Slashdot Mirror
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.
So what you're saying is that everything I've screwed up on has really been my fault?
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!
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?
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.
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!
Even if I did choose to change something about my life, it would have no bearing on free will.
The problem with free will is whether you have it or whether you don't it makes absolutely zero difference in your life (we're talking philosophical free will here, not material, so no one give me the snarky "I'm in jail you insensitive clod" response).
Everyone makes decisions with the implicit belief that their decisions matter. Now, if we have free will, then they actually do. If we don't have free will, then they actually don't. Regardless, you make the same damn decision, and it will have the same consequences.
So why the eternal wanking over whether or not we possess a property that cannot be measured and doesn't effect our lives in any way?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Speaking of Adams, a quote from TFA: "Conway is set on explaining to the University community and the public over six weeks the tenets of their 'Free Will Theorem'." 6 x 7days = 42, spooky huh?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Crazy? No - read Barbour.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice!
Are you sure this is a problem? I'm not a physicist, but I thought that a) "spooky action at a distance" has been demonstrated in a lab and b) there's no way to use it to transmit information at superluminal speeds. Maybe someone with a real physics edumacation could enlighten me?
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
It looks to me like it's intended as a reductio ad absurdum of the concept of free will: i.e. assume free will exists, then show that ridiculous things follow. To me, it's obvious that free will doesn't exist. Our brains are made of the same stuff as the rest of the universe, obeying the same laws. These laws may be indeterministic, but since we have no control over quantum randomness, that randomness doesn't help us in any way.
Grr! Arg!
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.
For myself, there's a psychological effect. When I have wanted to disbelieve free will, I also drifted towards victimhood. If I have free will, my choices matter and I can't be a victim. My life is better. YMMV.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
quote
More precisely, if the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus in a certain measurement, then the particle's response (to be pedantic--the universe's response near the particle) is not determined by the entire previous history of the universe.
end quote
I've not read the whole thing yet but it sounds like they've managed to prove that if free will exists then there is no non-local hidden variable theorem compatible with the results of QM.
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
I wonder if they have taken into account the history of the decision being made, or the machine actually being set in the chosen direction. Now, just from this one quote, it would seem that the act of making a decision may actually influence the history of the universe. So, choice is a part of the entire universe -- the only question is whether or not free will actually exists?
Dayum. To be or not to be.
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
So I would prefer this title: "If electrons do not have free will, then neither do we."
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.
Free will doesn't exist. We think it exists because we don't understand the nature of time and space. We think there is a "now" that is real, and that the past and future don't really exist. In reality, the past and the future exist forever in timelessness. The march of time is an expression of our growth, not our transformation.
Read flatland, or watch it. Contemplate a line erupting from a point, or a square from a line, or a cube from a square. Is the line transformed when a square erupts from it? Does it cease to exist? It does not. It is, forever.
That is the nature of your life. That is what your experience of time is. When you die, you will not cease. You will become complete, and you will exist, endlessly.
We are not changing. We are growing. We do not die, we become complete. We have all the free will of a plant reaching for the sun.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
It is the theory that has been making steady progress since the introduction of quantum mechanics, using probabilistic interpretations. Progress like the development of quantum field theory, and the standard model.
Your complaints that that the consequences of probabilistic interpretations are absurd are like the complaints of opponents of relativity that relativity's consequences are absurd. The same sort of arguments that you're making now can be turned into arguments that we should be using an "ether-based" theory to explain electromagnetism. One which does all its work in some absolute reference frame, but makes the same predictions as relativity.
Yes, you can do it that way. But it's a pain in the ass, and the only benefit to it is that it pretends to satisfy the philosophical preconceptions of people who believe there's an absolute reference frame. It doesn't actually, it just pretends to. Same with Bohmian mechanics.
We all do stupid things, but there's a reason we do those things. Another way to say it would be that something caused us to perform the stupid action. The real question is, given a unique and massively complex set of inputs, will we always get the same output? You may think you have free will because you were faced with a decision and you made a choice, but something on some fundamental level caused you to make that choice, and if whatever that fundamental thing is was just responding to inputs, then it's not really free will in the philosophical sense.
life is a tragedy to those who feel, and a comedy to those who think
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!
Can I have some of what your smoking?
I've always thought that the illusion of free will comes from a point you bring up, here. Kant argues that his ethical theory is grounded in reason, and that anyone who is reasonable will agree and those who are "defective" will not. However, the brain by its very nature is defective in both function and capacity. I think free will is merely a mental mechanism that we use to justify not performing the most ideal action in a given situation. Rather than giving into the idea that our imperfect brains make our bodies perform an action in a given circumstance (oftentimes leading to performing a bad act), the subjective nature of individualism doesn't allow us to seriously take this into account and instead uses the same subjective nature of choice to justify the action.
