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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."
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?
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.
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.