Do Subatomic Particles Have Free Will?

An anonymous reader sends in a Science News article that begins: "Human free will might seem like the squishiest of philosophical subjects, way beyond the realm of mathematical demonstration. But two highly regarded Princeton mathematicians, John Conway and Simon Kochen, claim to have proven that if humans have even the tiniest amount of free will, then atoms themselves must also behave unpredictably." Standard interpretations of quantum mechanics, of course, embrace unpredictability. But many physicists aren't comfortable with that, and are working to develop deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics. Conway and Kochen's proof argues that these efforts will be fruitless — unless one is willing to give up human free will, in a very strong sense. The article quotes Conway: "We can really prove that there's no algorithm, no way that the particle can give an answer that is unique and can be specified ahead of time. I'm still amazed that we can actually manage to prove that."

Comments

Uh, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's already considerable evidence that humans don't have free will, but that free will is (essentially) an illusion created by your brain.

So, no, particles do not have free will.

Re:Uh, what?

[ceejayoz]

But what, then, is guiding us to believe we have free will?

The fact that there are so many variables constantly changing as to construct the illusion of it.

That, and the desire to have some purpose - any purpose - to our behaviours.

Re:Uh, what?

[Skevin]

I already tend to believe humans don't have free will to begin with. We are governed by a set of rules, that while we might think we are free to take a drastically different action, there are further rules upon those rules which determine why we took that action.

Okay, so as an example... it's close to lunch time, and I haven't eaten all day. I have money, and I'm right outside a burger joint. Is it Free Will that I decide to go inside and buy some food? What if I watched a video on arterial plaque buildup the previous day and decide to try to find a salad instead? Is it Free Will, or was my logic governed by another set of rules that determined I would seek a healthier alternative? We might think our actions are determined by a thought process, but I've been philosophizing heavily as to how those thought processes got into place to begin with.

Solomon Chang

Re:Uh, what?

[unity100]

then fetch that considerable evidence. dont produce arguments out of your butt.

Re:Uh, what?

[Kagura]

You mean the extremely complex deterministic chemical reactions in your brain will ignore his future posts, not your free will.

Re:Uh, what?

[fastest fascist]

If a desire can guide us, how does that differ from free will? So the mind is basically a combination of brain "modules" of varying function and complexity - how does that nullify the idea of free will? You ARE your brain (and the rest of your body, of course), therefore if your brain is able to moderate it's own actions, you have free will.

Re:Uh, what?

[XcepticZP]

Exactly. We, people, want to believe that we are all unique. This dates back to when philosophers starting separating humans from everything else, which they dubbed "mindless automatons". We humans are supposed to have a "soul". Determinism takes all that away from us and simply tells us that we really are not separate from the environment, because we're made of the same things. Free will was spawned by the same thing that spawned religion.

Re:Uh, what?

[BPPG]

I'd say that feeling if you felt that it was necessary to philosophize about it, then that itself would suggest that you do have free will.

Logic and free will are definitely not mutually exclusive. I'd go as far to say that curiosity and sentience may require free will, and logic/philosophical discord are a means (or rather, one of the only appropriate means) to satisfying that curiosity. Otherwise, we're all just automatons.

Re:Uh, what?

[atlep]

You assume ~A and draw the conclusion ~B. That's not justified.

One thing about logic is understanding when to use it.

You are correct that A->B does not imply ~A->~B.

When you have ~A you do not know anything about B, and cannot make a conclusion based on the model.

However, A->B was never ment to be a complete model of the possible relationships between conscious minds and conscious atoms. It describes only one relatinship. If we want to understand what ~A leads to, we need to look beyond A->B and at the world we're trying to model. And doing that, we see that if we have ~A (no free will) then there is no reason to suspect atoms with free will either.

So there is justification for extending the model and say that ~A->~B

So asuming atoms have not free will, since we don't, ~A from ~B, is a fair and valid conclusion. It's not a logical proof derived from A->B, but it was never claimed to be either.

The real error here was to use an incomplete model to say that a justified conclusion that was not part of the model was false.

Re:Uh, what?

[blahplusplus]

What's the difference between a ball and a human? A human can change it's direction a ball can't, how exactly do humans not have free will here, and most importantly is the concept of "Free will" coherently defined? What is meant by free will, what is meant by "determined"?

