Welterklärungen, Zehnte Klasse Leistungsstufe

Some physical objections to some physical objections to Free Will

This will be rather brief and incomplete. But gee, it’s my free will to publish it as is.

Scientists have become notoriously sceptic or pessimistic about free will. Guys like Sam Harris or Victor Stenger, for instance. Also german physicist Sabine Hossenfelder published on her blog three articles, by the names of „You probably have no free will. But don’t worry about it.“ (2013), „10 Misconceptions about Free Will“ (2014) and „Free will is dead, let’s bury it.“ (2016).

Very roughly speaking, these people hold that the laws of nature (be it the basic laws of physics or the inner working of our brains) do not leave any room for anything that could be righteously called „freedom“.

Now, being a scientist myself, I kinda felt the need to answer back. After all, free will is quite an important question, but it’s also notoriously muddy. Therefore, I chose to just focus on the 2012 arxiv-article on „The Free Will Function“ by above mentioned Sabine Hossenfelder. In her paper, Mrs Hossenfelder gives some reasoning as to why the basic laws of physics would preclude freedom from being possible in the physical world; and that is (since there is nothing but a physical world) possible at all.
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