Entanglement Could Be a Deterministic Phenomenon

KentuckyFC writes "Nobel prize-winning physicist Gerard 't Hooft has joined the likes of computer scientists Stephen Wolfram and Ed Fredkin in claiming that the universe can be accurately modeled by cellular automata. The novel aspect of 't Hooft's model is that it allows quantum mechanics and, in particular, the spooky action at a distance known as entanglement to be deterministic. The idea that quantum mechanics is fundamentally deterministic is known as hidden variable theory but has been widely discounted by physicists because numerous experiments have shown its predictions to be wrong. But 't Hooft says his cellular automaton model is a new class of hidden variable theory that falls outside the remit of previous tests. However, he readily admits that the new model has serious shortcomings — it lacks some of the basic symmetries that our universe enjoys, such as rotational symmetry. However, 't Hooft adds that he is working on modifications that will make the model more realistic (abstract)."

Comments

I knew it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Free will is a sham. Of course, believe whatever you will. It's not like you have a choice.

Re:I knew it.

[brian0918]

I choose NOT to make a choice!

Re:I knew it.

[Kagura]

Our brain does not work on quantum processes, anyway! I can't know this for sure, but come on... use your brain!

Re:I knew it.

[tecnico.hitos]

Oh, but everyone have free will. It's just the decision you will make is determined by your biology, experiences and environment.

It doesn't mean you don't make a decision.

Re:I knew it.

[idontgno]

I choose NOT to make a choice!

Rush thanks you for making your choice.

Re:I knew it.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

That's where the philosophy chokes. It assumes making a decision, i.e. weighing pros and cons and your emotions and information, is somehow magically free of both determinism and random control. They may have influence, but ultimately there's some mysterious spiritual thing beyond determinism and randomness that's doing the deciding in a manner that doesn't involve either.

Which, I submit, makes no sense. Weighing options is the essence of determinism, for that matter.

More importantly, back to the physics, you can easily base quantum on determinism if you give up on Einstein's concept of reality. Which is to say, that there are "real things out there with real, measurable properties".

Quantum implies heavily that, for example, there is no particle out there with an actual, measurable position, and so on.

But if Quantum Mechanics itself was, say, a computer simulation, then the whole hidden-variables problem disappears as an issue. I.e. the "wavicles" of QM and their quantum properties don't even exist as real objects. The "probability cloud" and entanglement are not real features. Of course, that really violates Einstein's sacred belief about real objects out there.

Re:I knew it.

[Chris Burke]

Free will is a sham. Of course, believe whatever you will. It's not like you have a choice.

Dude, if you were counting on the non-determinism of quantum entanglement to save the concept of free will, then you were out on a limb to begin with. How is randomly following the rules of the universe any more a matter of "will" than deterministically following them?

You could try to rely on a seriously weird and unlikely interpretation of QM which is basically a pun (measurement -> observation -> observer -> sentient observer), but then you're using the concept of sentience/free will influencing quantum events to explain how sentience/free will is possible in the first place. Maybe it's possible, but it's quite a long shot to be basing your whole concept of self awareness on.

I have free will because as far as I can tell I exercise it. In a pure philosophical sense you could never prove you have it even if we somehow did show that QM is influenced by "observers". But that act of faith has worked well enough for me. I'm certainly going to live my life as though I have free will, and if I'm only "automatically" making that choice, then so be it.

Re:I knew it.

[Anonymous Coward]

The mice were right!

Re:I knew it.

[sexconker]

It may be, but science has not even attempted to define who I, my conscious self, am.

How does a lump of grey matter result in a singular consciousness?

All you other fuckers, you're just deterministic machines. I could model you perfectly given enough time.

But me? I'm something...else.

Re:I knew it.

[JamesP]

Well, will is nothing more than the output of a huge amount of data fed into a chaotic function.

Re:I knew it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, right. You had to say that.

Re:I knew it.

[onemorechip]

I have free will because as far as I can tell I exercise it.

Free from what? That's the real question.

Re:I knew it.

[orkysoft]

I choose to believe what I was programmed to believe!

Re:I knew it.

[spazdor]

you can easily base quantum on determinism if you give up on Einstein's concept of reality. Which is to say, that there are "real things out there with real, measurable properties".

Quantum implies heavily that, for example, there is no particle out there with an actual, measurable position, and so on.

You needn't give up on Einstein's notion just to believe in QM. There are still real things out there, with real, measurable, probabilistic properties. There's nothing more 'real' about a Bohr atom than a Planck one.

Re:I knew it.

[John Hasler]

Everything "works on quantum processes".

Re:I knew it.

[John Hasler]

> But if Quantum Mechanics itself was, say, a computer simulation... ...then the computer on which the simulation is running must exist in a universe. You now have replaced a few hidden variables with an entire hidden universe. Apply Occam's Razor.

Re:I knew it.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's where the philosophy chokes. It assumes making a decision, i.e. weighing pros and cons and your emotions and information, is somehow magically free of both determinism and random control. They may have influence, but ultimately there's some mysterious spiritual thing beyond determinism and randomness that's doing the deciding in a manner that doesn't involve either.