If our genetic engineering sciences were advanced enough, we could make fairies and unicorns, would that prove we have fee will? taking a subjective idea and actually making it in reality? i.e. a car didn't exist before we created it, but the stuff the car is made of pre-existing the car, so all aspects of the idea of a car must be derived from pre-existing reality.

I always hate these discussions because no one can really define their terms correctly, anyone want to hae a go at it?

Re:Uh, what?

[indifferent children]

But what, then, is guiding us to believe we have free will?

The same over-active "agency detection" apparatus that tricks us into thinking that a moving shadow or a bolt of lightning is a god or spirit. We have a really poor (in the false-positive direction) agency detection apparatus, which I have seen explained (Gould? Sagan?) as: those who assumed that the moving shadow was out to get them, outlived those who assumed that it was just the wind in the trees (because sometimes it was a hungry agent). Until concepts such as tithing were invented, there was little survival penalty to seeing non-obvious agents were there were none.

Re:Uh, what?

[indifferent children]

And I'd like people who think they understand particle physics to build an accurate weather-prediction machine. It won't work on a practical level because the number of inputs and interactions is "huge", and you would have to be able to measure the approximate state of trillions of particles (same is true for weather prediction or brain simulation). But just because we don't have to means to predict outcomes, does not mean that the outcomes are not pre-determined and theoretically predictable. IOW, our pitiful inability to build such an aparatus does not disprove determinism.

Re:Uh, what?

[fastest fascist]

A steam engine does not, as far as I know, experience anything, nor does it consider itself an entity in any way. I can't, strictly speaking, prove that you do, either, but you yourself know you do. What's experiencing if not a way to get information from the world in order to make decisions - with free will - about it? In any case, judging by the quote you posted, it seems we more or less agree on this matter.

Re:Uh, what?

[BPPG]

because they can ;-)

Re:Uh, what?

[DamnStupidElf]

If the outcome of your decision-making process is pre-determined (as determinism requires) then you had no choice in your "decision". If you have no choice in what you are going to decide, then how can your "will" be "free"?

There are an infinite number of possible universes in which rational beings otherwise indistinguishable from ourselves make different choices than we will make in this universe. If an omniscient observer could look at all possible universes, they would not be able to determine the actions of any given rational being. They could make a probability distribution, but that's about as good as we can do within our own universe.

To be clear, I mean that our analogs in other possible universes are so close to us that we would not be able to tell whether we were in this universe or another one. Even if an omniscient observer knows everything about all possible universes, the set of rational beings who I would identify as me, writing this post on slashdot to you, have an infinite number of future possibilities. That is my free will. I do not know my future actions, and neither does anyone else. I freely choose out of any possible future, although I do not know from which possible universe my choice comes or into which possible universe I will travel with my decision.

If we limit ourselves to deterministic universes (since the idea is to show the existence of free will in a deterministic universe, that should be okay), then no omniscient being exists. There is always a larger possible deterministic universe containing any candidate being, making them non-omniscient. This guarantees that there is no being sitting around who is 100% sure that the deterministic universe it is examining with you in it will not go up in a puff of smoke due to some oddity of the universe containing the semi-omniscient being.

Alternatively, you can take a modal realist approach and consider that every possible universe actually exists, so every choice made through free will actually exists in a real alternative universe. This proves the existence of free will somewhat vacuously, but no less validly.
 

Re:Uh, what?

[Artifakt]

I am aware 100% of the time that I exist. During the times I (allegedly) don't exist, I am not aware of them. I have never experienced something without being aware of it - the two states are synonyms.
      But, I have been aware of many things that don't indicate an external reality. My own internal thoughts and emotions don't necessarily correspond to reality, my memories may or may not be accurate to varying degrees when checked against new experiences, plus there's dreams, delusions, and many other states where I have strong doubt the things I am aware of at that time match in any way with an objective external universe.
        So, I believe in an external reality, but I simply must do so based on a lot less than 100% of my total awareness. If I thought the percentage was very small, I wouldn't believe that the rest of you are real enough to bother typing this, but if I set the percentage at or very close to 100%, I'd be assuming my dreams are real, my emotions are tools of reason, and railroad tracks really do get closer together in the distance!
        Now 'freewill' seems to be real to me, but it acts in many cases in relation to things I also can't prove are real. I can't really prove to anyone else that I have 'real' emotions instead of just 'simulating them', I can't prove I was genuinely mistaken about something instead of pretending to be mistaken, etc. So, I can't use any of these to prove I have free will, since they themselves can also be doubted.
        But, I've just shown that the idea of an external reality, and particularly one where processes of Chemistry and Physics imply there is no true free will possible, is itself subject to doubt. So the real reason we can doubt free will exists is that we can actually doubt just about everything. Now what really bugs me is you people who are swearing up and down there is no reason to doubt external reality, but doubting everything else for reasons that also apply to that external model, except you won't apply them to that, just everything else.

