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

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."

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: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?

[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.