What is Life?

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

 

Baby don't hurt me~

[whm1974]

1 hour ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

 

Baby don't hurt me~

Love only Applies to Mammals and Birds.

[YellowJersey]

3 hours ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

 

Baby don't hurt me~

Beat me to it

[Drama Lama]

16 hours ago, ragnarok0273 said:

The meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything:

42.

What is the question, is a better question to ask.

but don't forget your towel

[whm1974]

What is this about Jokes derived from the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"? Yes I read the Book and seen parts of the Movies, but...

 

[Dash Lambda]

19 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

-snip-

I'm gonna have to disagree with you on that one.

 

Classical physics tells us that the physical interactions and phenomena that make up... well, us, are described by a set of purely deterministic rules. Thus, if you gathered enough information and used a sophisticated enough model, you could perfectly predict future events, including people's ostensibly independent decisions.

 

Quantum mechanics introduces randomness. We have ways to constrain that randomness, but we have not yet been able to make QM deterministic, and there's active debate over whether that's a matter of our understanding or simply the nature of physics.

 

By QM, no matter how much information you gather, you cannot perfectly predict the state of a system at arbitrary time scales. At best, you can predict a set of possible states.

 

When considering the feasibility of free will in this context, the question becomes where does that randomness come from?

No matter how much people claim we're nothing but highly ordered chemical reactions, there remains an element of consciousness that we have yet to even develop the language to describe rigorously. The physical body accounts for all observable behavior, but does not in any way we know account for how you experience the world as an entity through that body. It's not something expressed through any known physical phenomena, and is thus not observable or predictable -it's just a property of your experience.

 

Some describe that (rather uselessly) as your "soul". Some say it's an emergent property of physics, but that doesn't type-check. Ultimately, we haven't even begun to approach understanding it, all we have are names.

 

And that leaves room for stuff to get weird and metaphysical. Maybe you actually are some more abstract entity controlling your body through quantum randomness, maybe reality doesn't exist and all those (apparently nonexistent) old philosophers were right, maybe the answer is even weirder.