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If We Have Free Will, Then So Do Electrons
snahgle writes "Mathematicians John Conway (inventor of the Game of Life) and Simon Kochen of Princeton University have proven that if human experimenters demonstrate 'free will' in choosing what measurements to take on a particle, then the axioms of quantum mechanics require that the free will property be available to the particles measured, or to the universe as a whole. Conway is giving a series of lectures on the 'Free Will Theorem' and its ramifications over the next month at Princeton. A followup article strengthening the theory (PDF) was published last month in Notices of the AMS." Update: 03/19 14:20 GMT by KD : jamie points out that we discussed this theorem last year, before the paper had been published.
The universe really IS out to get me!
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Then that means that they can impose their will on other particles. In short, one will will the will of particles to impose your will to will other particles in your will to your will.
Well there you have it. A new breakthrough in the area of free will and our lives are...exactly the same.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
So what you're saying is that everything I've screwed up on has really been my fault?
Sorry, but you forgot to carry the 2. No free will for you and you will need to see me after class.
So, all we need to do is consider this universe to be thought about by a larger more richer universe and then everything can be seen to happen automatically :-)
One of the lamer cop-outs of the late 20th century :-)
I am sorry this proves nothing in the deterministic debate. All it says is If the observers have free will then teh particles must have free will. It does not answer the question: Does the observer have free will?
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
Now all we have to do is prove that people have free will, something people have been trying to do for a thousand years, and then we'll know that particles have free will and by extension, the whole universe!
Jesus Christ what a waste of time. Proving free will is like trying to prove the immortal soul, except, if you proved the immortal soul you get all this interesting life-after-death crap, and if you prove free will you get the comfort of knowing that all your stupid decisions are your stupid decisions.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It's John Calvin.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
if they choose not to decide, they still have made a choice!
So basically youre saying it WAS my fault I tried to get a first post here?
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
That a particle has free-will using the standard definition is rather disturbing. Particles, capable of making a decision implies an inherent intelligence or at least a built-in "table of actions" at some level.
Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?
To mean, this seems to imply one of two possibilities.
Either Bucky Fuller had it right in his use of "Universe" as an article-less proper noun...
Or it means basically nothing more than that God does play dice with the universe.
Hmm... Bucky right, or Einstein wrong. Tough call...
I took baby quantum mechanics a year ago (an optional 3rd semester of intro physics), and the whole predestination thing was thrown out the window to me as soon as soon as there was a probability distribution of where the particle was at any given time. My thought philosophically is that the sum of tiny deviations from the mean made it so that I could not just take an inventory of all the particles in the universe, write a program to describe their governing laws, and then the output would be every moment of of the future. I much prefer a universe of surprises.
I didn't RTFA, but from TFS it appears to me that humans having free will is taken as an assumption that the rest of the proof hinges upon.
If anything from reading the summary I get the impression it is against Free Will, as the words "free will" are quoted, and then attributed to inanimate objects.
Considering that quotes are often used to denote words that are being used to mean something different than what is being said (verbal irony?), it follows that a likely conclusion is "people have "free will the same way a rock does." Which is to say we don't have it as we understand it.
I think the headline should be Mathematicians Prove Universe Has "Free Will", or Mathematicians "Prove" Universe Has Free Will
What do I know though, I am not a Quantum Physicist, Mathematician, or Philosopher. In fact, I may not even have decent reading comprehension, so take it all with a grain of salt.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Someone was sure to arrive at this conclusion.
If I have free will, I don't need to worry about it. If I don't have free will, there's no point in worrying about it. :->
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
They changed the outcome by measuring it!
Indeed. This is my first visit in a week, as it's so painful watching the front page load.
Is this an early April fool?
They take as axiomatic *both* "instantaneous spooky action at a distance" *and* "information can't travel faster than light". Since those two principles are contradictory they can prove anything they damned well like by assuming they are both true!!!
Crazy? No - read Barbour.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I *knew* the universe was out to get me.
Are they equating randomness with free will? i.e. non-determinism? If that's the case, then it's total BS unless they've determined what makes the choices at the quantum level.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice!
The universe is a libertarian, now time for its inhabitants to follow.
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
In this context, "free will" does not mean what you think it means. Please read the articles, especially the discussion section at the end of the Notices piece.
If electrons have free will, we can hold them responsible for their actions. If an electron does something bad we can punish it.
Scientists should stay a mile away from stuff that is, at its heart, a moral question.
This speaks to the absurdity of standard interpretations of quantum mechanics, and nothing else. The only cure, which physicists strangely resist, is a return to the deBroglie interpetation that was greatly expanded by Bohm and Bell. More information from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It was the wishy-washy "primacy of consciousness" philosophy pushed by the likes of Bohr that got us to this dead end, and only a reality-based philosophy is going to lead to new insight. So long as we interpret the results incorrectly, we are destined to fall into the same trap.
Its probably a bad assumption that the human experimenters have free will -- there's no real evidence to support that and a reasonable bit to suggest that free will is nothing but a "fantasy" our brains make up after the fact to justify a decision or action.
Sort of a dirty secret of cognitive science. If there's free will, there's not much chance its concious free will.
I have no choice but to believe that I have free will.
I've skimmed through the article (can't claim I've read it because I skipped the mathematics). But there is nothing in there that defined "will" let alone "free will" in the sense you would define it for humans. There is a piece of text at the end that laments of mathematics not getting into newspapers. Well, using this slightly inflammatory title may help.
They define (strong) free [will] as:
To say that Aâ(TM)s choice of x, y, z is free means
more precisely that it is not determined by (i.e.,
is not a function of) what has happened at earlier
times (in any inertial frame). Our theorem is the
surprising consequence that particle aâ(TM)s response
must be free in exactly the same sense, that it is
not a function of what has happened earlier (with
respect to any inertial frame).
But in my opinion of free is that you can make your own choice based on the information available to you. Proving that there is no theoretical/statistical way of influencing a decision is the worst thing you could do. Proving that everything "below" is just randomly moving in every direction without being steered could make it harder to prove human free will instead of easier.
I really would like to believe in human free will, but the scary thing is that I don't get to this conclusion when studying science. Oh well, it certainly *feels* and if that is all a scam, it's certainly a darn good one :)
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I see the contraposition of this predicate much more interesting. If we are able to show that the particles do not have free will... then it means we do not have neither. Which is what I really expect.
If this is the case, then we must once more consider the question, "what is a soul?". Presumably, a soul is what allows humans to be capable of free will. And if the smallest of particles can display traits of "free will", then it must rule it that a soul is any amount of chemical switches or other structures in the humans' evolved brain, and it must mean that a "soul" is something entirely different that has no physical structure, or at least one in our dimensions that we can measure.
So when the good folks at CERN are smashing up particles in the LHC, the particles *want* to be smashed up?
