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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."
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.
...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.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't put advice in your sig.
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.
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.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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?
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.)