The mind may or may not have a spritual (in the supernatural sense of the word) aspect, but that is beside the point. The mind could very well be an emergent phenomena that involves a combination of both deterministic and random features which are the result of purely natural features. In that case the mind is neither purely deterministic nor random, rather the mind is both simultaneously!

Which, I submit, makes no sense. Weighing options is the essence of determinism, for that matter.

Weighing options is also the essence of Free Will. There is also more than one philsophical formulation of Determinism. While various Incompatibilist stances seems most prevalent on Slashdot (and with IT professionals in general), it has no more empericial evidence than any of the Compatibilist stances. The former essentially believes that of all theoretical options only one (the one selected by the agent) was possible based on all circustances surrounding a given decision, basically reducing every decision to a huge conditional function (which might partially explain why IT proefessionials tend to prefer it:P). The latter believes that while the circustances surrounding the decision may heavily influence what the agent chooses, they are still free to choose one of multiple options and which one they choose can't always be predicted regardless if the prediction has complete and perfect information about both the circumstances and the agent involved in the choice.

I haven't studied the parts of Physics involved enough to meaningfully comment on the second half of your post.

Re:I knew it.

[NickFortune]

Interesting subject.

You could try to rely on a seriously weird and unlikely interpretation of QM which is basically a pun (measurement -> observation -> observer -> sentient observer), but then you're using the concept of sentience/free will influencing quantum events to explain how sentience/free will is possible in the first place.

Or maybe just pointing out that there's room for free will in the quantum model. I know the idea is unpopular among physicists, but I didn't think anything had emerged that made it significantly less likely than any other interpretation.

There's also a real question of what constitutes "measurement" in the absence of conciousness. You can placing a ruler on a desk to measure a line, but in the absence of intention and perception, there's nothing to distinguish such an occurrence from any other collision between two pieces of wood.

I have free will because as far as I can tell I exercise it.

Good call :) Personally, I think free will and determinism are merely useful models of reality. Determinism works well if you're designing an engine. Free will works better for things on a personal and social level. I suspect neither is entirely true in objective terms.

The trick, of course, is to use the worldview best suited to the task at hand.

Re:I knew it.

[ezzzD55J]

The Honking.
(Sigh.)

Re:I knew it.

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck

Re:I knew it.

[holmstar]

Occam's Razor is just a rule of thumb. It doesn't prove that the simpler answer is the correct one.

Re:I knew it.

[huckamania]

It assumes making a decision, i.e. weighing pros and cons and your emotions and information, is somehow magically free of both determinism and random control. They may have influence, but ultimately there's some mysterious spiritual thing beyond determinism and randomness that's doing the deciding in a manner that doesn't involve either.

Where does this nonsense come from? If you did something and feel later that there is some mysterious spiritual thing that decided what that something was, seek help before the mysterious spiritual thing has you jumping off a roof. I think using the word 'free' to describe something is a disservice to everyone who follows. Like FOSS, the free in free will is a distraction that will never go away. Is it controversial to say that someone has 'will power'? Why is it a controversy for intelligent animals to have 'free will'?

Quantum implies heavily that, for example, there is no particle out there with an actual, measurable position

Really? From Wikipedia In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. I guess if the particles were really 'out there' then we couldn't actually measure their position from in here. If they came in here then we might have a chance.

But if Quantum Mechanics itself was, say, a computer simulation, then the whole hidden-variables problem disappears as an issue.

QM is a theory describing the Universe. If QM itself was, say, a computer simulation, then the Universe is a computer simulation, running on God's box (elite gaming rig, of course). Unless the computer running the simulation is a simulation itself. Eventually you'd have to have a real computer in the really real reality, possibly sitting on a stack of turtles.

Re:I knew it.

[Torodung]

In fact, I'd say that Occam's Razor is a tautology. What it really says is that a simpler solution/explanation is more easily implemented/grasped. More useful and productive.

No matter how complex things actually are, it's nothing but art appreciation if you can't wrap your head around the idea, understand, and produce something with that understanding.

That is the essence of Occam's Razor.

--
Toro

Re:I knew it.

[Atario]

I have free will because as far as I can tell I exercise it.

Or, put another way, you are not capable of perceiving the phenomena that constitute your deterministic behavior ahead of time. This should come as no surprise, since doing so would no doubt interact with that very behavior. Not to mention that we're all caught up in a Sensitive Dependence On Initial Conditions maelstrom on every level imaginable.

Re:I knew it.

[siride]

I would disagree. The original statement is along the lines of "do not multiply entities needlessly", which can probably be reworded as "don't invoke things without due reason". It doesn't say "the simplest answer is always the best". That is a gross misinterpretation and rightly is useless. The correct interpretation is in line with an assumption that we must make when doing science: if we cannot directly observe something to exist, nor can we provide evidence that it must exist, then there is no reason to claim it exists. It might well still exist nonetheless, but then it falls outside the realm of science to verify its existence.

Re:I knew it.

[siride]

I feel like you are so close...nobody here bothers to define what free will actually is or means. But they *know* it is incompatible with determinism. That's no way to run a debate or scientific inquiry.

Re:I knew it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, Rush had some great lyrics. If only someone did a grunge cover of them, they'd be awesome. Freewill is really a sad song sung neon carebear style.