That's what they call "materialistic determinism": basically its whether or not the laws of nature dictate your current and future actions (as opposed to a God, or whatever).
I still think its wanking. Not because it may not be true, but because, true or false, we have no other way of living our lives. We have to live as if our choices are ours.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The problem with such a simplistic view, is that if the universe [i]is[/i] deterministic then it is possible to choose between outcomes (because they are predictable) and free will is back. You've basically leapt to philosophical conclusions, covered them in the language of science (which it sounds like you don't understand anyway) and then tried to state them as self evident facts. Not a great debate tactic.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Similarly, imbuing inanimate objects with human properties...
Humans are made of inantimate objects; amino acids, atoms, protons, quarks...
Free Martian Whores!
Not true. You're ignoring the potential change in behavior that comes from "proving" we have no free will. If that is shown to be the case then, no matter what you do, even kill your wife and kids, it has been preordained.
Personally, I don't believe this crap - science is edging pretty far into metaphysical claptrap these days, which feels like a pretty clear sign we're missing some fundamental knowledge and are instead creating a rehashed version of "Gods Bowling In The Sky" to explain things we don't fully understand. But if this is "proven" scientifically, you can bet your ass it will have a pretty deep impact on how people behave.
The crimes of eBay are a disgrace to it's pig latin heritage!
"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.
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.
If the universe is deterministic, then it follows that it is predictable, but unfortunately you don't get to choose outcomes, because your choice is determined by firing of neurons in your brain, which is caused by chemical processes based on the history of your brain. In other words, your choice is predictable, and therefore isn't really a choice at all.
If the world is deterministic - if I recall my free will philosophy class from many years ago - then you are unable to to choose differently. All your actions, all events even, are determined by causal agents, which in turn were themselves determined by causal agents.
And we can't turn to quantum mechanics for the source of free will. Primarily b/c it is a system that is not predictable (uncertainty) and is apparently random. And, a random process cannot be the locus of free will. Free will connotes control - and by definition things randomly occurring are not controlled.
I believe that someone like Dan Dennett would somewhat agree with you - that we can have something like free will (it looks that way to us) in a deterministic world. But he's written more than a few books to argue his compatibilist viewpoint - I'm not even gonna try b/c I couldn't do it justice.
At the end of the day, I see arguing about free will to be little more than mental masturbation. I feel free. I believe that I am able to make decisions. Why worry about crap that better minds than me have been stumbling over for millennia. No need for any existential funks - fuck it.
Don't worry about the mule, just load the wagon.
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..."
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..."
"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.
The result of the spooky action at a distance is random: New information is created, none is transmitted.
Who ordered that?
the only benefit to it is that it pretends to satisfy the philosophical preconceptions
The point is precisely that that is *not* the only benefit. The benefits are quite real and necessary for any progress to be made in melding quantum and relativistic theories. Bell and Bohm have already covered all the implications in decades-old papers. Check out the bibliography in that SEP entry for the details.
We're practically re-enacting this dialogue from arXiv:quant-ph. Rather than make all the same mistakes, you'd be better off just reading that piece.
If the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus, then their actions are not "determined" by the entire previous history of the universe. The experimenter is part of the universe near the particle, so universe near the particle is not determined. Congratulations, it's a tautology.
That's it's not immediately recognized is because the one of the confusions that results in the whole free will versus determinism brou-ha-ha: the mistaken belief that the observer is somehow separate from the observed.
The other confusion is the question of what "determined" means. We think of it was fated, pre-destined. We still carry around this notion of a Newtonian clockwork universe, that given the initial configuration of the universe you could apply a simple set of laws to figure out the state today. We worry that the universe is losslessly compressible to that set of laws plus initial conditions. Once the-powers-that-be flipped the switch it was all fated, so they really need not have bothered, so where's that leave us?
But the universe is not compressible, not without loss. There is no fully comprehensive model of the cosmos that is simpler than the cosmos itself, no way to tell what an individual particle is going to do at time T other than to run the entire universe up to and including time t. You can't even run it up to t minus epsilon and they say, oh, it'll definitely do X. The damn universe keeps producing new information, in the algorithmic sense of the word. And you're part of it! It's like that Kilgore Trout story, "Now It Can Be Told" -- not even the creator of the universe knew what the man was going to say next.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
There it is folks:
Free will always results in throwing your hands up and saying "fuck it".
When is the government going to ban free will?
Won't somebody please think of the children?
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...
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.
Why worry about crap that better minds than me have been stumbling over for millennia.
Becasue if I'm wrong then I don't have a choice in the matter anyway.
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.
Your diatribe is an artifact of your limits of perception
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).
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?
If you would not exist, would you be aware of it? In the same sense, a computer is aware of its existence.