Now I'll throw out another completely unprovable thought...
Perhaps consciousness has the ability to affect how wavefunction collapse occurs, perhaps it even has the ability to influence the observed outcome.
I'm not going to try to prove these two ideas but together they can help form an idea that perhaps observations on the past actually influence the past and perhaps despite this 'observation after the fact' there's still free will.
It's not provable but then neither is the "there's no such thing as free will" arguments that this sort of research leads to. The point of the above is to highlight that there's still a way out for free will.
Quantum unconsciousness is attractive under the concept "what if all the things we don't understand are actually one thing", but there's a lot of unknowns out there and they don't all have the same door.
Right. I don't think you need to drop down to the level of quantum physics and neurology for this - I feel that economics invalidates free will just fine on its own.
After all, the supposedly free-willed humans aren't behaving randomly - they're making choices they see as beneficial to themselves (or "good" under their system of values). Meanwhile, economics as a field is all about predicting what choices people make facing specific situations, in order to force people to make specific choices by engineering situations they face. At scale, it works spectacularly well, but even at an individual level, it's just a matter of tailoring manipulation.
One may counter: "I have free will, therefore I can choose not to follow the incentives" - but you are going to follow the incentives anyway, that's literally the definition of what they are. Kryptonite to free will. The thing that allows me to predict what the free-willed you will chose - with perfect accuracy in the theoretical limit. So what's the meaning of free will if people can be made to behave deterministically?
In fact, that's what society is about. That's what civilization is about. Making people behave deterministically to a good approximation. That is, making people predictable to each other. The people who, by their "free will", choose to not follow incentives? We label them as loonies and lock them in mental hospitals, as they're a danger to themselves and everyone around.
To sum up: I increasingly feel the question of free will is meaningless in practice, because having a society is fundamentally opposite to it.
I like to think it's a probability distribution that you have some influence over.
I choose to catch a ball. I've just made it 99% likely that I'll catch it. But there's still room for chaos to ensure it's not a deterministic outcome.
Free will is sometimes failing at things you set out to do? We hardly need quantum theory to explain that humans are clumsy or sometimes mispredict the trajectory of a thrown object.
I like this idea, but it clashes with my experience of almost never getting something "right" the first time, and having to base my future decisions on corrections my past self has envisioned future me taking.
For example, could you imagine someone who has never walked suddenly being able to dance if they were magically healed on some given day?
That said, I do suspect there's some relation between quantum mechanics and how we experience the world, especially given we can't exactly place the relation between space and time.
Heartily recommend it. sci-fi detective story which asks "what if the Copenhagen interpretation of QM was real?" (note: author acknowledges that it's just a plot device: https://www.gregegan.net/QUARANTINE/QM/QM.html - good writeup, but spoilers).
That are interesting possibilities. I just wish some Jean Perrin would design and perform a great experiment to exclude some possibilities from the explanation space.
Delayed-choice experiments demonstrate the seeming ability of measurements in the present to alter events occurring in the past. eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser
Now I'll throw out another completely unprovable thought...
Perhaps consciousness has the ability to affect how wavefunction collapse occurs, perhaps it even has the ability to influence the observed outcome.
I'm not going to try to prove these two ideas but together they can help form an idea that perhaps observations on the past actually influence the past and perhaps despite this 'observation after the fact' there's still free will.
It's not provable but then neither is the "there's no such thing as free will" arguments that this sort of research leads to. The point of the above is to highlight that there's still a way out for free will.