Long Live Free Will, Even with Laplace’s Demon
Laplace’s Demon can observe our future, but our future is uncertain to us
I’ve read Liu Cixin’s novels before, where he mentioned a time machine that can predict the future. When people discovered their own futures, everyone lost the motivation to do anything, because no matter what they did, their futures were just as the time machine had predicted. Although quantum physics is random, the macroscopic laws of physics are fixed. This means that if we knew the motion state of every single atom in the world and could extrapolate based on the laws, we could determine our future — this is Laplace’s Demon.
However, do not despair because of this. Believe in the power of our free will. My friends, from our perspective, our free will can indeed shape our behavior and influence the future.
For us, our future is unpredictable. If we predict our next action, and we don’t want that outcome, we can take the opposite action. But because our future is that way, something will correct our opposite action. And since we’ve predicted the future, we can take a new opposite action to cancel out the correction. But because the future is that way, a new correction will appear…this is an endless cycle. So, our future is unpredictable.