   

Re:Uh, what?

[im_thatoneguy]

Furthermore we still have to define free will.

If an agent with free will is defined as an agent whose behavior is unpredictable then free will can exist. Sub-atomic particles CAN fall under that definition as having free will.

If an agent with free will is defined as an agent who is capable of changing its state through means which are impossible to predict and NOT-RANDOM then it will be impossible to determine whether or not sub-atomic particles or people have free will.

There is no evidence or suggestion that human decision making (moral, religious or otherwise) is anything other than the product of chemical reactions occuring in the brain. Eventually we'll be able to perfectly model the human brain and if it doesn't function then we'll be able to effectively determine that humans do not have free will and that the source of the unpredictability is chaos and happenstance not some super-natural decision making agent which transmits decisions to the meat. (Personally I would argue that alcohol and other physical decision impairing forces are proof that our brain and not some supernatural morality engine is the source of our decisions.)

There are three methods that I know of by which something can happen:
1) Deterministic
2) Random
3) Free Will

Number 2 and 3 are effectively impossible to discriminate between so even if a sub-atomic particle is demonstrated to be unpredictable it still doesn't make it free of will. However even the word "unpredictable" has to be carefully used because the weather is unpredictable and yet most people believe it is deterministic and not the hand of say... Thor.

Number 1 is impossible to prove as well. However counter examples where an agent can be forced into acting against its normal behavior is very strong evidence to support a definition of determinism.

And just to head off the obligatory nihlist: I can't prove that Jesus wasn't Budha's mother or that I'm not a delusional apple hanging from a tree in Iowa so please let's apply occum's razor to this matter before blurting out some nonsense like "but you can never know FOR SURE if a sub-atomic particle is random therefore it has free will."

Re:Uh, what?

[im_thatoneguy]

Eventually we'll be able to perfectly model the human brain and if it doesn't function then we'll be able to effectively determine that humans do not have free will and that the source of the unpredictability is chaos and happenstance not some super-natural decision making agent which transmits decisions to the meat.

Sorry posted too quick.

That should read: Eventually we'll be able to perfectly model the human brain and if it doesn't fail to function then we'll be able to effectively determine that humans do not have free will and that the source of the unpredictability is chaos and happenstance not some super-natural decision making agent which transmits decisions to the meat.

This is exactly what free will boils down to..

[blind biker]

...if you are willing (and able) to scientifically analyse what human will (free or otherwise) really is, and what are the boundaries of its freedom. If we hadn't have quantum mechanical phenomena, there would be no room for free will whatsoever, and we'd be all living a predetermined life.

When I try to discuss this topic with my friends, they are either not scientifically minded enough to follow through, or just can't accept the fact that, as physical beings, we would be absolutely determined in our behaviour and actions. And then, there's the concept of "soul" that, so far, has only helped to muddy the waters of reasoning in this topic. I'd really like to see a way that the concept of "soul" could be included in the discussion of free will in a physical world, I just don't know of any scientifically minded philosopher who had done it.

Re:This is exactly what free will boils down to..

[Austerity Empowers]

Are particles unpredictable because they have free will, or are they unpredictable because we don't have the ability to understand what drives them?

At one point objects fell from the sky because it was God's will.

Re:This is exactly what free will boils down to..

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

This is only true if you assume free will to be inconsistent with fundamental unpredictability.

What exactly is the problem, if you simply require that free will is inconsistent with practical unpredictability ? Then free will would be perfectly consistent with even Newtonian physics.