Re:I knew it.

[HiThere]

You could try the definition of "free will" that Larry Niven used in "Protector":

Free will is the result of not being able to accurately predict the best action.

That's a paraphrase, but I think I preserved all the meaning without dragging in a lot of story context. If you know what the best action is, then you will follow that course of action. So you don't have free will. If you don't know, and you don't know enough about yourself to accurately model why you are making the decision that you are making, then you perceive yourself as having free will.

Now currently nobody knows enough about themselves to be able to accurately model why they make the decisions they do, so free will is a "best working assumption". This doesn't make it true, merely practical. But practical counts for a lot, and truth is hard to come by.

Re:I knew it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Free will is a sham. Of course, believe whatever you will. It's not like you have a choice.

Conway's game of life was proven to be unpredictable, meaning that the only way to know what the state will be at a certain genereation is to go through all the calculations. If reality is like that it's pretty meaningless whether or not our behaviour is deterministic, there is no way we can fully predict it anyway. Even if we have no free will the illusion of free will is hard to break.

I actually find the idea that my conciousness doesn't decide my behaviour but is just an observer quite fascinating. It adds a dimension to my complexity.

Re:I knew it.

[meta-monkey]

You have to admit, though, the idea of the universe being a computer simulation would explain why QM doesn't reconcile with gravity, or why there is an ultimate speed limit. If you limit the speed at which simulated objects can travel, you make sure local computations stay local, and by abstracting away the fine-grain interactions of particles into the coarse-grain interactions of larger bodies the math required to simulate them becomes simpler.

Re:I knew it.

[spiffmastercow]

not necessarily.

Re:I knew it.

[lgw]

Lyrics as written in the album pull-out: "if you choose not to decide you cannot have made a choice".
Lyrics as sung: "if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice".

So they're agnostic on what it means to be agnostic - I refuse to believe this was a printing mistake, it's just too clever.

Re:I knew it.

[ceoyoyo]

It is even more clear the other way around (and more accurate, as another poster pointed out). Occam's razor says that there is nothing to be gained by adding bits to a theory that don't make it work any better.

The general principle of Occam's razor is often used another way though: if a theory becomes very complicated, full of special cases and exceptions, we are suspicious of it's underlying principles, even if it is the best match to the observations.

A geocentric solar system with epicycles fits observations better than a heliocentric solar system with circular orbits, yet the latter was preferred for it's simplicity, and work on that model led to the heliocentric-elliptical orbits theory.

Re:I knew it.

[rhsanborn]

Which is why God was able to say 10^90 bits of RAM ought to be enough for anybody, because he made sure he bounded his variables.

Re:I knew it.

[HTH NE1]

But if Quantum Mechanics itself was, say, a computer simulation... ...then the computer on which the simulation is running must exist in a universe.

Not necessarily. The computer on which the simulation is running may be the universe. A very simple one perhaps, but capable of running itself as well as any number of simulations.

Re:I knew it.

[Torodung]

Poor Occam. Mistranslated, misinterpreted, and probably misattributed.

I agree with you, and perhaps you misunderstood me.

I parse the original with a context of: "Do not multiply entities needlessly, because you will rapidly exceed your own faculties. It's a limited resource. Make it count."

This translates to "simple solutions are more productive because they are more readily understood and implemented." It's an engineering application, rather than theoretical.

Corollary to Occam's Razor: Increased complexity has a logarithmically diminishing return. :^)

--
Toro

Re:I knew it.

[conspirator57]

how do we submit bug reports?

when we die, i guess we get garbage collected or freed back to the heap.

meh.

Re:I knew it.

[conspirator57]

clearly this is wrong because it doesn't begin with 256 and end with a power of 2.

e.g. 256KiB, 256MiB, 256*2^(10^90) :p

you need to realize that Microsoft is the one true religion, and its leaders channel god's thoughts. sometimes their human frailties cause them to get the exponent wrong.

Re:I knew it.

[Chris Burke]

Or maybe just pointing out that there's room for free will in the quantum model. I know the idea is unpopular among physicists, but I didn't think anything had emerged that made it significantly less likely than any other interpretation.

I don't like the idea of taking some poorly understood part of the universe, speculating that "consciousness" might be involved because it isn't explicitly excluded by current understanding, and saying that's where free will lies. It sounds like wishful thinking to me, or a variant of the "God of the gaps". If your faith in God depends entirely on requiring God to explain some aspect of the physical universe, then you're fighting a losing battle to keep that faith. Similarly, if your belief in free will is dependent on being able to point to the unknown and say "the source of free will lies there", then what happens when we figure that part out and it doesn't? Find the next unknown and hope that justifies the belief? I don't like it.

There's also a real question of what constitutes "measurement" in the absence of conciousness. You can placing a ruler on a desk to measure a line, but in the absence of intention and perception, there's nothing to distinguish such an occurrence from any other collision between two pieces of wood.

