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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.
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
It's John Calvin.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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.
Ah, but if you can prove free will exists, then you can prove evil people will go to hell!
Seriously, this whole free will debate is pointless. Every manifestation of so-called "free will" can be adequately explained by assuming that our human brains can convincingly imitate free will (to other human brains). And that is a much simpler proposition that looking for free will in the fabric of the cosmos (what religious balderdash!).
I pretend to have free will, you believe me, and we're both happy.
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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!
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.
Of course, you couldn't help but say that.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
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 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.
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.
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?
"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.
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..."
"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.
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
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?