I can't believe people still believe in free will and agency. I'm not aware of anything in biology or physics that suggests we have some magic spark in a mystical plane that gives us "free will". We just do stuff in response to stimulus. I would have thought this debate would die when neurologists started opening up people's brains and inducing massive personality shifts and various cognitive aberrations by poking people's brain meat with electrodes. It's just a false dichotomy left over from weird medieval religious nonsense.
God they're talking about choosing to act Killllll meeeeeee
I'm reading the intro to Infinite Thought btws feel free to check in here because I will be cataloging my distress relating to French people who spend too much time thinking and not enough time practicing with swords.
Yes, but I feel I should clarify that "initial conditions" are relative. They're just the parameters at a particular time, perhaps the time you start observing or simulating a system. In a deterministic system, perfect knowledge of all parameters at any one time is enough to determine them at any other time.
Of course, it's not possible to perfectly the mass or velocity of something. Much less everything in the universe. You're right though many large scale systems in the universe exhibit chaos. e.g. 3 or more body gravitation, weather. But the universe is not fully deterministic, there is randomness at the quantum scale. This randomness led to the distribution of matter at the largest scale of the universe early on, but it's unclear to me whether they ever add up to randomness at large scales today. Like if you rewound the universe 2 years and played it all again, what would change due to quantum randomness? idk, maybe the weather?