There's a real question of what constitutes measurement, but it's not really a matter of consciousness. We can and have conducted experiments where the time of the collapse of a wave function, as measured by instrumentation, must have necessarily preceded the observation by an observer, i.e. when the ruler was placed on the desk, not when a human eye looks at it. That's what I meant by it being based on puns -- "measurement" does not have to be something seen by a person, so while the definition is iffy, it does not imply that a measurer must be around, but that's kind of what you're implying by saying it's unclear "in the absence of consciousness". There are connotations to these words that create that connection in your mind, but they aren't necessarily relevant to the science. Science reasoning based on nuances of human language is bad reasoning.

Good call :) Personally, I think free will and determinism are merely useful models of reality. Determinism works well if you're designing an engine. Free will works better for things on a personal and social level. I suspect neither is entirely true in objective terms.

Well part of my point was that even a non-deterministic universe still doesn't mean you have free will. The model of waveform collapse as a truly random event is non-deterministic, but no more conducive to causing "free will" than a deterministic universe.

But yes, much like "I think therefore I am", "free will" is a concept more useful at a personal level, not at the level of physics. We can't even define terms like "free will" or "sentient" or "consciousness" or "intelligence" in a rigorous scientific manner. So I'm more than happy saying I have "free will", whatever that means, simply due to perceiving that I do (whatever "perception" means). :)

Re:I knew it.

[Torodung]

Yup. What's up with string theory? ;^)

Toro's Razor: Fundamentally useless but appealing information is art.

--
Toro

(See my other post upthread, this is a very cool discussion. Thanks.)

Re:I knew it.

[Anonymous Coward]

THANK YOU FOR NOT MUTILATING OCCAM'S RAZOR

I don't know why it's such a hard concept to understand, but I do wish that Contact had never been filmed.

Re:I knew it.

[mfnickster]

Lyrics as written in the album pull-out: "if you choose not to decide you cannot have made a choice". Lyrics as sung: "if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice".

This is covered in the Rush FAQ - evidently it was printed correctly in Canada, which is why whenever some American told them it was wrong, they replied "no it isn't, eh."

Re:I knew it.

[ceoyoyo]

String theory has a very attractive (and very simple) basic idea - that fundamental particles are not dimensionless points, but rather extended objects with one or more dimensions. The problems come when you try to figure out what that means. The whole thing gets really complicated, really fast.

The idea behind string theory is actually that, given a very simple starting point (the existence of very small strings that vibrate, plus some other properties), everything else follows. Most of the complication and arbitrarity that are popularly attributed to string theory seem to be a result of not having the proper mathematical tools to do this. Instead, we have to take shortcuts.

For example, string theory predicts a number of extra dimensions that are curled up into a particular class of shape. The exact WAY they're curled up is something that string theorists believe should follow from the basic tenants of string theory, but they don't know how to calculate it yet. The particular shape of those extra dimensions determines the masses and other properties of the particles - something that we've only managed to measure, not predict, so far.

Conceptually, it's a very attractive theory. The problem is that we don't know how to do the math to see if it works out or not.

Re:I knew it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, if "the simplest answer were always the best", then all those scientists could just pack up and go home right now, because obviously a wizard did it.

Re:I knew it.

[ceoyoyo]

PS: Cellular automata are in many ways very similar to string theory. The idea is that by starting with something very simple, you can get very complicated behaviour. The problem is, there aren't any proper mathematical tools for predicting that behaviour, except in very simple cases. The best you can do it try it out and see.

Take Conway's game of life, for example. Given a non-trivial starting arrangement, without actually running through all the iterations, can you predict the state the system will stabilize at? Can you even predict (for non-special cases) if it will ever stabilize?

Re:I knew it.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I think you're still wrong. It's not just a case of simpler answers being easier to understand and implement.

The easiest way to explain it is by example. Consider the popular controversy over creation versus evolution. Many people consider the creationist explanation simpler and easier to understand, but Occam's Razor supports evolution instead.

The reason is that evolutionary theory simply composes other accepted scientific theories, such as inheritance through sexual reproduction; it does not introduce any new concepts that do not exist in the theories that support it. Creation, on the other hand, requires one to introduce the concept of a creator. That is "multiplying entities", and it is needless because the competing theory doesn't have to do it.

Re:I knew it.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're in Eden, everything is certain and you don't have to work for anything but you have no free will.

Eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (weighing choices against each other, etc.) and you get free will but you have to live in the face of uncertainty and hardship.

So now we're back to the Judeo-Christian concept of suffering and error being the price of free will.

Re:I knew it.

[Haeleth]

If you know what the best action is, then you will follow that course of action.

It is simplistic to assume that there is always a single best course of action, or that someone who knew what that was would inevitably choose it.

Larry Niven deserves the praise he gets as a writer, but he writes fiction, not science. His books have some fine plots and plenty of inventive ideas, but that doesn't mean that everything he writes is wisdom of the profoundest order.

Re:I knew it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm ok without free will as long as you don't try to bring back determinism.

Re:I knew it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it cuts deeper than you give it credit for and I'm not a Niven fan.

All of the structures in information theory and decision theory collapse to zero if you analyze a system with a single outcome or a single branch with infinite utility.

Re:I knew it.

[Toonol]

That's obviously true. However, I think in the case of the brain, it's even more explicit. There are mechanisms in place that act to massively amplify signals, specifically geared to utilize quantum effects. It's going to be one of the difficulties in building an actual replica of the human brain in software; emulation at the level of the neuron is insufficient. There are quantum effects that need to be simulated within the inner structure of a single neuron.

