Strong Determinism correspond to Predeterminism: no Freewill
Weak Determinism correspond to Probabilistic future: allowed Freewill
Hello. Well, I don't think that freewill sounds very compatible with a "probabilistic future" either. No one can control probability. (There is that quote attributed to Einstein about God not throwing dice. Similarly, if we have freewill, as we define it, we could not be throwing dice either. That just does not sound like "freewill.") That is not to say that I do not think there is any freewill (of any kind), just that I'm not so sure that it's a matter of Newtonian vs quantum physics, especially since the former is a special case of the latter. - Cheers!
First I would like to agree with James Knaub: merely lack of determinism is probably neither necessary nor sufficient to allow for free will.
Second, I disagree with the difference between QM and CM. CM includes chaotic systems, for which no prediction is possible. Further, all reasonable systems are open, so that we never know all relevant degrees of freedom.
An example: if we have a mole of ideal gas at standard temperature and pressure, and if we know all initial positions and velocities, as well as have a fairly good knowledge of the environment. It is then enough to have a mistake of 1 meter in the position of 1 kg at the distance of Sirius for all your predictions concerning this mole of ideal gas to become completely wrong within one second because of the error committed in the gravity field!
Clearly, there is no determinism, even classically, under such circumstances. On the other hand, to justify ``free will'' we need much more than just the impossibility to predict behaviour, otherwise one could make a case for that mole of ideal gas ``having free will'': clear nonsense.
With all this, I do not know what to say about free will. We surely have it (or we think we do, which is much the same). I do not think mechanics enters into it, though. My guess is it concerns a peculiar class of systems which speak of themselves in the first person. But going further would be sharing my confusion.
How do you extend a psychological concept up to microphysics ? I wonder.
The Dirac-de-Broglie noise does enough to ruin all our dreams of panoptical power.
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