Slashdot Mirror
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."
If they indeed succeed, some other folks will start to search for underlying nondeterministic model, and so on...
Go watch Waking Life, that creepy rotoscope-styled movie. That's a big part of it.
The question of "Are we merely the random wavering of subatomic particles" is almost, verbatim, a line from the film.
Unpredictability has nothing to do with free will. I can be completely predictable and still be acting freely. Conversely, if my actions are random, how can I be said to have any control over them?
A very good film. Here is an interesting monologue about the relationship between the free will and physics laws.
I should add that when it comes to theoritical physics and expoloration, we should not limit ourselves strictly to materialistic or atheistic viewpoints, but also should explore possibilities that there is a metaphysical components to something. So if we have theories which point to the possibility of a metaphysical component, these should not be thrown out because they conflict with someones atheistic viewpoint. Until we have a clear answer and something that is provable with emperical evidence, we really should consider all possibilities regarding something, and even afterwards continue to test theories and laws, not assuming they are entirely correct. I do not believe, in a strict seperation of science and religion, religion can inspire science, but when it comes to established fact we should follow evidence. Science can also speculate about things which are presently undetermined and untested, and develop a hypothesis or theory, in which case all possibilities should be explored, regardless if they have an atheist or a religions aura about them. So especially with things hypothesis which conjectures in areas about might what be possible, i think it is important for all possibilities to be explored and seen as possible, and where there is evidence, the evidence should not be ignored because they conflict with religions or atheism.
"free will" is just an expression of the impossibility of predicting the future with any degree of accuracy based on knowing initial conditions. In an ideal world, you could, and it would be clear there is no free will. But we can no easier predict a human's decision than we can figure out exactly where a given atom of oxygen will be in the room 5 seconds from now. So for all practical purposes, there is free will. But the reality will always be that there is none. So although there is no free will, there's no point in arguing about it.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The original poster writes that this hypothesis is a threat to "human free will, in a very strong sense". I'm not sure what he means by a very strong sense, but it becomes clear after doing a little research that none of these people are talking about human free will in the sense that most people perceive it.
The real argument here is about whether the future is fixed. If the universe is purely mechanistic, then no agency -- human or otherwise -- can change the course of future events. But what does that mean for a human being?
Not much, it turns out. So you can't change the future, but thanks to the laws of thermodynamics you don't know what the future is going to be like anyhow. There's still nothing to prevent you from shaping (as opposed to changing) the future with your decisions.
But wait! Aren't those decisions also pre-determined? In a strictly physical sense, yes, they are. But again, what does that mean for us? Not much. A human being is a vastly complex and chaotic system interacting with a vastly complex and chaotic environment. We're driven by chaos theory and the laws of thermodynamics, not by quantum randomness. (Would you really want to be guided by quantum randomness? I mean seriously. . . What kind of "free will" would you get out of that?)
Any argument against free will -- in the way that most ordinary people regard it -- is easily brushed aside. For thousands of years we've been designing and creating things, making plans and then carrying them out. That's free will. To argue against it is like trying to prove that black is white (and then getting yourself killed at the next zebra crossing).
If you mean "guy on the street who just thought about this five minutes ago", probably, but free will has been a serious topic of philosophical discussion for centuries now. As you might expect, various people have written various things on the subject that you might not think of in a college-dorm philosophy session, which seems to be the extent of philosophical thinking the scientists who are the subject of this article have done.
In particular, a major position on the subject, held by both philosophers (from Hume on down) and scientists-turned-philosophers (notably Daniel Dennett), termed "compatibilism", is that free will and determinism are perfectly compatible. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a reasonably good summary.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"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?"
The copy would act a LOT like the original, but would diverge eventually, because it cannot remain in the same state after being copied: both copies can't be in the same place so they will be affected differently by their environment.
The whole free-will debate is missing the point: there being complete determinism to human nature or, at a higher level, in the Universe itself does not equate it being predictable by us, because of this little grain of sand discovered by Edward Lorenz - the fact that ce can't know the full starting conditions. The most we can hope to achieve is good local predictions at a very small time scale.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
The "average behavior of crowds is deterministic" thing doesn't really work. The sum or average of a set of random variables is also a random variable.
There is a well known result in probability theory called the central limit theorem that says that if you add up enough independent, identically-distributed random variables together you get a normal distribution (i.e. bell curve). Lots of people try to apply this to economics (or in Asimov's case, history), but it doesn't work in practice. Individual actions are not independent or identically distributed. People's actions are correlated to other people's actions. Some people have vastly more influence on the aggregate outcome than others.
So the central limit theorem can't be applied to aggregate behavior. Instead of getting a nice well behaved normal distribution, you'll end up with a distribution that's messy, unpredictable, and confusing, which is fitting, since that's what we humans are.
You have to consider the opposite. Why would our minds not experience will?
Our minds have evolved for decision-making. A decision consists of what the organism percieves and a response. Imagine the first organism to have a photoelectric cell on its skin and a neuron connected to it. Light on means hide, light off means move.
More complex decisions demands a more complex mind, but in essence it is the same. Will is crucial for decision-making. Of course it is important for the organism to know when to hide from predators, but it's prehaps even more important to know when you're hungry.
The illusion of will is necessary for any sort of inner life to have any meaning. Imagine an organism that percieves everything and can do everything but does not have the will to do anything. Would such a creature survive a day in this world? I believe she would be ant food.
There are many useful illusions. Pour some hot water on your arm and you'll experience pain. Pain exists only as a computer process in your brain. It's an illusion.
Will by itself, combined with a complex mind, leads directly down the path to "free". But it's just a word, just like "hungry", "horny", "hurting" or "skippy-doo". Our minds have evolved to a point were we can appreciate that we have complex choices.