Re:I knew it.

[retchdog]

Your questions are probably rhetorical, but anyway, the answer to both is "no". (assuming the fully general case allowing all initially finite configurations)

A universal Turing machine has been implemented in Life: http://www.rendell-attic.org/gol/tm.htm

Re:I knew it.

[The_Duck271]

[citation needed]

Re:I knew it.

[Toonol]

It's not that free will is a sham. It's that it's so poorly defined that discussion over breaks down into nonsensical pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo.

Personally, I think the problem with self-determination was solved once we discovered chaos theory, and iterative functions. The processes in the brain are either fully or partly deterministic; it doesn't really matter. The important point is that it is a chaotic system that cannot be accurately modeled. The ONLY way to know with certainty what the reaction to a certain stimuli is to present that person with a stimuli and see what they do.

In other words... behavior is probably deterministic, but is unpredictable. The brain, processes all input in a way that is unique to that individual, and responds in a way that is unique to that individual. Since the mind IS the brain, and the person IS the mind, that's equivalent to saying that when John sees things, John will react in the way that is determined by everything that John is. That's free will enough to satisfy me. It doesn't absolve John from responsibility or guilt, because John isn't a different entity than his mind.

Re:I knew it.

[Fallingcow]

Someone's been reading Anathem by Stephenson...

Re:I knew it.

[turbidostato]

"[citation needed]"

That's not the problem: he could cite Penrose's "Emperor's new mind". The point is "a mathematician almost absolutly unkowledgeable about not only neurophysiology but even basic biology makes some non sustainable assertions (quite on-line to those of René Thom -a mathematician too)... so what?

Re:I knew it.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Hmmm game of life "code". That must be about as clear as brainfuck or befunge code.

This also throws the whole "determinism means all your actions are fixed" idiocy where it belongs, in the loony bin. It may be technically correct that strictly speaking your free will does not choose totally random, and it does not choose "pure" unpredictable things ...

BUT it is nevertheless impossible to predict, in any reasonable timeframe and with any accuracy what a given human will decide in a specific situation. Given, of course that humans can implement turing machines, which seems to me a pretty well established fact.

Re:I knew it.

[LrdDimwit]

I know kung fu.

Re:I knew it.

[turbidostato]

"I have free will because as far as I can tell I exercise it.
Free from what? That's the real question."

Still that's a valid operational assertion. I remember Asimov thinking about humankind in related terms: the argument of some of his tales (specially Bicentennial Man) is the if you can ask to be consider a free human being, then you deserve to be considered a free human being. On the same line of thought if you consider yourself to own a free will, then you should be considered to in fact have it. After all, who can falsify your claims?

Re:I knew it.

[turbidostato]

"Free will is the result of not being able to accurately predict the best action."

That's not free will: that's ignorance.

Free will is the ability to choose something despite being accurately concious of it not being the best curse of action.

"If you know what the best action is, then you will follow that course of action. "

Or not. If you really own a free will, that is.

Re:I knew it.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I choose NOT to make a choice!

That seems foolish to me.

  - If you have free will and do your best to exercise it in your own interest, you have a chance to exert some control over your situation and benefit yourself.

  - If you have free will and do not do your best to exercise it in your own interest, you are likely to do poorly.

  - If you don't have free will it doesn't matter.

So the best path seems to be to assume you have free will and act accordingly.

Re:I knew it.

[turbidostato]

"If you're in Eden, everything is certain and you don't have to work for anything but you have no free will.
Eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (weighing choices against each other, etc.) and you get free will but you have to live in the face of uncertainty and hardship."

Nonsense.

To the best of my knowledge those that ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil *did* were in Eden by then so by your account they had not free will and as such they were not able to freely choose to eat the fruit or not. But if they had no choice, how could God punish them for their unavoidable actions?

"So now we're back to the Judeo-Christian concept of suffering and error being the price of free will."

How can this be a "Judeo-Christian" matter any more than a plain common sense one? As long as you have the ability to choice and there's at least one choice to be done between something positive and something negative, error is the unavoidable output of free will; intelligence will modulate the relative proportions of suffering and error versus good choices but free will will make suffering and error an always present outcome.

Re:I knew it.

[turbidostato]

"Even if we have no free will the illusion of free will is hard to break."

Then why is it that Conway's ants don't produce even the slightest illusion of free will?

Re:I knew it.

[HiThere]

I the context "best course of action", best is defined with respect to your own motivational structure.

If it seems like there are multiple courses of action equally good, then you need to project the results of those paths of action a few more plys ahead.

Where this really falls down is that complexity theory shows that nobody can ever make such a projection in a sufficiently complex environment. And it's a good guess that we live in such a "sufficiently complex environment".

So as a practical matter, the definition doesn't come even close to eliminating free will. And can't.

P.S.: every fiction writer is also a philosopher. And what I'm proposing is a philosophical challenge, not a scientific one.
What I'm doing is claiming that the term "free will" defines a real process, but that the real process isn't what it appears to be, but is something deterministic, though unpredictable due to chaos and complexity.

