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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.
The article was from 2006. Here's a link to wikipedia for some details.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0807.3286
...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.
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I've now fulfilled my destiny.
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If they indeed succeed, some other folks will start to search for underlying nondeterministic model, and so on...
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?
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 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.
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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I can be completely predictable and still be acting freely.
No, you can't. If I can know right now every action you are going to take, from now until you die (ignoring the edge case where you die instantly), then you are not exercising free will. Why? Because your actions in the future are being completely determined by the state of things right now.
That's what distinguishes determinism from free will.
Conversely, if my actions are random, how can I be said to have any control over them?
Not "random", but "unpredictable". There's a *huge* difference.
You have basically three choices here:
-Humans/animals/subatomic particles have free will somehow; as in, they can make arbitrary decisions and cause action that is unpredictable by any model of physics.
-Humans et al. do not have free will and their actions are dictated by laws of physics; said laws are natural and immutable and will lead to a predictable model of the universe.
-Humans et al. do not have free will and their actions are dictated by the whims of a god or other conscious entity. This scenario, much like creation theories, really just moves the determination of free will to another actor: If we are merely cogs in god's plan, does god have free will? This scenario, even if true, would not provide us with any useful information.
As an atheist I cannot fathom option 3. Of the remaining scenarios, the only one I can rationally support is number two (no free will thanks to physics). As it hurts my ego to claim that I have no free will, I believe that the concept of free will ought to be divided into distinct categories: mathematically-derived actions of matter and energy and sentient actions (which would not cover particles unless they were shown to be conscious). I think they ought to be treated as separate fields.
Or maybe individuals have free will, but the species does not. If you can predict birthrate, accident rate, crime rate, etc with a high degree of accuracy, is free will threatened? If you can predict with great accuracy that 1.2% of RV owners will experience a collision while driving their RV, do RV owners still retain free will?
I need more caffeine.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
First of all, quantum mechanics has absolutely nothing to do with free will. Free will, if understood properly, is a moral property of human agents. And whether someone is responsible for his actions has nothing to do with our final understanding of subatomic physics.
Secondly, the physics is questionable. There are several assumptions underlying Bell's inequalities. One of which is that incoming (that is, earlier in time) influences are independent. However, the fundamental laws are, for the most part, time symmetric. (The exceptions are the neutral kaon which has questionable significance and entropy, which is a supervenient law that needs to be explained by cosmic boundary conditions.)
The point is that we should not expect incoming influences to be independent. We should expect variable dependence going both ways in time. "Agency" and "observer" being primitive theoretical entities was always a metaphysical abomination. Happily, it's not necessary once the symmetry of time is fully appreciated.
I'm not saying anything new. Huw Price is the principle proponent of this view and he's not the one who came up with it either. To my knowledge there has been no serious reply to Price's proposal. So his work sits largely ignored, while media attention goes to crazy interpretations that give free will to subatomic particles, and various other metaphysical abominations.
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.
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
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?
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.
The argument in the article is clever, but it really says nothing about free will. It's an argument about interpretation of quantum mechanics. In fact, it says that quantum measurements can imply a hidden variable theory if humans do not have the freedom to chose axes arbitrarily. This has little or nothing to do with particles having free will.
Doesn't have much to do with humans having free will, either, since few physicists see any need for hidden variable interpretations of quantum mechanics.
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....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
That the anger and denial phases last longer than I thought. :)
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.)
You got it all wrong. The existence or non-existence of a god is irrelevant. There are logically two possibilities here:
1. God does not exist and thus there is no evidence whatsoever to support a claim that it does exist.
2. God does exist, but the game is designed -- by the one who created this reality no less -- that evidence can not be found through rational means. The whole reward/punishment system is based on accepting the premises without evidence.
Besides, why does this even matter to you? If you're religious, don't you already have all the evidence you need?
see a Text Widget
I'm totally happy to redefine "free will" as "the illusion of free will" - as I point out, the illusions of free will is alwats the reality, and it cannot be otherwise. Just as there is no differenve between the "illusion of pain" and "pain".
But determinism absolutely precludes true free will. This is so patently obvious that I'm always shocked to see people like yourself attempting to argue against it.
An assertion is not an argument.
Words have meanings. So unless you live in a world where "logical consistency" is an illusion as well, please don't redefine terms in order to support your preconceived notions.
The church says that about "morality" all the time. The purpose of philosophy is to investigate the meansing of words suchas as "good", "know", "identity", and "free will". You'd be amazed for each of these word how many irreconcilable camps there are who each say "please don't redefine terms in order to support your preconceived notions". Sorry, you don't get to define words to support your notions either.
I claim that if I have sufficient self-awareness to reflect on a choice and make a decision, then I have free will. How could it be otherwise? When I brush something hot and jump away by reflex without reflection: no free will. When I decide to use a pot-holder to grab that pan instead - free will.
What does it matter if my actions are taken in a deterministic universe? What about if the universe in non-deterministic, but an eternal (meaning "outside of time") observer can observe the outcome in time orthagonal to mine - does that matter? What if a very powerful intelligence can model my thought processes to the point where it can predict my decisions with 100% accuracy - does that matter? What if it's 99.9999999999% accuracy, and it happens to predict correctly every time - does that matter?
It's been a while since I studied this stuff, but those are a few of the interesting questions I remember off the top of my head. There are many more simple question like that abotu which people are *sure* they have the only correct, rational answer, and are shocked to discover that there is an opposing camp.
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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?