Uncovering the Possibilities of Groundhog Day and the Illusion of Free Will

[smurfslappa]

If you haven't seen the movie Groundhog Day, you should. It's a good movie. Bill Murray plays a news reporter waking up to the same crap every day, and is driven mad by it. This made me wonder. The day was exactly the same as before; all the atoms and sub-atomic particles in the universe had been reset to their previous positions, speeds and directions of that morning. Would this happen in real life? If so, free will is just an illusion that we created, and we are controlled by the elaborate dance of atoms and theyre components subcomponents. But smurfslappa, our interaction with others changes our thought process, thusly changing this dance! Who's to say that everything has to be right next to each other to affect its course? The particles of your mind worked in such a way that you wanted to call your friend. Your friends worked in such a way that he remembered you owed him ten bucks. If you took the atoms and all theyre smaller particles of the world to 20 minutes prior to that conversations, why wouldn't they repeat the same dance they had before, leading up to your friends phone call? And why wouldn't you say the same things? The synapses should fire exactly as they had before. So if they did, both groups would be affected exactly as they had before. Atoms get pulled from every direction, so theyre components would be pulled in every direction, and they're components would move around, affecting the movements. But if the planets move around the sun with consistency, why wouldn't atoms have they're own dance? A really really impossible-to-predict-the-next-move-because-it's-so-complex dance. All these things have theyre own mass, gravities which cause them to move around. Someone give me a good answer, which has been thought out: If i reset the entire universe to the state it was this morning, why wouldn't the day be exactly the same?

 

[shadowman]

If i reset the entire universe to the state it was this morning, why wouldn't the day be exactly the same?

I suggest you look up "chaos theory". just cause all the atoms reacted the same before, doesn't mean they will act the same way the next time. there are many many many different ways for an atom to react to a stimulus. I mean look at it this way, no matter how many times you go to sleep, you'll never roll out of bed exactly the same way...