(And, yes, the Pak are rather unplausible. But they are a device for examining the consequences of certain implausible occurrences.)

Re:I knew it.

[hazem]

Take Conway's game of life, for example. Given a non-trivial starting arrangement, without actually running through all the iterations, can you predict the state the system will stabilize at? Can you even predict (for non-special cases) if it will ever stabilize?

I'm risking a big "whoosh" here, but aren't you simply restating the premise behind the halting problem?

As for The idea is that by starting with something very simple, you can get very complicated behaviour. The problem is, there aren't any proper mathematical tools for predicting that behaviour, except in very simple cases. The best you can do it try it out and see..

I haven't done much directly with CA, but I have dabbled in agent-based simulation. It seems to me you're describing "emergence". But I think it might be at least slightly more useful than string theory. Using ABS, one thing you can try to demonstrate is a "minimum set of rules" needed to generate a certain seemingly complex behavior that has been observed in reality. Having done so doesn't mean that you've actually found the actual rules that drive the behavior of the system, but it serves a good starting point for understanding how that system works.

Re:I knew it.

[InfiniteLoopCounter]

> But if Quantum Mechanics itself was, say, a computer simulation... ...then the computer on which the simulation is running must exist in a universe.

But this would make many things much easier to explain.

For instance, general relativity -> floating point bug; black holes -> program bug not picked up in testing, slowly patched out of existence; quantum double slit pattern -> performance optimization applied when no one is looking; time's arrow -> step simulation; big bang -> start time of simulation; expansion of the universe -> higher dimensional being that runs the simulation is on the hardware upgrade treadmill.

See how easy problems in cosmology become?

Re:I knew it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lack of complexity.

Re:I knew it.

[improfane]

Quantum biology

It has its own field of science. Let me guess, you just wanted to say citation needed. Don't.

Re:I knew it.

[NickFortune]

I don't like the idea of taking some poorly understood part of the universe, speculating that "consciousness" might be involved because it isn't explicitly excluded by current understanding, and saying that's where free will lies.

Put like that, I'd have to agree. On the other hand, I don't see a problem with speculating that consciousness might be involved. Given that human awareness is well accepted phenomena, I can't see how it's any different from speculating on the involvement of quarks, or gravitation waves.

And given that as a legitimate speculation, I don't think it's unreasonable to propose that if free will should in fact exist (and I have my reservations on that point) then this is the likely mechanism.

It sounds like wishful thinking to me, or a variant of the "God of the gaps".

As I understand it the God of the Gaps argument is along the lines of "I have a wonderful scientific theory that explains absolutely everything, with a few small exceptions, such as how birds fly and why apples fall to earth. However, I can resolve these apparent problems by asserting that God directly intervenes in the physical universe to manifest all phenomena not directly accounted for my my theory. Therefore my theory is perfect". There's an obvious fallacy there.

I don't think that applies in this case, however. I don't think anyone is proposing the direct intervention of an entity that cannot be show to exist in order to account for the theory's flaws. Rather, we're speculating that an admittedly subjective phenomenon which everyone experiences on a more-or-less continual basis may in fact be bound up with one term in the underlying equations for which there is at present no agreed real-world counterpart.

Similarly, if your belief in free will is dependent on being able to point to the unknown and say "the source of free will lies there", then what happens when we figure that part out and it doesn't?

The same thing that happens when any scientific theory is disproven. If a theory that explains how birds fly is discredited, we don't abandon the notion of birdflight. Nor is it bad science to look for a better explanation in such a case.

There's a real question of what constitutes measurement, but it's not really a matter of consciousness. We can and have conducted experiments where the time of the collapse of a wave function, as measured by instrumentation, must have necessarily preceded the observation by an observer, i.e. when the ruler was placed on the desk, not when a human eye looks at it.

I'll admit that I'm getting a little out of my depth here, but isn't this the Schrodinger's Cat case? The cat may have died three weeks ago, but it remains alive and dead in the box until someone bothers to find out which is, in fact, the case. The time of the event is not necessarily the time of the waveform's collapse. Or is that too simplistic?

Well part of my point was that even a non-deterministic universe still doesn't mean you have free will. The model of waveform collapse as a truly random event is non-deterministic, but no more conducive to causing "free will" than a deterministic universe.

Well yeah, non-determinism is (I suspect) a necessary but not a sufficient condition. On the other hand, I'd have the same problem with a purely random universe as with a purely mechanical one: both of them reduce people to marionettes, jerked around the world by forces entirely outside their control. That wouldn't be so bad, but it reduces the human mind to a mechanism with the sole function of generating illusions to make the it appear as though the persons actions were the result of conscious intent. I have problems with that, in that I can't see how or why such a thing could arise.

Personally, I think that sooner or later, physics is going to have to come to term

Re:I knew it.

[ceoyoyo]

We can't implement Turing machines. They require infinite memory. We can come pretty close given certain restrictions though.

There hasn't been any serious suggestion that we can predict any complicated system to any reasonable level since chaos and quantum mechanics came along.

Re:I knew it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. It *is* simply a case of elegant ideas implemented to meet a "need" are the most useful. You "need" something because it is necessary, as in answering a necessary question, not because it is "better" or "competing."