I think I may need to brush up on my Euthanasia Laws of Physics.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Similarly, imbuing inanimate objects with human properties is a catchy way of persuading non-scientists (and by extension, the media) to engage, but it gives a completely wrong view of the world.
Bad science, don't do it again.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
You are just a bunch of atoms and molecules being governed by the forces of quantum mechanics. Any idea that you have free will is merely an illusion. Given identical (ABSOLUTELY IDENTICAL, down to the quanta) inputs, you will behave in the exact same way.
It is a disturbing thought to people, but it is the truth.
So glad other people are noticing it too .. ... Something to do with this http://www.google.com/trends?q=slashdot.org perhaps ? Guess it's the beginning of the end then. Slashdot is dying, and google trends confirms it.
So...if electrons have free will then it stands to reason that the collective has free will because of that.
Gives new insight into "The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing."
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
Experimenters have free will if and only if particles have free will.
If a particle has free will, then the experimenter has free will since the experimenter is composed of particles and functions via these particles.
This implies the experimenters are deterministic if and only if particles are deterministic.
Human free will is completely irrelevant for any other purpose except political ones.
If you conclude that free will exists, it's like Darwin has proved that free markets are fair, because everyone "has a chance to make it". If you conclude that free will doesn't exist, it's like Marx and the global organisations for socialism are right, because anyone who is poor has no "fault" in their own poverty and so it is fundamentally unfair that they should enjoy a worse life than someone else. Free will therefore changes from a very esoteric philosophical question, which to most people should be as meaningful as "how many roads must a man walk down?" and something that gets everyone going.
Hence, the people arguing about free will are just about never quantum physicists, 99% in any debate are ideologists and revolutionaries with little clue about physics. Whether humans have free will or not should from a physicist perspective be only about as interesting as "does absolute causality hold or not?" with perhaps a slightly interesting quantum twist about brains of all kinds (of which the human is only one).
From my perspective, it sucks because the conclusion of either party sucks: If the conclusion is that humans have complete free will, it's retarded, because it will be taken to the credit that people who drink piss because that is all they have deserve it. If the conclusion is that humans don't have free will, it means that people who drag women into cars at night and rape them "have no guilt". In the latter case I would also go to the declaimer's house and kick their ass, and say "Sorry, I couldn't control myself". In either case society only functions if we _pretend_ to have free will.
The paper is an interesting read, but people must remember that this theorem still does not distinguish between Free Will or Randomness. It merely says that if a property X, is exibhited by the scientist conducting the experiment, then X would be present in the particles too.
As regard to whether X, is Free Will or randomness, Conway does not know. He gave it the provocative title of ``Free Will'' out of his own free will, or randomness, or what have you ;-)
See this page and go to the last section entitled ``Questions,'' where Conway admits to this in a seminar at the University of Auckland.
The "progress" you're referring to is in the application of theory. The theory itself has been dead for decades. The progress I was referring to is in the theory. As quantum theory can't deal with all scenarios, it is incomplete. Of course, it will be a long time before application has a need for better theory in order to continue to advance, but in the mean time, the theory is going nowhere.
I'm not sure what nonprobabilistic interpretations you're referring to - certainly not deBroglie-Bohm. Bohmian mechanics does not reject probability, but doesn't embrace it like standard interpretations. Instead, probability is simply a useful predictor, and nothing more, as would be the case with any other notion of "probability" applied in any other circumstance. Only in standard QM interpretations do you get the probability seen as something physical, and get the absurd consequences of observer-dependent reality and volitional particles. *rolls eyes*
i dont have "free will" really, since i cant walk out of my door now and suddenly start to float. i cant just suddenly become heavier. i cant suddenly just start a nuclear chain reaction within myself by firing my own cells at each other. what we see as "free will" is our brains gathering all the known facts and variables and creating a set of paths possible to take, and then narrowing those down to the one most likely to do us best. though you might think your making a concious decision, the decision has already been made several seconds before you thought you made it.
with particles, it is the same, they are bound by a certain set of facts and variables, the only difference is, there are far fewer facts and variables limiting the particles movement. though for forces that come from these can be far stronger.
portfolio
In the paper, he describes a hexagon physics world and makes some rules about it. The rules are inconsistent. If you're standing on a spin-0 hex, you know you'll be on a spin-1 hex the next day due to one of the rules. This is in contradiction to the assertion that you can't know ahead of time what spin you'll be on. Yet they claim the rules of this game are consistent.
Am I the only one who read "If We Have Free Will, Then So Do Elections" and thought about voting machines?
My theory of life is, that the universe wants to exist. And for that to be possible, cognition has to exist. For if there is nothing that is aware of the universe it doesn't make a difference whether it exists or not. Until there is no cognition the universe is in a sort of "dream state" of wanting to exist without truly existing
.
Us lifeforms with our senses are the means by which the universe is materialized from it's dream state into the micro-universe that is everything inside of our minds. Thereby life and the universe form a symbiotic relationship where the one makes the existence of the other a possibility and vice versa.
The fact that the universe can have something akin to a will fits into this theory nicely.
Just as deconstructing matter leads us to the very wierd principles of quantum mechanics, perhaps deconstructing free will leads us to some comparably wierd principles. In both cases, what we accept as standard properties look nothing like what's really going on.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Perhaps there is no such thing as choice. What if you make your choice based on circumstances beyond your control? New Scientist ran a story yesterday Faster-than-light 'tachyons' might be impossible after all where some math guys came up with the possibility that we live in a deterministic universe:
Free Martian Whores!
Free is the ability to hypthothesize about possible outcomes to the situations and circumstances that one perceives around them and devise strategies (not necessarily logical) for dealing with them in some manner based on knowledge about them and prior experience. The manner itself is determined by one's assorted motivations, which can potentially be very numerous, and are themselves self-determined by any available method, including 'freely' chosen. The measure of the depth of recursion to which this can potentially be applied by an intelligence, in general, and not merely for any one particular decision, could roughly be construed as an approximate measure of how much free will one has.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Per Adams, as soon as we figure out a theory of the universe, and the universe has free will, it will immediately becomes infinitely more complicated and blow our theory out of the water.
Per Pullman, some church somewhere will dedicate itself to destroying the "free will" in particles, leading to an epic battle between God, man, and the movie industry.
Per CmdrTaco, some commenter somewhere must have accidentally angered a meson, leading it to direct a microscopic black hole to reside in /.'s servers, explaining where all the thoughtful comments disappear to...
You can choose from quantum fears
...On an unrelated note, don't mistype 'hadron' in Wikipedia's search. Don't do it! DON'T!
And hadrons that can kill
Sorry. I had to jump on the Rush bandwagon.
.
Spork.
P.S. Spork.
IANAQP, though I try from time to time to read up on the subject.