To make a prediction 100% certain in Newtonian physics you'd have to make every measurement conceivable in a single instant. Otherwise, no matter how much data you bring into your simulation to predict, there'd always be the possibility of outside intervention (I'm not talking ghosts or aliens or God, but merely some guy, or even a single particle of dust that wasn't included in your simulation coming in and ruining your predictions).

Also you'd need "faster-than-realtime" simulation. Even if you could simulate the universe, unless you can do it faster than the real world does it, it will not yield any prediction.

There are lots of places for fundamental problems to manifest themselves, and we've certainly not looked everywhere for them. In fact I could name 10 fundamental problems with simulating even an ant according to newtonian physics.

In the case that, while the universe is fundamentally predictable, but not practically, only a being completely independant of our own universe would be able to predict anything 100% certain. Or if you like it stated otherwise, only God would know the future for certain, everyone else merely has a bad (or good) guess, but nothing more.

That's a very inglamorous way of looking at the universe, and at our own limitations, but it does seem to have realiy on it's side.

Therefore, even in Newton's world, only God knows the future, everyone else merely has a guess.

Re:This is exactly what free will boils down to..

[Chrisje]

I've been doing some reading lately, and if you'd read Lakoff's "Metaphors we live by" you'd be noticing that "Free will" and the "Soul" are linguistic concepts we cannot define or express properly. So at the end of the day these vague notions will be described in metaphors, meaning that we try to describe these notions as concepts derived from things that are more clear to us. The same would apply to the ever-fuzzy notions of love and hate. Now Lakoff would argue that Mathematics and Philosophy are not objective at all, and can never presume to be. He would argue that we use mathematics as a metaphor to make the world comply with our own physical condition and the way that condition predisposes our thought patterns.

Having said that, if you attribute the meaning of the ability to make choices to the concept of free will, you could argue that even in a largely deterministic universe, you can still make the odd choice to throw determinism out the window. I guess I'm trying to say that like "Free Will", Determinism is a construct we created so as to make sense of our universe, and I am not sure if it exists either. Who is trying to predict/pre-determine what and why? It makes no sense, unless we had a Prime Mover, a Mao Zhe Dong of the sky, as it were.

So the whole "Free will / Determinism" discussion is quite silly. Within certain parameters I am quite sure that our universe influences our thought patterns, but I'm also quite sure that our actions/choices are somewhat based on what we want for that moment. You could argue that Free Will and Determinism are two extremes of a spectrum, and that the truth probably lies in the middle.

Wide Interpretation of Freewill is at fault

[topham]

Think about a definition of Free Will for a while. Then answer this question:

If an exact copy of you were made (absolutely exact, right down to the quantum state of every particle); do you believe that given the exact same environment (a twinned universe?) your doppleganger would ever do anything different than yourself?

If you believe that you would not act, and think exactly the same then you believe Free Will is beyond quantum mechanics; otherwise Free Will is just the synergistic response to a complex organism that has the capability to think of itself.

Re:Wide Interpretation of Freewill is at fault

[LeafOnTheWind]

Mod parent up. Finally someone who knows what they are talking about.

The buzzword "free will" is bringing out the idiots with no science education. This discussion simplifies to one thing - if, given all the requisite variables in a system, one can predict the next infinite states of that system, that system is deterministic. Id est, if, ignoring the cloning theorem and other QM restraints, one knew the exact state of every particle in the human body and one could predict the next infinite states of that system (the body), then that system would be deterministic (have no "free will"). If, on the other hand, the human body (more precisely, the mind) could be proven to have a finite number of predictable states, then the underlying physical systems must therefore also have a finite number of predictable states (be unpredictable).

Now, QM predicts that subatomic particles are unpredictable. Technically, that would make our minds unpredictable HOWEVER - unpredictable is defined precisely as being unable to predict an infinite number of states in the system. A finite (even large) number may still be possible. This would the generalization of a large number of unpredictable subsystems in the system used to approximate the future states. As we see with Newtonian physics, this method can be fairly accurate.

The only way that humans could be proven to be completely predictable would be to disprove the tenets of quantum mechanics. Until then, humans have "free will."

Re:Science and religions/atheism should not mix

[mblase]

I am a little bit concerned, that scientists, due to their philosophical bent, might actually try ignore evidence that does not fit into the atheist viewpoints.