You seem to think something is needless because you deem it unnecessary, but if the essential question is "What started material existence?," and that is important because we have to pay Him for the "existence bill" or we'll get shut off, evolution is pants.

Your example sucks, because it is based in the faulty premise that evolution and creationism answer the same questions. I advise to tell creationists what it is: The two don't even intersect, not intellectually nor in their fruits. Evolution has brought us medicine and heartier foods. Creationism is essentially a fruitless "theory." It's only useful if you think you can "ask God" what to do next. What makes it a poor theory is the empirical demonstration of where that leads, throughout history, not Occam's Razor.

Re:I knew it.

[ceoyoyo]

It's not strictly a restatement of the halting problem, although it is very similar, and part (can you decide if the pattern will stabilize) is probably a special case of the halting problem.

The difference I was pointing out is that out mathematical tools are generally up to the task of dealing with reasonably simple traditional theories. If you've got a differential equation you might be able to solve it analytically. If not, you might be able to model the problem more simply and get an analytical answer. With cellular automata, except in very special cases, there's no hope of an analytical solution. If you've got a non-local universe modelled with cellular automata you're in a hopeless bind.

String theory gets a bad rap, but it is VERY incomplete. The hope is that, when we know how to actually work through the theory, it will hold together well and predict a lot of the constants that we have to input into things like the Standard Model.

Also, don't forget that the reach of string theory is very much greater than this cellular automata - QM. The latter is just a different interpretation of QM, it doesn't really change anything. You still need all the constants, including the masses of all the basic particles in the standard model to make the thing work, and it's still not compatible with general relativity. String theory, on the other hand, if it turns out to work like it's supposed to, will predict almost everything AND unify QM and GR.

Re:I knew it.

[tenco]

One can think whatever one wants. No citation needed.

Re:I knew it.

[tenco]

There is also more than one philsophical formulation of Determinism.

I haven't read through this whole philosophical blabber, but it seems to me that there's only the question if nonlinear systems/deterministic chaos should be labeled deterministic, nondeterministic or soft deterministic.

Re:I knew it.

[KingOfTheDustBunnies]

The ONLY way to know with certainty what the reaction to a certain stimuli is to present that person with a stimuli and see what they do.

You have presented me with the stimulus known as bad grammar. Could anyone have predicted that my response would be to complain about it two days later?

Re:I knew it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, the perfect computer. The one with the maximum possible processing power using the least amount of particles/matter/whatever.

I've often mused about this; fascinating stuff. Glad to see I'm not the only one :)

-XcepticZP

Re:I knew it.

[Chris Burke]

As I understand it the God of the Gaps argument is along the lines of "I have a wonderful scientific theory that explains absolutely everything, with a few small exceptions, such as how birds fly and why apples fall to earth. However, I can resolve these apparent problems by asserting that God directly intervenes in the physical universe to manifest all phenomena not directly accounted for my my theory. Therefore my theory is perfect". There's an obvious fallacy there.

"God of the Gaps" isn't about fixing a scientific theory. It's about fundamentalists who want to ascribe God an active and necessary role in running the Universe, because by requiring a God to make the universe work it aids in their arguments that God must exist. However this is an increasing challenge because everything that used to be an obvious "God did it!" moment, from lightning to conception, has now been largely explained by science with no need for a God at all. Scientific knowledge however is incomplete, and it is these ever-shrinking gaps that the fundamentalist points to and says "See, science has no answer! God must have done it!" When that phenomenon is explained, they move on to another, and continue to say that you can't explain physical reality without a -- their -- God.

You know, rather than accepting that a universe created by God and the universe described by science are not contradictory, and that the universe as described by science is elegant, beautiful, and a testament to God's amazing creation.

While not (necessarily) operating under the blindness of dogma, I feel this case is somewhat similar. Find an area that science has not yet ruled to be strictly deterministic, and point to that and say that's where free will lives.

I'll admit that I'm getting a little out of my depth here, but isn't this the Schrodinger's Cat case? The cat may have died three weeks ago, but it remains alive and dead in the box until someone bothers to find out which is, in fact, the case. The time of the event is not necessarily the time of the waveform's collapse. Or is that too simplistic?

Um, well, S's Cat is a thought experiment, and it was never intended to directly imply that the cat was actually both alive and dead at any point, but rather to point out that the limits of understanding of QM at the time could not distinguish, because what we knew was that waveforms collapsed upon "measurement", but that was a poorly defined term. A simultaneously dead/alive cat was supposed to be a ridiculous outcome pointing out how the theory was incomplete. It was definitely never the intention to imply that the cat was alive and dead until someone performed a measurement. It was already established experimentally at the time that you didn't need a person to cause a waveform to collapse.

Think of it this way: Instead of opening the box and checking on the cat to see if it was alive or dead, imagine you had a monitor attached to the cat that checked its heart rate. The monitor constitutes a measurement, and causes the waveform to collapse. The result of that measurement can then be used to perform whatever macroscopic actions you want, and the result will not be a superposition of quantum states without any humans in the loop. Use it to launch a nuclear missile (against the evil culture who conducts such experiments), and the nuke is either launched or it isn't, it isn't in a launched/not-launched state until someone checks the box for the cat, or sees the nuke, or whatever.