Every time I approach it, I hit the same wall. The math, though complicated and counter-intutive, I can accept. The common interpretations, though... they get a bit rough.
So now we see "if an experimentor's choice of test isn't determined by available information, then the result of the experiment isn't determined by accessible information either", and we interpret that as "if humans have free will, then so do electrons."
Yeah, ok... except QP already predicts that the results of the experiment are not determined by available information. They're freaking random. That's the whole point, no?
This reads to me like a clever ploy by determinists to use rhetorical games of making the true sound absurd, in order to convince the gullable that science can lead to conclusions in abstract philosophy.
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"Except that neural computation is inherently non symbolic..."
And yet I close my eyes and I see symbols, emerging from those computations, right???
"this is your fallacy"
So where's the falsification, individual ants don't "know" the optimum search method but nevertheless the ant's nest performs that feat.
"you have no understanding of neurology."
I never claimed to have an "understanding of neurology" but zero is a little harsh. If you're not just shooting your mouth off and do know something then show me the falsification...
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Then I read Berlekamp, Conway and Guy's "Winning Ways For Your Mathematical Plays" and found that just as much fun.
Can someone please spare a few mod points for the parent, to bring it up to 5-Informative?
Perhaps there is no such thing as choice. What if you make your choice based on circumstances beyond your control?
We make all our choices based on external stimuli, which are largely beyond our control. Of all the philosophical nonsense that's bandied about, the whole "fate vs free will" debate is the most exasperating. "Free will" is an artifact of the limits of our perception, and nothing more. Every "choice" we make is nothing more than a cascade of logic (in the electronics/programming sense) based on running recent perceptions through a network of previously conceived notions and instinctual prewiring. It's all completely deterministic. The only time it's labelled "free will" is when the decision system is too complex for anyone to predict the outcome. Dropping a hot potato isn't called "free will" because we understand the grossly simple neurological mechanism that causes it. Dropping a puppy off a cliff is seen as "free will" because there's no telling what twisted up crazy logic went into that decision. In both cases, though, it is a logical necessity that some deterministic mechanism precipitated both end results. Even the theist cop-out of "the ghost in the machine", i.e. the immaterial soul, doesn't really escape the problem. All things happen because of something else. Even the "ghost" argument requires that outside stimulus trigger an analysis based on pre-existing stored information.
So enough with the "free will" crap already. It's like arguing about how much longer the upper line in this optical illusion appears to be
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Subtext:
Do it. Do it! DO IT!
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
In order to measure electrons, you need a machine. That machine must be built, configured, put in place all by humans. Who may or may not have free will. Since electrons exist at quantum level, their measurement will be influenced by the measuring machine, whose only reason of being there, is the possible free will of humans.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
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Mixing quantum physics amd human awareness, is just old plain non sense. Scientist should have to take some philosophy courses before trying to talk about 'what' 'the' 'world' 'is'.
What's in a sig?
Show me a conscious choice that is made for no reason, and I will show you free will. Every choice mad is for a reason. Thus your choice is the effect of a cause. "Choice" is the illusion created by your brain when it's really just analyzing which decision would most fulfill its current desire.
You're exactly right, and it proves how stupid philosophy has gotten ever since its divorce from science and the law was finalized.
"Free will" in the philosophical sense does not matter, because the way philosophy defines it, it is some ethereal abstract thing. In practical applications the concept of "free will" can be much more concretely defined as the ability to choose one course of action over another. This is the definition of free will upon which U.S. law is based (because how can you be "guilty" if you could not have chosen any other course of action--see the concept of "mens rea" as well).
In addition a foundation of science is our ability to conduct experiments to test theory. We've not yet been able to reliably and precisely predict the behavior of an individual human over any appreciable span of time.
In terms of particle physics, nothing is alive, let alone possesses consciousness or free will. Electrons work exactly the same way in me as they do in a cloud of smoke. And like a cloud of smoke there is no way to predict the precise movement of me beyond a very short span of time. And yet there is a lot of practical utility in distinguishing between things that are "alive" or not at the level of our everyday experience.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
of Philosophers, and Philosophers should recognise they can only conjecture, without direct access to the mystical experience of unity.
Those bound by the conceptual frame of will and determinism are like the inhabitants of Flatland. Their 2-dimensional mathematics cannot account for Reality.
Trapped in a world that must conform to logical constructs, they are unaware that what they are measuring is their perceptions, not the World. What they observe is merely the particular quality of their minds, not the Truth.
Plato's cave cannot be escaped, by creating more precision in the measurement of shadows! Logic is a useful tool for effecting work and accomplishing a task - but not for perceiving the nature of existence.
The only escape is to defy and revile the "self". Ah. As long as anyone is their "self" they have no "free will" in any meaningful sense, anyway. As Spinoza, a mere philosopher, would have it:
Humans have no free will. They believe, however, that their will is free. In Spinoza's letter to G. H. Schaller, he wrote: "men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." (Letter number 62)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The form of free will in the TFA is summarized in the line:
"the choice an experimenter makes is not a function of the past"
The article argues that if we have this form of free will, then elementary particles must have it as well.
I, for one, am satisfied with a much different form of free will:
"the choice an experimenter makes cannot be predicted in advanced by anyone (including the experimenter him/herself)"
For this, we need only acknowledge that to predict what decision an experimenter would make at a given time, we would need to know in advance the experimenter's exact brain state at the time the decision is made. And in order to know that, we would need to know the exact state at some earlier time, and then run a model of the brain and the environment with which it interacts up to the point of the decision. How detailed would the model need to be? How detailed would our knowledge of the earlier state and the environment need to be? To make the prediction with certainty, they would need to be exact. How could the experimenter and his environment be modelled exactly? There is only one way: the actual experimenter and environment (or a perfect replica), occuring in real time. Thus I submit to you that the decision is unknowable by anyone (including the experimenter) until it actually occurs.
This form of free will is perfectly compatible with a fully deterministic universe, while still being fully satisfying (to me anyway).
How does this free will work when particles are entangled? They chose each other?
This is not the sig you're looking for.
Wow, 240 comments about the possible non-existence of human choice, and nobody has yet found an xkcd comic to explain it?!?
Disclaimer: If you do not agree with my statement, please take it up with to original state of the universe, I had not say in it!
At the galactic scale, we have no free will. We are, for all our mobility and freedom of choice, bound to a rock spinning around a star that is spinning around the galaxy. With all of our combined efforts, we can not currently change that.
Now imagine we have advanced and expanded beyond our own galaxy. We are still in a universe that is expanding away from itself. That someday in the future will be so far apart that the lights will go out. At some point, even the closest galaxies will run out of fuel and die a cold death. At the universal scale, we have no free will.
But tell your wife she is fat and it is free will that is slapping you across the face.
Where does this theory make accommodation for the fact that it's Turtles, all the way down?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
...but my moniker does too! Thanks slashdot!