Yeah, it's terrible when respectable professional scientists won't accept the possibility of unprovable supernatural beings as an axiom for their research papers.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Oh great

[Anonymous Coward]

Now my "spiritually minded" friends will be telling me that science has proved that subatomic particles think and feel. I know they mean well, but nothing is worse than a quantum mechanics lesson from people who can't even do algebra.

Simple answer

[greyhueofdoubt]

You have basically three choices here:

-Humans/animals/subatomic particles have free will somehow; as in, they can make arbitrary decisions and cause action that is unpredictable by any model of physics.

-Humans et al. do not have free will and their actions are dictated by laws of physics; said laws are natural and immutable and will lead to a predictable model of the universe.

-Humans et al. do not have free will and their actions are dictated by the whims of a god or other conscious entity. This scenario, much like creation theories, really just moves the determination of free will to another actor: If we are merely cogs in god's plan, does god have free will? This scenario, even if true, would not provide us with any useful information.

As an atheist I cannot fathom option 3. Of the remaining scenarios, the only one I can rationally support is number two (no free will thanks to physics). As it hurts my ego to claim that I have no free will, I believe that the concept of free will ought to be divided into distinct categories: mathematically-derived actions of matter and energy and sentient actions (which would not cover particles unless they were shown to be conscious). I think they ought to be treated as separate fields.

Or maybe individuals have free will, but the species does not. If you can predict birthrate, accident rate, crime rate, etc with a high degree of accuracy, is free will threatened? If you can predict with great accuracy that 1.2% of RV owners will experience a collision while driving their RV, do RV owners still retain free will?

I need more caffeine.
-b

Bad Philosophy and Questionable Physics

[etymxris]

First of all, quantum mechanics has absolutely nothing to do with free will. Free will, if understood properly, is a moral property of human agents. And whether someone is responsible for his actions has nothing to do with our final understanding of subatomic physics.

Secondly, the physics is questionable. There are several assumptions underlying Bell's inequalities. One of which is that incoming (that is, earlier in time) influences are independent. However, the fundamental laws are, for the most part, time symmetric. (The exceptions are the neutral kaon which has questionable significance and entropy, which is a supervenient law that needs to be explained by cosmic boundary conditions.)

The point is that we should not expect incoming influences to be independent. We should expect variable dependence going both ways in time. "Agency" and "observer" being primitive theoretical entities was always a metaphysical abomination. Happily, it's not necessary once the symmetry of time is fully appreciated.

I'm not saying anything new. Huw Price is the principle proponent of this view and he's not the one who came up with it either. To my knowledge there has been no serious reply to Price's proposal. So his work sits largely ignored, while media attention goes to crazy interpretations that give free will to subatomic particles, and various other metaphysical abominations.

No: Free will + statistics

[Roger W Moore]

No - in Asimov's world humans can have free will in exactly the same manner as quantum mechanical particles can have "free will" and yet Newtonian mechanics (which is deterministic) can accurately describe the physics of things a lot larger than an atom. There is a probability for each human/particle to make different choices and, when statistically sampled on a large enough scale, those probabilities lead to something that appear deterministic.

This is exactly how quantum mechanics work. Each particle has a probability distribution for what it will do so that, at the large scale because of the huge numbers involved we know that roughly 40% will do X, 20% will do Y and 40% will do Z.

While I don't know for certain that Asimov based psycho-history on QM I've often suspected as much. As a PhD chemist he should have had a reasonably good understanding of QM at least.

Re:Science and religions/atheism should not mix

[Koiu Lpoi]

He said evidence. If there is evidence of such beings (hypothetical), it would be wrong of scientists to ignore it just because they're atheist, right?

Randomness and unpredictability

[pcgabe]

All things "quantum" are portrayed as bizarre, but they aren't; they aren't even that difficult to understand, if presented properly. There's just a whole lot of bad "information" out there.

The most famous alternative is attributed to the physicist David Bohm, who argued in the 1950s that the behavior of subatomic particles is entirely determined by "hidden variables" that cannot be observed.

Bohm's idea has never been debunked, and is perfectly logical. Remember, the movement of the planets was also once "unpredictable", and then "mostly predictable but with errors" before we understood the hidden variables. Just because something is currently unpredictable, doesn't make it random.

Anyway.

