reality, right?) - then scientifically that statement does not make a lot of sense. It is in fact not enough to specify the wave-function in such a way as to specify it for all time via evolution. This is the essence of Turtle-Achilles paradox and more prominently Chaos Theory, which has been an established paradigm of science for many decades now.

You write that "discarding chaos theory the statement is correct". Well, yes perhaps. It's about the same as to say "discarding Einstein's relativity, one could easily travel faster than the speed of light". Chaos theory describes the real world, better in this regards than other theories we have. It's not enough to just discard it: you will end up with faulty reasoning...




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