No, really, don't. As much as you want to see how funny wikipedia can be, I remind you that it's not funny when it's science.
...so I'm really getting a charge out of some of these replies.
"Particles" are just a modeling tool. They are a means of conceptualizing mechanical causes for the behavior of the world as we experience it.
So far, they have proven to be a very useful means of said modeling. The predictions that particle/force-based models make are quite accurate these days, and have been successfully applied to do a huge variety of useful work (playing world of warcraft being my particular favorite). Accurate predictive power is the final judgment of the scientific process, so from that perspective particles are sure winners.
But the fact remains that particles are abstract representations of phenomena which we cannot directly perceive (we infer the behavior of subatomic particles through detection devices which were themselves built upon these inferences, for example). The popular visualization of tiny little solid spheres bouncing around was rejected based on evidence gathered way back in the 20's, and rival visualizations that also have predictive power had been proposed since the dawn of recorded history. However, these are technical details which need not confuse non-scientists, so simply saying "particles are where it's at" makes life a lot simpler.
The issue of free will is not properly within the domain of science. Science doesn't study that sort of thing. Free will is the proper subject matter of philosophers, theologians, and so on. Trying to determine its scientific validity is trying to talk about aviation technology using only the vocabulary of gardening techniques.
"Do particles have free will" is an absurd question. You may as well ask about the nutritive properties of thrust and lift. That visualization just doesn't fit the subject matter.
The inclination to think of things in these terms comes from the popular notion that science has the market cornered in "truth," and that the word "truth" has a single and unambiguous meaning within all conceptual domains (which it clearly does not). We think, "science proves or disproves things, right? So lets get the final proof or disproof of free will." But I maintain that we are confusing ourselves by asking the questing incorrectly, and of the wrong people.
Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!
Next your're going to ask to have milk AND lemon in your tea!
Free will, indeed!
Spork.
P.S. Spork.
Put humans into PET scanners, run some experiments, and it starts to look like humans do not exactly have free will. And it appears that our cognitive mind may not be able to directly will an action. And there is an area of the brain devoted to figuring out what the hell it is we are doing, and making up a consistent story about what is happening. In everyday life this stuff works smoothly and you don't notice it. But certain experiments or injuries reveal the way it works.
The paper isn't worth reading for that precise reason. It tells us something we already knew that has nothing to do with free will as we experience it. If I has a RNG in my head and constantly did what it told me, I would have free will according to this paper. That can't be right. I am not a philosopher, but for free will to occur or exist, there have to be at least intentions and the ability to act on them. These qualifications are necessary for all loose definitions of free will that are commonly adhered to, and from them it follows that free will is necessarily a fuzzy concept, an emerging property of certain large systems, and possibly to some extent an artificial concept developped in order to be able to hold people responsible for their actions, which is essential for things like morality, duty, trust, justice and therefore society to work.
The summary has an update that says "we" discussed this paper last year, before it had been published. This is 2009. It was published in 2006. Last year was 2008. In which universe, other than the April Fool's universe, does 2008 come before 2006?
What have they proven? That they can define "random event" to mean "free will". You can't predict a spin, so that obviously means that the particle you are measuring had the "free will" to choose its own spin, with all the anthropomorphic implications fully attached.
That, and that people who are supposed to be smart will waste a lot of time debating philosophy as applied to the "free will" of an electron.
We did nothing to earn or pay for our will, so how can it not be free?
How could human experiments prove free will? Really. Free will seems like one of those things that you can't prove.
Free will? Really?
I have an Atom here requesting recognition under the United Nations Universal Declaration of Rights. It's Hydrogen in a three way indeterminate state right now. I is currently uncertain what this means. Whatever the case it's got the power to go bang!
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
All this proves is that scientists so far lack the capability to measure what constitutes "free will" or "souls" or "spirit".
Any person of a mystical persuasion can tell you that there are other planes of existence that we have trouble measuring, but they impact ours. It is very hard for me to discount all religion and mysticism throughout history just because a modern-day scientist lacks the tools to measure it.
It really is quite a startling assumption to believe that you have measured everything in all dimensions, thereby pronouncing that the electrons measurable in this dimension must somehow be responsible for the free will that we (appear?) to see.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
"When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem resembles a nail. The universe seems mathematical if you use mathematics."
Sure there are "other tools", some are entertaining such as when I suspend disbelief and get into a movie, or crank "Ode to Joy" up to 11, great for the soul. We all have those uncommon perceptions, FWIW my advise is to learn to enjoy them. However fantasy just isn't as useful as critical thinking when contemplating what legendary philosphers Pink Floyd called "magnets and miracles". If you belive there is a better way to make sense of the universe then let's hear about it before we start shouting past each other.
"If you wear blue glasses, the sun itself is blue."
Maths describes our common perceptions in a common language, wearing blue glasses is one of those common perceptions, you're allowed to enjoy both levels.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
That's always the case. People like to act as if "not choosing" is somehow a new option, yet it is merely one choice among many, with it's own implications, moral and practical, good and bad.
Has anyone looked into the proof enough to assess whether it's a proof in the mathematical sense or a proof in the philosophical sense? As in "I've proven that god exists". I don't know about you, but I've never run across a mathematical proof involving statements about free will and subatomic particles...
Where are the mod points when you really need them?
Any person of a mystical persuasion can tell you that there are other planes of existence that we have trouble measuring, but they impact ours.
So can any drug addict. This reasoning sounds a lot like the "lucas argument" in maths. Perhaps google it.
Also keep in mind that there isn't a single human who can argue in favor of these "planes" one billionth as stubbornly as a well-chosen markov chain can.
Humans ("of the correct persuasion" has always been an addendum to that line of reasoning) are special. They are magical being capable of overcoming the physical limits that apply to everything else. Right ...
You're the type of person that believes politicians raise taxes to help us ...
Once a large enough starts preaching something like that, though, it tends to blow up rather badly in all our faces.
How about you don't dismiss all religions of the past, but instead follow one, knowing that science will tell you what the different religions do : ...
a certain religion built america, and is the source (quite literally) of rights and of all of the VERY rare states that aren't totalitarian
another religion built the middle east. Visit the place once, especially the poorer parts. A word of caution is in order : a single look upon the poorer parts of Dubai will make any moral human being loose any and all respect for the supposed "beauty" of that city.
How about you treat religions for what they are : collections of habits, truth and mythology that together serve to build & continue a society of humans.
The whole point of different religions is that they're different. You should read about evolution once or twice. The reality is, quite simple, not that there is a "common truth" to all religions, but rather that one religion is more effective than others. That religion, no matter how peaceful it may appear, it may even genuinly want and strive for peace, nor how violent it's tactics, even if they commit jihadi massacres regularly, only one will be left for the future.
