Freewill vs determinism is a nonsensical question
I have a thought experiment to propose:
We place a space ship, 3 light-minutes from Earth. It is also a time machine.
On Earth is a little coffee shop in which two elderly women have a conversation. This conversation is recorded for exactly 1 minute, and radioed immediately to space. 3 minutes later, the space ship watches the conversation and at minute 4, the space ship activates its time machine and jumps 4 minutes back in the past.
The two women are conversing again, the same minute. They cannot be influenced by the space ship, since it is 3 light minutes away. The space ship receives their conversation again, and then after a minute of listening, it jumps back 4 minutes in time.
My simple proposition:
- If determinism is true, the space ship will do this forever, without those two women ever changing a single thing in their conversation.
- However, if free will exists, then an outside change is not required. With enough repetition one of the old ladies will change up what they are saying eventually, if she possesses free will. This must be the definition of free will, because even an automaton can change their behavior on new input from the outer world.
(Side note: This idea mirrors the halting problem.)
Now that we have clarified what free will is and what determinism is, and since we acknowledge entropy makes it impossible to recreate the same state twice, as long as we do not have time travel, we could never test for free will. Because short of time travel, we could never recreate the exact same state a near infinite amount of times.
Which leads to a simple thought: Free will and determinism are indistinguishable from each other. And that makes them identical. They are the same.
Therefore, I conclude, free will is determinism and that is why the debate about free will versus determinism makes no sense.
At least in this universe, under the assumption that time travel in the past is impossible and entropy is irreversible.
Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.