There are a number of statements in this article that lead me to believe that either: A) Conway and Kochen are loony, or B) crappy "science" journalism strikes again. Hopefully it's the latter and something was just lost in the translation from actual-science to journalism-ese. However, the fact that the two of them have been hawking this idea for four years tends toward A.

Repeated throughout the article is the idea that the particle CHOOSES its spin. This is an insane idea. The whole presentation is nuts. Do subatomic particles have free will? What? Does a glass of water have free will? Can you define free will first so that a meaningful discussion can follow?

This article portrays it as a new choice, either determinism or free will. It has always been one or the other, they're mutually exclusive (for certain values of "free will").

But anyway.

Entangle two particles this way, and then send a physicist named Alice with one of them to Mars and leave the other with a physicist named Bob on Earth. That will prevent information from passing between the physicists or the particles, according to relativity theory.

WTF. Again with the lunacy. You don't have to send Alice to Mars to prevent information passing between them. First of all, information isn't going to pass between them, that's not what entangled particles are about (despite massive popular [but factually wrong] ideas to the contrary). Second of all, putting Alice on the other side of Earth gets her out of Bob's immediate light cone.

ANYWAY.

The point of the thought experiment is to "prove" that there's no way to predict the axis of spin of the particle, even with an identically entangled particle, if you "poke" it differently, because no perfect pre-poke state exists.

This means that the particle cannot have a definite spin in every direction before it's measured, Kochen and Specker concluded. If it did, physicists would be able to occasionally observe it breaking the 1-0-1 rule, which never happens. Instead, it must "decide" which spin to have on the fly.

Because "poking" it changes its spin. NO SHIT. You change the outcome by measuring it. Oh my science! Alert the media! So their idea is that the spin is not predetermined, and therefore determinism is false and we have "free will". Except it STILL doesn't disprove Bohm's conjecture (see start of rant) that there are unknown rules in play.

So, their idea basically adds nothing to the debate. It "proves" nothing. It tells us nothing. Why is this on /.?

This article is dumb. I'm dumber for having read it. I award the author no points, and may science have mercy on his inevitably destined animating force.

Re:Randomness and unpredictability

[glwtta]

Can you define free will first so that a meaningful discussion can follow?

Well, in a word, no.

That's what makes it one of the Great Questions of the ages that can never be answered: people use several, completely unrelated, definitions of "free will" interchangeably, allowing them to carry on this "debate" for several thousand years now.

Re:Science and religions/atheism should not mix

[drsmithy]

He said evidence. If there is evidence of such beings (hypothetical), it would be wrong of scientists to ignore it just because they're atheist, right?

If there is such evidence, it wouldn't be supernatural, and hence scientists' religious beliefs (or lack thereof) would be irrelevant.

Re:What do we mean by FREE WILL here?

[bunratty]

It's not free will if we're automata predetermined to carry out a given sequence of actions and have no power to choose otherwise. Free will is the ability to make a decision -- to choose whether to behave one way or the other.

Re:Free Will != Unpredictability

[fastest fascist]

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it's a duck. That "you" have an "illusion" of free will is a strange claim to make. Who is this "you" the brain is fooling into thinking it's in control? The brain is in control, although in a distributed manner. Sure, if you want to think of yourself as a dictator holding all the strings, getting information from and passing instructions to from the different facilities of your nervous system, you're going to run into all kinds of trouble because, frankly, it just isn't so. There's no differentiating the experience of self, or of free will, or of anything, really, and the brain that does the experiencing, usually experiencing any given event in a multitude of different, even conflicting ways. If you can't tell the difference between having or not having free will, why do you think there is one in the first place?

Stupid

[Geoffrey.landis]

Particles do not have will at all, free or otherwise, so it's silly to say they have "free will."

The argument in the article is clever, but it really says nothing about free will. It's an argument about interpretation of quantum mechanics. In fact, it says that quantum measurements can imply a hidden variable theory if humans do not have the freedom to chose axes arbitrarily. This has little or nothing to do with particles having free will.

Doesn't have much to do with humans having free will, either, since few physicists see any need for hidden variable interpretations of quantum mechanics.

Re:Stupid

[stevelinton]

It's rather more than that. It's perhaps easier to extract what is, in effect the authors definition of "an application of free will" from the abstract quantity itself. Such an application is a decision which is not entirely the consequence of events that precede it.

