The free will conversations drive me insane. People can't shut up about how Heisenberg's uncertainty principle proves random phenomena (which isn't exactly true) but worse, they insist it indicates that we have free will.
But a) what it really indicates is that it would be unmeasurable whether we have free will, and b) it also doesn't really prove that, because while electron positions are unpredictable, molecular reactions, the sort that happen in the human brain are pretty predictable.
Basically, my response to this is "That would be relevant if we had black holes or large hadron colliders in our heads, but we don't, so...". But people really really want to believe in free will and will use any sliver of half-truth to believe they've proved it.
EDIT: To be clear, I do not believe free will has been proven OR disproven.
EDIT 2: More sophisticated wrong people argue from Bell's Inequalities rather than the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, but that also results from a misunderstanding of the theory and also neither proves nor disproves determinism.
But a) what it really indicates is that it would be unmeasurable whether we have free will, and b) it also doesn't really prove that, because while electron positions are unpredictable, molecular reactions, the sort that happen in the human brain are pretty predictable.
Basically, my response to this is "That would be relevant if we had black holes or large hadron colliders in our heads, but we don't, so...". But people really really want to believe in free will and will use any sliver of half-truth to believe they've proved it.
EDIT: To be clear, I do not believe free will has been proven OR disproven.
EDIT 2: More sophisticated wrong people argue from Bell's Inequalities rather than the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, but that also results from a misunderstanding of the theory and also neither proves nor disproves determinism.