Also, what's with the logic that just because you percieve something, it's real? So feeling god makes god real?
I believe that we have free will, *and* that the universe is completely deterministic. The two concepts are orthgonal. One cannot have "illusion of free will" any more than one can have "illusion of pain". If I believe that I'm in pain, than I necessarily am in pain, even if the pain comes from e.g. a limb that no longer exists - doesn't matter: if it hurts, it hurts.
Similarly, if I consciously decide my next actions, then I necessarily have free will, regardless of whether the universe is pre-determined. You might argue that in a deterministic universe all consciousness is an illusion - but that's an unreawrding path to travel.
In any case, arguing "if I have free will, then the universe is not deterministic" is not logical - the assumption that "determinism is incompatible with free will" has been argued by philosophers for centuries, without conclusion. Feel free to believe that - many do - but don't state it as a fact.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
....it's infeasible to predict the evolution of the universe faster than real-time.....
To make any predictions, one would first have to understand what "real time" actually is. Science can divide and measure time more accurately than any other physical quantity, but no scientist has even the faintest clue what time really is. We glibly talk about the past to present and the future, but in reality have only access to the instantaneous "now".
We are all like fish in an aquarium, our time space universe. Only the builder and keeper of the aquarium can know what will happen when inside the aquarium. This is because He is not inside of or part of the aquarium, but exists eternally and independently.
A good illustration of this is the astronaut inside of a closed (noiseless) rocket accelerating exactly at 32 f/s per second. There is no experiment whatsoever that such an person could make, whereby he could tell whether the rocket was standing on earth or not. Another analogy might be a person floating in a balloon not experiencing any wind because the balloon is traveling at the same rate. We are all immersed as it were in a stream of time and are all carried along with it.
All theory is gray
I'd like people who view the human thought process as an algorithm to put it in software.
That's a false dichotomy. Just because a person does have free will does not mean they would never make a bad choice.
Just to be clear, I was not talking about a single bad choice, or even a few. I'm talking about when its now clear to the individual that path A is not a good thing (a physically abusive relationship for example), and the person continues down path A when they admit that path A is not a good thing.
After reading the article, which does not convince me of free will (and I have yet to of read a comment in this thread that is convinced either), I also found this interesting under the free will article on wikipedia:
the neuroscience part of free will here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will#Neuroscience.
So a steam engine with a governor on it, providing a feedback mechanism that moderates its actions, has free will? That's a highly non-standard use of the term.
The best take I've seen on the "dilemma" of free will comes from Raymond Smullyan:
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Choosing freely and after consideration isn't choosing for any reason, it is simply choosing and after considering the options, non-options, etc. This is a crucial ontological distinction that makes all the difference - even when there is only one choice!
Chocolate or Vanilla? Choose?
Chocolate!
Why did you choose what you choose?
I choose chocolate because once you have tried chocolate you never go back!
That's not a choice, that's a deterministic decision. Nothing wrong with it, but it's not a choice made freely since you had a reason, logical or illogical, you had a reason.
Chocolate or Vanilla?
Chocolate!
Why did you choose Chocolate?
I choose chocolate because I choose chocolate!
Excellent choice!
Thank you. I considered the choices, and I choose freely!
Yes you did. We live in the house of language.
Since the development of modern science. When you have no reason to assume something, it's assumption is illogical. It's not "false"(unless it violates others you've proven true), it's just irrelevant.
To clarify: When you have no testable evidence, your claim is meaningless. Science is not like math, where you can define your world and it's axioms of truth (and suffer the consequences ala Godel, but that's another story). Science so far is concerned with making models that work, where the models are statements about the world as we "see" it. The topic being discussed today is pointless, because the reason we are talking about non-sentient things having a "will" is because they are the constituents of something that is thought of as having a "will". The OP and GP posts were collectively saying that you can pretty much rule out this hocus pocus free will stuff, it's wrong, so there is no need for anything else to be said about particles.
And to the Scientists: Goodness gracious, people. It's not like quantum field theory is already out of the way and under your belt, so you can talk about implications in the human mind, which is much less understood. The philosophers make the mistake of talking about shit they don't understand, so let's not make science commit the same crime.
Your problem here is that you've taken physics, which provides nothing more than a really good description of many aspects of the world, and surreptitiously promoted it to a metaphysics, i.e., something that is expected to provide the one true description of the world.
Let's assume that it is true that if all we are is physical beings, then we would be absolutely determined in our behavior and actions. Well, one answer to that argument is that we're not just physical beings. Which leads us to:
The argument that we're not just physical beings doesn't need to rely on a vague sense of the term "soul." We can frame such an argument in terms of knowledge. For the sakes of the present argument, we don't need to define knowledge any better than saying that it is justified true belief, a kind of relation between a knowing subject and an object of knowledge.
So, suppose somebody, let's call him Joe, claims to know that people are nothing more than physical objects. Now the problem is that by claiming to know that, Joe must commit himself to the claim that knowlegde is a physical relation between physical objects, justified by appeal to theories of physics. But what justifies those theories of physics? Physics itself? That would be circular.
In short, the claim that people are just physical beings is epistemologically self-defeating because to possess the knowledge of physics, we must have non-physical grounds that justify our belief in that knowledge. So, we don't have to appeal to a soul to shoot down the claim--we just have to ask how it is possible to know such a thing for the claim to fall down to pieces. (Note that the argument doesn't support any particular notion of "soul" either; all it really assumes is that people can know stuff like physics.)
Are you adequate?
Which demonstrates the power of the model. Your edit is just one among many, and among many there seems to be a decent font of knowledge.