The only truth that an effective religion, no matter which one, provides is that doing what it says, by following it's dogma, you will make that religion more successfull (mostly by being successfull yourself, but there are exceptions)
These patterns of actions, these dogmas that drive people to act in certain ways are what forms societies, and cultures.
Take away the religion, and the society will vanish. Take away, or change the society enough and the religion will suffer. These two effects, after an initial push, tend to feed on one another, causing predictable events to occur with ever increasing speed until ... well until the thing that happens to everything involved in any "ever increasing" thing.
But theoretically, free will could be demonstrated. If there is something that you really don't want to do, and have already firmly decided not to do, and you still go ahead and do it anyway, that would prove you possess free will.
However, this would be too difficult an experiment to perform. Namely, one could argue that you decided to do this anyway merely to prove the existence of free will, which you would perceive as a gain in your life. This, by itself could be the ("external") stimulus to perform the action.
Maybe someone could think up a proper experiment in a closed environment. But I generally don't trust these type of behaviour experiments, nor their outcomes...
that time at some small scale is discrete and not continuous. Then it would not be possible for there not to be a first event if the universe is of finite age, which seems to be the case.
It's very easy for me to discount the theories of the four/five classical elements, or phlogiston, but that's because I haven't been educated stupid.
Show some evidence even for an effect in the brain which can't possibly be accounted for by everything we currently understand about it, and people might be more willing to believe your ludicrous claims.
Either way, the source of our decisions boils down to three options:
1. 100% deterministic. Set in stone at the beginning of time.
2. 100% random. Roll of dice.
3. Some combination of the above. Roll of dice weighted by factors set in stone at the beginning of time.
Personally, I don't see any room for free will there.
Well, you're missing #4. That we possess within ourselves some mechanism to force our "will" onto the universe. "Will" being some special force that we can purely "choose" which form it takes. This mechanism would be something we haven't detected nor predicted in our scientific models, but it is still a possibility that you've left out.
Assuming such a mechanism is possible in the universe, we then have to ask; Is it likely that we evolved such an ability? I think not. It isn't necessary for survival and reproduction as far as I can tell. It seems to me that a deterministic/random being could survive just as well. Although one might argue that our will is governed by a rationality that would help survival, but that is an interesting statement; what does it mean that our will is governed? I'll gloss over the linguistic nuances for now and move on.
So if we didn't evolve this theoretical ability -- the basis of which hasn't been predicted in our scientific models -- then where did it come from? Did we stumble upon it by chance, or was it given to us by some other power (read god). All possibilities which cannot be ruled out, but they can be reasoned about.
We then have to ask about the evidence we have for believing that we have free will and determine if deterministic/random beings would have the same evidence. Of course we don't have very compelling evidence or free will would me canon in the scientific community.
So far our scientific models have a randomness to then in QM. We don't know if this perceived randomness is actual randomness or a failure on our part to detect/understand the deterministic nature of it. If the universe was wholly deterministic, it seems as though it would be fairly simple to try and find a moment where this determinism was broken and call that evidence of free will. But the randomness of the current model allows for a subtle possibility that our "will" can modify the random outcomes predicted in QM. This interpretation makes our "will" mechanism far, far more complex if you want to assume that our will is meaningful. Modifying the QM randomness in such a way that we choose one decision over another would be quite a feat, if it is even possible. Random QM variations get smaller on larger scales, and it is hard to create a complex system sensitive enough to enact large scale changes based on such small deviations. Some may argue that the brain is very complex, and is a prime candidate for such a device. That is a possibility, but in my opinion the complexity of it all significantly decreases the possibility that this ability is something we gained through random chance.
Which leaves the final possibility that some other being designed us with this complex QM form of free will. I'm going to leave this one alone because it gets a little off track, but I will say this: If we believe something because it is a theoretical possibility that there exists a mechanism, that we haven't detected nor predicted, and then also believe that some other being, which we haven't detected nor predicted, granted us the ability to tap into that mechanism to allow us to impose our will on the universe, which we haven't detected nor predicted -- then I'm going to go out on a limb and disagree.
So you see, your three options don't cover everything. Arguing against the above ideas is valid, and if you did, I would likely agree with you. Stating that the above ideas are not a possibility is a pretty hard sell to make.
If time were discrete then your argument would collapse.
If electrons have free will, what to they base their decisions on? It seems to me that free will is only useful if you have some stored experience to call on.
Conservation of angular momentum makes the world go round.
Implicit in your argument is the assertion that the Mind is deterministic. We actually don't know enough about our minds or the brain to know if this is the case. We have very strong reasons to believe that our mind follows deterministic natural laws, but we cannot completely eliminate the other possibility.
Princeton University Press will be publishing the book that will summarize the six lectures on Free Will by John Conway. It will be available in the spring of 2010. Watch www.press.princeton.edu for updates.
I'm still with Schopenhauer, that free will is a myth as all actions are empirically influenced in one way or another, and therefore no such action is truly "free". So not to play semantics, but if you subscribe to this theory as well, than is it something other than "free will" that's guiding these sub-atomic particles if this theorem plays out, and if so, what?
"Prize Essay on the Freedom of Will" for further reference.
Your diatribe is an artifact of your limits of perception
Wake me up once the existance of tachyons have been proven. Until then I'm more than happy to summarily dismiss all arguments for or against free will as irrelevent.
Free will has no empirically testable definition, and hence is not a scientific concept. To determine scientifically if somebody has it or not is more a matter of agreeing upon a set of testable conditions for "free will" than anything else. As it happens the only physical concepts that seem to be even remotely related to people's idea about what "free will" is would be randomness and causality. The standard model assumes that some interactions are inherently random and unpredictable, and that is about as close to an answer as you will get.
So in a more abstract manner, this sounds like existence as we know it is actually one infinitesimal part of an equally appropriate infinit matryoshka doll sequence.
how is babby formed?
"In a whimsical abuse of pedigree leading to much undeserved press, two guys who apparently understand neither philosophy nor quantum mechanics mathematically connect two of those fields' major questions in a non-peer reviewed arXiv article and simultaneously solve humanity's deepest ontological questions using a translucent haze of logic."
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Please read Henry Stapp's Mindful Universe. And no, he is not a crank (although he does need an editor...)
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
don't you love people that know best?, pity, in your case the standard model seem to point in the other direction and I hope it does, a free will universe is much more interesting
Show some evidence even for an effect in the brain which can't possibly be accounted for by everything we currently understand about it, and people might be more willing to believe your ludicrous claims.
Simple. The fact that I (and you, too) am aware of our existence. We can argue about free will, but perhaps more important is the perception of free will, or indeed any will at all.
(Not that I necessarily agree with the grandparent's ludicrous claims, either).
If you've stopped visiting Slashdot, then how did you post?
Or can this be taken as an expression of free will, that in an act of BAWWWWW you decided not to visit Slashdot, and then did it anyway just to prove that you can in fact countermand even your own decisions?
