I don't think there's any interpretation of quantum physics that allows for it to be clockwork, but I think it's a big leap from non-deterministic quantum phenomena to anything that could meaningfully be called free will.
Take a great hitter in baseball and try to determine what makes them so great at deciding when to swing. We try to see, right up until the moment when the batter commits to a swing, whether we can predict their actions in advance.
Some pitches, anyone could tell you not to swing at. Some, anyone could tell you to swing at. So the greatness lies in-between. Say for the sake of argument that it's 1/3rd, 1/3rd, 1/3rd.
Then we have other great hitters, coaches, physiologists, etc. analyze the pitches instead, more confidently classifying them as swing or don't, narrowing the band where the great hitter had a difficult choice to make, bringing us to 40%/40%/20%.
Then we outfit the player with all sorts of monitoring devices and watch the pitches in super slo-mo, revealing that on what had been previously considered too close to call, by the time it became apparent that the pitch was going to break, the batter's muscles were tensed up in such a way that trying to adjust would have resulted in a ground-out to first. 45%/45%/10%
We install a theoretical non- brain implant to pick apart that mythical 10% and reduce it to 1%; the other 99% of the time, the batter is effectively acting as a complex machine.
At some point, though, we reach a pitch that really could have gone either way no matter how good our measurements were; a pitch that came down to a quantum roll of the dice. Is this the decision? Made by what? Subatomic particles that the batter had for lunch a while back? Does food get a welcoming party in the gut, where it's informed that it's now part of a baseball player and to be sure to take the fork in the wavefunction collapse that leads to more homeruns?
So yeah, when you look at it too closely, the idea that there's an "I" who deserves credit for all "I"'ve done kinda falls apart and can't be salvaged at the quantum level, either. Still, it's a powerful illusion that we all basically buy into all of the time that we're not thinking about it or taking hallucinogens, so I'm going back to it now.
I don't think there's any interpretation of quantum physics that allows for it to be clockwork, but I think it's a big leap from non-deterministic quantum phenomena to anything that could meaningfully be called free will.
Take a great hitter in baseball and try to determine what makes them so great at deciding when to swing. We try to see, right up until the moment when the batter commits to a swing, whether we can predict their actions in advance.
Some pitches, anyone could tell you not to swing at. Some, anyone could tell you to swing at. So the greatness lies in-between. Say for the sake of argument that it's 1/3rd, 1/3rd, 1/3rd.
Then we have other great hitters, coaches, physiologists, etc. analyze the pitches instead, more confidently classifying them as swing or don't, narrowing the band where the great hitter had a difficult choice to make, bringing us to 40%/40%/20%.
Then we outfit the player with all sorts of monitoring devices and watch the pitches in super slo-mo, revealing that on what had been previously considered too close to call, by the time it became apparent that the pitch was going to break, the batter's muscles were tensed up in such a way that trying to adjust would have resulted in a ground-out to first. 45%/45%/10%
We install a theoretical non-
brain implant to pick apart that mythical 10% and reduce it to 1%; the other 99% of the time, the batter is effectively acting as a complex machine.
At some point, though, we reach a pitch that really could have gone either way no matter how good our measurements were; a pitch that came down to a quantum roll of the dice. Is this the decision? Made by what? Subatomic particles that the batter had for lunch a while back? Does food get a welcoming party in the gut, where it's informed that it's now part of a baseball player and to be sure to take the fork in the wavefunction collapse that leads to more homeruns?
So yeah, when you look at it too closely, the idea that there's an "I" who deserves credit for all "I"'ve done kinda falls apart and can't be salvaged at the quantum level, either. Still, it's a powerful illusion that we all basically buy into all of the time that we're not thinking about it or taking hallucinogens, so I'm going back to it now.