In my book Breaking the Free Will Illusion, I have a chapter titled “Quantum Misunderstandings and Contrivances”. In it I touch upon the fact that in quantum mechanics (which addresses the smallest particles and their behavior) there are numerous “interpretations” surrounding what certain experiments show, and surrounding the mathematics used to describe this scale. These interpretations are rightly called “quantum interpretations”, and they compete with each other. Some are deterministic (meaning entirely causal), others are indeterministic (meaning some events don’t have causes), and others are agnostic on whether all events have a cause or not.

The fact of the matter is, we just don’t know which interpretation is the best model of reality. They each have their unintuitive problems. Regardless of this, I delve into why none of them can help grant free will.

One of these interpretations, however, is so un-evidentary that it really can’t be taken too seriously. Yet I’ve come across many occasion when someone will invoke this interpretation as a savior of free will.  The interpretation I’m talking about is called the many-worlds interpretation (also known as many-universes or many-histories interpretation). Though all of the interpretations are speculative, this interpretation speculates on “worlds” that are impossible to prove. A huge no-no in science.  But worse than that, not only does it not grant free will, but out of all of the processes it is the most fatalistic. Continue reading »

If you don’t already know, I’m a hard incompatibilist. This means I think free will is logically incoherent in both a deterministic universe as well as an indeterministic universe. In this post, I just want to address if the universe is a “deterministic universe”, meaning entirely causal (all events have a cause), and what such would mean for the word “possibility”.

There are different branches of philosophy. One of these branches is called “epistemology” which is the branch that is concerned with the nature of knowledge. In other words, what we can know, how we can know it, and so on. Another is called “ontology” which is the branch that is concerned with existence (or “being”, “becoming”, “reality”). In other words, it addresses what exists, how it exists, if something cannot exist, and so on.

These two branches are more often conflated than not. People address epistemology when they should be addressing ontology, or ontology for epistemological usages of words. This is very problematic and causes great confusion.

To give an example of how these are used, the claim “rocks exist in the box” is an ontological claim. The claim that “a heavy box is probably filled with rocks” is epistemological. We may not know (epistemology) that the box is filled with rocks, but either they do exist (ontology) in the box or they do not. Continue reading »

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I want to yell this from the rooftops to all of those people who conflate reductionism with hard determinism. Determinism is not reductionistic! Okay…not literally yell it from the rooftops as (the majority) of people who aren’t into philosophy would just think “huh”? But you get the point. 🙂

For people who don’t already know, hard determinism states that since every event is causal, free will is incompatible with such. I don’t label myself as a Hard Determinist, but rather a Hard Incompatibilist (Meaning free will is incompatible in both a deterministic univerese as well as an indeterministic universe), but either way neither implies a reductionistic framework.

Reductionism, at it’s stripped away base, means that everything can be reduced down to it’s parts. And there are reductionists out there who think everything is just the “small bits” bouncing around. Some even say large scale objects don’t really exist due to this.

This is what I call “extreme reductionism”.  The rejection of what those parts make up due to being able to reduce an object to the parts. And it’s a big, ginormous, whopping mistake from what I can tell.

And some of these people not only reject free will (which they are absolutely correct in doing so), but they also reject consciousness itself and say that is an “illusion”. Let’s just disregard the fact that you can’t have an illusion without consciousness, so the illusion of consciousness is within an illusion of consciousness within an illusion of consciousness, so on ad absurdum.

But why is this reductionistic framework a mistake? Because we know otherwise. We know that parts make up wholes which have an actual effect on the parts themself. That simply isn’t possible without extending existence to the very wholes that the parts make up. Continue reading »