An ounce of prevention, a pound of obscure?
Of course I managed to completely blow the quote. Perception, ya, that's it.
It takes a super computer facility to model a few subatomic particles - and in nowhere near real time. Yet the facility is made up of something on the order of 10^28 particles or more. While you can simply this (the center of mass of the facility for example) the complexity of the universe as time progresses is many orders of magnitude greater than what can be rendered.
Because each particle infulences others, the degree of complexity is truly staggering. Relativity can't help because as you warp time, the rest of the universe ages around you which only compounds the problem. Free will can exist because even if the rules of the universe are knowable, and even if you could determine the 'hidden variables' (though they don't exist) of quantum mechanics, then you would still be forced to swallow calculations or *thoughts* about the universe in simplified terms - never achieving full fidelity of understanding. Thus determinism, as in being able to make predicitions based on past universe states, can never be fully accomplished with full fidelity and thus is not plausable to implement.
Free will is just being able to make choices - and without the requirement of full understanding of where that decision comes from. Thus free will can be fully deterministic - yet at the same time, from the perspective of the thinking entity, be indistinguashable from free.
Wrong. There are obviously such things as internal stimuli, e.g. hunger, thirst, itches, etc.; one might add that external stimuli become internal as they enter the senses and perception (you can't see with your ears, after all). Free will, although subjective, isn't an artifact of "the limits of our perception", but an artifact of subjectivity as such. It's not so much about complexity as about the unknowable (in a way similar to how the subject can know about a physical object, but not from the object's perspective, and the object, unless it's an animal, probably doesn't know about itself; although the subject can imagine itself).
Yes, free will is an illusion, but approaching it through objectivity and logic is a silly exercise, as it isn't an object you can study: it is an aspect of what studies, just like logic and objectivity themselves, including the assumption that "all things happen because of something else".
My computer knows when it's on, when it's sleeping, and when it's about to turn off. Does it have free will too?
"I imagine every little neutron in an atom bomb feels the same way. He can go spung! or he can sit still, just as he pleases. But statistical mechanics work out all the same and the bomb goes off--"
Robert Heinlein, The Year of the Jackpot 1952
I found this essay on Free Will which I tend to agree with. Any time someone deviates from what is considered a normal human desire, that becomes grounds for clinical diagnosis of mental issues, so ultimately the choices people make are extremely predictable and not very "free."
This is the best summary I could tease out of the follow up paper:
Although, as we show in [1], determinism may formally be shown to be consistent, there is no longer any evidence that supports it, in view of the fact that classical physics has been superseded by quantum mechanics, a non-deterministic theory. The import of the free will theorem is that it is not only current quantum theory, but the world itself that is non-deterministic, so that no future theory can return us to a clockwork universe.
See it? At a certain level, future events are inherently unpredictable. These small uncertainties bubble all the way up to our level. So, while we can predict with confidence that the sun will rise tomorrow, certain other smaller events are inherently unpredictable. That's a a circular way of saying that subatomic particles and big things like people have free will, because at least some of their actions cannot be determined by past events and circumstances.
They do this with a proof that first assumes such a model of events exists, and then go on to prove such a model is mathematically impossible. There are no hidden variables or forces, because quantum mechanics won't allow any. The world is non-deterministic, and it's no longer possible to prove that it is deterministic.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
Modded Funny? Perhaps the death of Slashdot is not so grim after all.
including Conway's famous paper, and I am not impressed. I believe Conway made some very unwarranted assumptions from which he drew his conclusions.
I am a big admirer of Conway in general, but I think his attempted leap from physics to metaphysics has fallen far short, and he is unwittingly falling down the gap in between. Unfortunately, they will probably drag a lot of good people down with them.
Whether the universe is deterministic or not has everything to say about free will.
Now, to start with you did not define "free will". I've seen 100's and 100's of hours of free will "discussion" all boil down to people using different definitions making it an apples to oranges discussion.
No one argues that people can make choices. That would be, at least, "soft free will". Hard free will is that ability to make choices without contraints of the physical laws of the universe.
Only that latter definition (or variants of it) are meaningful for any discussion because the former no one argues over as we all agree with it.
Now, if we can make choices without the contraints of the laws of the universe that needs a mechanism for doing so. If we can't, then whether the universe is deterministic or not has everything to do with whether we are automatons or not.
As a side note, non-deterministic interpretations of QM have "always" depended upon an assumed "hard free will" of the observer as "evidence" for a non-deterministic universe. And I've always considered it somewhat embarassing that the science community has glossed over that aspect of a popularization of hard science. Though in their defense no one wants to hear that "hard free will" is an illusion.
I choose YOU, Pikachu!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
So....It was predetermined by logic that you made your statement. Maybe "free will" is where gambling comes in and you know you can't tell God what to do with his dice. It sounds like you are at it again Einstein.
Every "choice" we make is nothing more than a cascade of logic (in the electronics/programming sense) based on running recent perceptions through a network of previously conceived notions and instinctual prewiring. It's all completely deterministic.
So, what about creativity? Ideas? Feelings as in "I have a bad feeling about this..."? Drugs?
It might be deterministic, but then the factors determining are uncountably infinite.
Jean Paul Sartre said it first, although he categorized the denial of choice as "bad faith." In other words, you had a choice. You're just not a good enough person to own up to it.
Article: To be more precise, what we shall show is that the particles' response to a certain type of experiment is not determined by the entire previous history of that part of the universe accessible to them.
Me: So they have taken Quantum mechanics, substituted the words "free will" for "undetermined result" and so changed the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox from "old news in physics" to "new result in philosophy!".
The equating of human free will with particle free will only makes sense in a (singular) universe. Fortunately we live in a multiverse, comprised of a large number of universes. Our ability to choose freely is the ability to choose which possible world to live in, moment by moment.
For a lower bound on the number of universes, compute the number of Planck times (5 x10^-44 sec.) there have been in history (13.7 x10^9 years) times the number of particles (10^80) to get something like 10^140.
As time progresses, the number of universes expands, each has a full complement of particles and therefore of people. So, which of these many copies of you is the you that you are currently experiencing? The one you choose!
Don't believe in multiple worlds? That's your choice. But in some possible worlds you do believe. And if you change your mind and begin believing in a multiverse, you've just moved your consciousness from this universe to a different one. And the electrons are all still there. They cannot, on the other hand, choose which universe in which to place their consciousness because they don't have any.
...for leptons! Half-spin is beautiful!
It has internal indications and senses, sure. It is aware of its current internal state. But is it aware that it exists? I would argue that it doesn't.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
defining free will as "being in a state that cannot be fully determined by past events" is the most contrived and artificial "definition" of free will that I have ever seen. In fact to even call this a definition of free will is pretty ridiculous, as it bears little if any resemblance to the "free will" that is generally referred to in either metaphysical OR real-world discussions of same.
