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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."
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.
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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.
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.
You mean the extremely complex deterministic chemical reactions in your brain will ignore his future posts, not your free will.
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.
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.
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.
Who is John Cabal?