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laws of nature, necessity, determinism, quantum theory, reductive materialism

Reductive materialists claim that the laws of nature predetermine how every material thing shall move, including human actions.  One objection that might be posed to reductionism is the randomness scientists attribute to the behavior of individual particles  at the quantum level.  The reductionist reply (this time correctly, in spite of the incoherence of their philosophical position) that quantum fluctuations don't save freedom.  If we behave as we do simply because of a lawful relation between our behavior and its material preconditions, then determinism is not avoided by supposing that right before behavior x happens, a (random) quantum fluctuation happens, which ends up causing (think of the butterfly effect) us to act differently than we otherwise would have, had the fluctuation not occurred.  That is because our behavior, although not predictable in virtue of what happened before the random fluctuation, is predictable in virtue of what happened subsequently.  We could get around this by identifying our behavior with the fluctuation itself, but that would be pathetically ad hoc.

What if what we call the laws of nature were to change?  That would not save freedom either, because action would still be determined by the (changing) laws of nature.   So an appeal to the fixity of the laws of nature is not a necessary condition for determinism.

What can't be dispensed with is reductionism.  Their denial of freedom is not much about foreknowledge as it is about the claim that we're not so special: we're just dust in the wind, as the song says.  But even the most complicated combination of forces can't think it is nothing but dust in the wind; hence reductionism is self-undermining.  All of its arguments turn to dust.

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