If anybody thinks that these people are referring to the "free will" that is commonly referred to in other discussions of the topic, they are mistaken. This definition is set in a completely different context and is very self-serving.
"we prove that if the choice of a particular type of spin 1 experiment is not a function of the information accessible to the experimenters..."
This makes the theorem meaningless, as the above pre-requisite is trivially false.
The outcome of the experiment _is_ a function of information accessible to the experimenters, namely:
1. What time is it.
2. Where does the experiment take place.
The outcome of the experiment will always be a function of these two bits of information.
This is a general problem of connecting quantum mechanics (or most physics) with the concept of "free will". Most physics deal with isolated systems. But a human being is not an isolated system.
An experiment involving an electron can be repeated any number of times (in principle) with identical conditions. This is not true of an experiment involving a physicist (you will either get a stray memory of the first experiment, or a different physicist).
- Kristian.
...in which case all bets are off.
My favorite quote remains:
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Dropping a hot potato isn't called "free will"
Yes, it is, because I could also choose to not drop it. It would be a hard choice but it would still be a choice.
Free will isn't choice in the absence of reason. That would be randomness. It is the choice between conflicting reasons.
Now you might still claim that free will doesn't exist but at least give the opposition the courtesy of stating their position properly instead of putting up a straw-man.
Even if free will is an artifact of our perception of a deterministic universe, I still find it extremely interesting that people who do believe in free will tend to be less constrained by their environments. For example, a child who experienced terrible abuse in a deterministic universe would have a very hard time having hope for their future. It becomes very easy to blame circumstances if you know that those circumstances are indeed necessarily the basis for your every choice.
If this example occurs in a universe with free will, there is no way to logically link previous circumstances with current choices. In a sense, giving the child control of their destiny.
Now in both examples, the Truth with a capital T could be that everything is deterministic, yet the behavior of the individual changes depending on how they view the universe, deterministically or with free will. If one believes that they have free will, they will function differently than if one believes that they have none. In this example I feel that the free will/determinism dichotomy is blurred, and really makes me question either side of the debate. It is almost as if belief can become a mechanism of some sort of strange ability to choose.
Ok ok, so our beliefs could be predetermined, but what about those who claim to believe in nothing? Or those who choose to believe in something just to believe in something (because believing in nothing makes it a bit hard to relate to others)?
Either way, the source of our decisions boils down to three options:
1. 100% deterministic. Set in stone at the beginning of time.
2. 100% random. Roll of dice.
3. Some combination of the above. Roll of dice weighted by factors set in stone at the beginning of time.
Personally, I don't see any room for free will there.
Philosophers posit something called agent causality which is a different option from your trilemma above. Essentially, doing something because *I* want to do something, instead of blind chemistry, or quantum randomness. While it appears ridiculous on the surface, you also have to understand that neither of your three options can logically be true at all, as well. If the world is 100% deterministic, for example, then we could build a machine which simulates the universe and runs it forward for the next year or so to see what happens. However, because of Turing, we know this isn't possible. Randomly rolling a 1d6 to see what we do doesn't actually change this conclusion at all.
I think you mean, "what does it matter if your choice is based on circumstances beyond your control?" It's not like you'll be able to do anything about it.
Fritzl needs you for his appeal. I hear the outback is pleasant this time of year.
It's all completely deterministic.
Can you actually believe that after studying Quantum Mechanics?
Here is the part I don't get: If there is no Free Will, doesn't that negate creativity? Where do ideas and inspirations come from if we're just running a pre-recorded script?
Not really - this presumes that the internal dialogue is in control of one's actions. It could merely be commentary - the journalist who thinks he is the story. "You" might very well debate long and hard about what it is "you" want to do whilst the mechanisms that actually get to decide that will do what it is "they" want to do.
There is no more freewill to randomness than there is to causality. Either way its not up to you. Once the human mind is finally understood in detail there will be a great many bubbles burst and depressed people. On the other hand there will be a lot more happy pills around to take.
Nobody denies that the stimuli/information is the universe. What the theorem hopes to prove is that the information/universe is self aware. It's certainly possible that there are no "external" stimuli, and that the external/internal dynamic is completely false. Can you prove anything exists independent of something somewhere observing or perceiving it? If you cannot, then what proof do you have of the independent existence of external stimuli, or that anything is external?
If everything is particles, what is external and internal? and if particles have free will, then the universe itself is self aware and the concept of external and internal is fundamentally flawed much the same way that while your heart is internal it's no less real than your skin which is external.
If there is free will then particles have free will because we are made up of particles, it seems rather simple but it does explain why you have a "self" and without a self I don't understand what the purpose behind concepts like internal and external would be, all that would exist is information and how you label it shouldn't matter unless you have a concept of self which gives you a reason to label the types, kinds, objects and give meaning to the information that is the universe.
If you would not exist, would you be aware of it? In the same sense, a computer is aware of its existence.
Without a self aware mind to think it into existence, there would be no universe. What this means is that the universe only exists because it is self aware.
To put it into perspective, is there any difference between a human, and sand which has the exact same weight?
What is more real, consciousness or the sand?
Question for all: is there any difference between a human, and sand which has the exact same weight?
Factors: What is more real, consciousness or the sand? If consciousness is more real, then the human is different from the sand of the same weight even if they are the same materially. However if consciousness is not real then the human and sand are equals.
My opinion is that consciousness is what makes something real, in specific free will is what defines how real something is. The universe is information, the "real" universe is the awareness/consciousness,the "fake" universe is the unaware/dead universe. I'm not saying that a hammer doesn't exist, it exists as junk information much in the same way white noise or pink noise exists, or "dirt" exists, but what I'm claiming is that the material universe itself is just information and the only real part of any of this is consciousness.
The alternative view is that you are no different than the computer you are reading my post on. You are free to believe you are a machine if you want, just don't become a terminator and we will get along just fine.
Matter is information. The information helps program the mind. The mind then takes control and brings order to the matter. Order becomes nature.
If we were to look at the universe as a bunch of numbers on a huge grid, a bunch of source code in a giant Google database, or a bunch of white snow with patterns and forms. The white snow is always the "dirt", the "clay" the "unconscious" universe which does not have any self awareness whatsoever and does not exist independently because it's "dead". Then we have the "order", the "patterns" which make up all math formulas, laws of physics, laws of nature, the "mind", the "reason" which allows us to make sense of and bring "life" to "forms" and "form" to "formlessness". This is existence.
The white noise is clay, junk information. I personally choose not to worship the "dirt", "clay", or "junk" information of the universe because it's existence depends entirely on something perceiving it. Some want to believe that the junk is important and worship it, some want to believe that there is some sort of point to studying white noise, but I think the only reason to study the clay and junk is to organize it into something useful.
