I read in a book on the science of chaos once, about a popular novelty random-motion desk sculpture that has three steel balls attached to stiff wires that are driven to rotate chaotically around each other by a magnet in the base of the sculpture. The book explained that a little simple math (relatively speaking) indicates that the motion of the steel balls can be completely altered in as few as 20 cycles, by the gravitational pull of a building five blocks away.
That means, if it were possible to create two machines that were identical all the way down to the quantum level, and set them in motion with the exact same force, even inside a vacuum, the mere fact that they occupied different positions in space, even if only a few inches, would cause them to lose synchronization within 20 or so cycles andstart rotating in completely independent chaotic patterns with no discernable relationship to each other's movement.
Within 40 to 100 cycles, the gravitational pull of a building sized object on Jupiter would have the same effect. And within, say, 1.000 to 10.000 cycles, such an object orbitting the nearest star (about three light-years away) would also cause our matched machines to “forget” their common origin (assuming of course that nothing else in the universe changed during those 1000 or so cycles).
With a little extrapolation it becomes clear that our machines could not remain in synch for more than a few years if nothing else changed in the entire universe, except the existence of a single molecule in a galaxy far-far away!
If that single molecule, billions of light-years from here, has the ability to alter the course of motion in our random-motion machine here on Earth (and every molecule in the universe has this ability to influence what happens), then it also has the ability to change the entire course of history on this planet, in much less than a few years!
What's my point? Is this just a novel but meaningless mental exercise? I think not. In fact, everything I think is also effected by that distant molecule. And that brings me to my point.
If any molecule in the universe can change what “random” thought I may be having two or three years from now, then how can we say that I have volition of thought (much less “free will”)?
Of course the first, and most obvious, response to that question is that, “the motion of the machine may change, but the machine itself does not change. It still behaves according to its own nature”.
But what determines the “nature” of the machine? Wasn't it “designed” by mere thought? So, this response to my question fails when you consider that the machine's very existence, and its “nature”, are determined by all those distant (and near) molecules in the first place. My question stands; where is our free will?
Actually, there is a solution to this puzzle, but not one that most people can accept (at least not yet). The answer, assuming we do in fact have “free will” (which we must, or all is lost!), and the only answer, is that we, in determining what we do and think, also determine the existence and state (location and motion in space and time) of EVERY SINGLE MOLECULE IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE FROM THE BEGINNING AND TO THE END OF TIME! There is no other solution.
Hense, we are God, or we are nothing!
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