Now if the experiments measuring particle a make an application of free will in deciding their choice of axes, and special relativity is OK, then the universe near particle b must also make an application of free will to decide the result of the measurement of particle b.

Foolishness

[wfolta]

Yeah, it's terrible when respectable professional scientists won't accept the possibility of unprovable supernatural beings as an axiom for their research papers.

Only evangelizing atheists and certain 17th-century clerics think that a scientist who believes in a supreme being will somehow have to resort to "angels pushing planets" kind of proof.

Newton, Bayes, and many other famous scientists were believers and that did not stop them from applying scientific methods. And many never-heard-of-them scientists today also believe as well, but you'll see no footnotes in their papers referencing this.

You make the basic mistake of assuming that those who stand inside of mainstream science and don't have Bible-referencing footnotes, have no faith. Not very scientific or rigorous. (Or correct.)

Re:Science and religions/atheism should not mix

[moz25]

You got it all wrong. The existence or non-existence of a god is irrelevant. There are logically two possibilities here:

1. God does not exist and thus there is no evidence whatsoever to support a claim that it does exist.

2. God does exist, but the game is designed -- by the one who created this reality no less -- that evidence can not be found through rational means. The whole reward/punishment system is based on accepting the premises without evidence.

Besides, why does this even matter to you? If you're religious, don't you already have all the evidence you need?

I'm surprised by the number of 'determinists'

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised by the number of people who are 'determinists' -- in other words, the universe is like a movie playing out -- all the frames have been shot (determined). This doesn't seem compatible with, evolution, for example. Why would consciousness evolve if it can't change anything? Even intelligence in say a lion is so that it can make decisions ( non-deterministic ) and improve its odds of survival. If it was all pre-determined, why provide an adaptive mechanism like intelligence, that is expensive ( althought that does not matter, I guess, in a deterministic universe) when it doesn't actually increase the odds of survival -- it just makes it appear as though it does. Your odds of survival are 100% until your thoroughly pre-determined death.

So -- if 'free will' - which is way too anthropomoriphic of a phrase exists anywhere ( i.e., you can make a decision that is not predetermined that affects the future )then it makes sense that it is part of the fabric of the universe ( sub-atomic particles ). My impression of the article is that it proves either their is 'free will' ( the universe is not deterministic ), or that it is. You can't have it both ways. My thought is that a deterministic universe is not really compatible with either our experience, or with many other observable phenomenon. That said, I guess you cant' rule it out completely, but hey, according to post-modernism you can't know anything at all with any certainty.

Re:You're orthogonal...

[lgw]

I'm totally happy to redefine "free will" as "the illusion of free will" - as I point out, the illusions of free will is alwats the reality, and it cannot be otherwise. Just as there is no differenve between the "illusion of pain" and "pain".

But determinism absolutely precludes true free will. This is so patently obvious that I'm always shocked to see people like yourself attempting to argue against it.

An assertion is not an argument.

Words have meanings. So unless you live in a world where "logical consistency" is an illusion as well, please don't redefine terms in order to support your preconceived notions.

The church says that about "morality" all the time. The purpose of philosophy is to investigate the meansing of words suchas as "good", "know", "identity", and "free will". You'd be amazed for each of these word how many irreconcilable camps there are who each say "please don't redefine terms in order to support your preconceived notions". Sorry, you don't get to define words to support your notions either.

I claim that if I have sufficient self-awareness to reflect on a choice and make a decision, then I have free will. How could it be otherwise? When I brush something hot and jump away by reflex without reflection: no free will. When I decide to use a pot-holder to grab that pan instead - free will.

What does it matter if my actions are taken in a deterministic universe? What about if the universe in non-deterministic, but an eternal (meaning "outside of time") observer can observe the outcome in time orthagonal to mine - does that matter? What if a very powerful intelligence can model my thought processes to the point where it can predict my decisions with 100% accuracy - does that matter? What if it's 99.9999999999% accuracy, and it happens to predict correctly every time - does that matter?

It's been a while since I studied this stuff, but those are a few of the interesting questions I remember off the top of my head. There are many more simple question like that abotu which people are *sure* they have the only correct, rational answer, and are shocked to discover that there is an opposing camp.