No - it's not simply a matter of it being too hard to understand - it has to do with whether the action was evaluated by a sentient being. Sure your decisions are the result of causal processes - everything is - but your causal processes involve a highly sophisticated set of evalations relative to various goals, etc. etc. dropping the hot potato not so much. Free will is compatible with determinism if you look at the right way.
Free will and determinism are both right. Free will seems to exist because of the way time works. Due to our position in time (with the "known" past behind us and the unpredictable future in front of us) free will seems to exist. It's not so much that it's one or the other, it's that free will is merely a concept and not a real thing; but, because our minds can perceive free will, it gives us enough power to make choices based off of the current state of the universe. Determinism, instead, would be a real thing that we've conceptualized. And concepts are good enough for us to base our entire lives on, why would these two concepts be directly incompatible? On a whole the world is deterministic but that doesn't do shit for us because we have no way to measure the state of everything nor calculate the future.
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
Every "choice" we make is nothing more than a cascade of logic (in the electronics/programming sense) based on running recent perceptions through a network of previously conceived notions and instinctual prewiring. It's all completely deterministic.
Your argument is based on the assumption that we already know exactly how the brain takes any/all stimuli and uses this to generate a response. This assumption is far from true.
We simply do not know whether free will exists. You can't say that it does not exist just as no one else can say that it does.
So which exact place in space that point would that be at? Can we all look into that direction and see the god then? :-)
While you are busy looking for this point on Google Sky, let me tell you what article says about the choice.
The article points, that if an experimenter can make his decision in a certain measurement independently from the past events, then the particle`s response is not determined by the entire previous history of the universe.
The speed of transmission of information is explicitly irrelevant to the argument.
and then further:
Although, as we show in [1], determinism may
formally be shown to be consistent, there is no
longer any evidence that supports it, in view of the
fact that classical physics has been superseded by
quantum mechanics, a non-deterministic theory.
The import of the free will theorem is that it is not
only current quantum theory, but the world itself
that is non-deterministic, so that no future theory
can return us to a clockwork universe.
...a stunned silence fell upon the hall.
You mean electrons play a role in an electro-chemical decision-making machine like the human brain?
This might be cool if there was a real understanding of what "free will" was.
Seriously. How can a choice a person makes possibly be "a free [choice] unconstrained by external agencies" (Google search for "define:free will")? Name one single thing we do which is unconstrained by external agencies.
"Free will," in my opinion, is nonsense.
If there is something that you really don't want to do, and have already firmly decided not to do, and you still go ahead and do it anyway, that would prove you possess free will.
How does that prove anything? I see this behavior in addicts all the time. I wouldn't call that free will.
We make all our choices based on external stimuli, which are largely beyond our control. Of all the philosophical nonsense that's bandied about, the whole "fate vs free will" debate is the most exasperating. "Free will" is an artifact of the limits of our perception, and nothing more. Every "choice" we make is nothing more than a cascade of logic (in the electronics/programming sense) based on running recent perceptions through a network of previously conceived notions and instinctual prewiring. It's all completely deterministic.
Our current mainstream view of physical universe says that the universe itself is not deterministic because of quantum uncertainity. Therefore our behaviour can't be deterministic either. In other words, there is no such thing as a pure, deterministic "cascade of logic". If the parts are big enough and the logic simple enough (both physically and temporally), then it can be very deterministic, but there's always the risk of something unexptected changing the outcome (say, a cosmic event obliterating the planet containing the logic).
It has always seemed to me that a deterministic universe, as envisioned by Descartes and Newton, was completely specified by its past history. If all particles in the universe could be exactly tracked through all of their elastic and inelastic interactions, from the distant past on into the distant future (assume that vast computer, Deep Thought, playing celestial pool), then any given human action should be completely determined by the momentary convergence of the past histories of all his constituent particles as predicted by their prior interactions. Thus sounds to me like complete determinism, with no room for free will. The escape clause from this state of one's distant past being their fate seems to appear in the form of uncertainty and other quantum indeterminacy, preventing the possibility of a completely deterministic past history.
If we the party of the first part being the TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN have in ourselves Free Will -of whatever definition- then Free Will has to be downwardly possessed to the minutest particles that makes us function. Elementary my dear; oh, and you too Watson.
The book On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Wisdom, And On the Will In Nature is in my opinion the best introduction to Arthur Schopenhauer's thought. In it, he details how each event has a cause and a chain of causes before it and how as a result the idea of free will implies an event without a cause.
Friendrich Nietzsche uses perhaps my favorite metaphor: "The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far; it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for 'freedom of the will' in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Münchhausen's audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness."
Why do people like the idea of free will?
It puts them in control. "I decide" sounds more empowered, egalitarian, positive and self-glorifying than "it was my option to."
It is the ethic of convenience and pretense of a species of monkeys who, having evolved enough to be proud of their new brains but not enough yet to find a use for them, are busy fiddling while Rome burns regarding climate, overpopulation, consumerism and other soul-deaths we daily endure.
Futurist Traditionalism
By Aether Wave Theory the so called "free will" of particles is given by fact, every particle appears as being composed from many others, so that their surface and behavior reveals only part of internal complexity. Nothing deeper is about it. http://aetherwavetheory.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-much-universe-appears-clever-for-us.html http://aetherwavetheory.blogspot.com/2008/09/aether-and-anthropic-principle.html
Because I said so.
Not good enough an excuse?
OK, then- I didn't want to hafta tell you this, but the projector and auditorium lights have failed- seems all the electrons have decided to boycott it.
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- aqk
F U
In any event, the sentiments seem admirable...
I say we should free Willy too!
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- aqk
F U
I for one welcome our free will wielding electron overlords.
My computer knows when it's on, when it's sleeping, and when it's about to turn off.
It most certainly does not. Your computer doesn't know any more than a light bulb or a paperback book or a door. Your computer is an animated tool, no more special than a chain saw or a zipper.
For someone posting at slashdot you sure don't know much about computers. How many beads do I have to string on my abacus before it becomes self-aware? A computer is an electric abacus with billions of beads.
Free Martian Whores!
a certain religion built america
Actually, no. Many of the European immigrants who built America came here because of religious intolerance in thair native lands. That's why "Freedom of religion" was built into the 1st amendment.
Free Martian Whores!
This makes me simultaneous cringe and want to smash something.
Their conditional is all very well, but it's absolutely pointless with regards to saying something about free will, given that the antecedent is false. Sure, they do acknowledge that it is a conditional, but they also talk about it as if the assumption that humans have free will is obviously true.
The extreme ignorance of and disdain for philosophy shown in their paper reflects poor scholarship, and a general attitude towards the subject that results in all too many scientists drawing woefully misguided conclusions, and wasting untold resources and time pursuing ill-advised research projects, because they fail to do rigorous philosophy as well as rigorous science.