Superposition of states has noticeable effects. We've even seen macroscopic superposition and it has a characteristic interference pattern. Which gives us a definitive way of knowing if the superposition is still holding. And it's a fragile thing, and does not require a person to look at it to change the measurement of superposition. It takes a lot of care to ensure no measurement of the waveform itself is taking place via any of the experimental apparatus.

Quantum computer

Re:I knew it.

[bill_mcgonigle]

the math required to simulate them becomes simpler.

We also have the problem of missing gravity waves, and noise in its place that looks just like a 2D-shell universe should, which AIUI, means the plank length is cheated (the universe appearing to be much more coarse-grained than the standard model predicts).

This actually works out well for entanglement, though - the entangled particles don't have to travel anywhere, they're at the same location on the shell, just being projected into two higher-dimensional locations at the same time. Like somebody added another object to a node when the entangling event happened.

Re:I knew it.

[bill_mcgonigle]

Which is why God was able to say 10^90 bits of RAM ought to be enough for anybody, because he made sure he bounded his variables.

How will major religions handle the idea of a God who is all-powerful and omniscient in our universe, but is a pimply-faced nerd in another?

Re:I knew it.

[retchdog]

I think it'll be a while before we see the emergence of "cryptographically-strong psychology". Maybe some day.

Re:I knew it.

[NickFortune]

"God of the Gaps" isn't about fixing a scientific theory. It's about fundamentalists who want to ascribe God an active and necessary role in running the Universe, because by requiring a God to make the universe work it aids in their arguments that God must exist.

I did some reading on this one, and I concede the point.

While not (necessarily) operating under the blindness of dogma, I feel this case is somewhat similar. Find an area that science has not yet ruled to be strictly deterministic, and point to that and say that's where free will lives.

Well, personally, I'm not saying anything lives anywhere. I'm not even asserting the existence of free will, at least not in the new-age fuzzy cosmic destiny sense of things. I do believe in free will in the sense of "we are more than mere puppets of meat, our actions entirely determined by forces beyond our ken", and I think I made a fairly rational case for that belief.

I'm definitely not asserting that free will "lives" in QM. It's just that I can't see anywhere else in physics where any element of subjectivity is acknowledged, except in the phrase "experimenter error". So if we're going to resolve the meat-puppet problem, then QM looks like our only starting point.

Think of it this way: Instead of opening the box and checking on the cat to see if it was alive or dead, imagine you had a monitor attached to the cat that checked its heart rate

Maybe this is because I'm a coder rather than a physicist, but I always think of this in terms of lazy evaluation. Nothing collapses until the results are needed to determine something, and then that state collapses, and all those that it depends on. So, the electrodes on the cat don't collapse the waveform: until someone looks at the readout, the readout too is in a state of superposition. It's when someone looks at the readout, that state collapses, which requires the collapse the state of the cat - so that has to happen before the readout state can collapse.

I know it's not exactly mainstream thinking, but I'm not aware of anything that rules the model out. But as I already said, I'm getting out of my depth here, and I may well be talking utter twaddle.

Personally, I think that sooner or later, physics is going to have to come to terms with the fact that conciousness exists and affects the objective world.

Well it definitely does, as long as you don't mean by somehow manipulating the operation of the laws of the universe, but rather by taking deliberate action to use the laws of the universe to achieve some desired effect. :)

Well, that's the crux of it really. Suppose I decide to scratch my nose in 30 seconds time. How does that purely subjective decision translate itself into the nerve impulse that contracts the muscle fibers needed to implement the action? At some point information passes from a purely subjective realm to the objective world.

And it seems to me that this is essentially the same problem that led to the Copenhagen Interpretation. Up until that point, you could pretty much define physics as "that which was not subjective". Then we get a mathematical model of the universe, supported by experiment, which on the face of it suggested that it was not possible to fully understand objective reality without taking subjectivity into account, Unsurprisingly, there was nearly a revolt in physics circles. The Copenhagen Interpretation - that the equations just work and do not represent any real world properties was only barely less heretical, I suspect, but it was adopted as the lesser of the two evils.

I think Bohr and Heisenberg were avoiding the issue then, and I think that sooner or later, physics is going to have to confront the matter.

You can point to that remaining gap and say that's where consciousness

Re:I knew it.

[onemorechip]

After all, who can falsify your claims?

Well, that's sort of the point of my post. Who can falsify a claim about free will if we don't know what alleged force that will is supposed to be free from?

Re:I knew it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not in love with "unify" in your wording:

String theory, on the other hand, if it turns out to work like it's supposed to, will predict almost everything AND unify QM and GR

Any string theory you write down that does not reproduce the results of the EFE in at least a low energy limit is demonstrably nonphysical and probably ultimately fruitless as an investigative tool, just as early attempts at writing down a theory of relativity including nonnegligible gravitation clearly needed to reproduce Newtonian behaviour in a weak field and in slow motion.

This is a straightforward correspondence limit requirement.

Correspondence does not require retention of any part of the equations in the existing valid theory, and of course only has to apply in the limit, which is also useful for testability reasons at least in principle.

That said, it has generally been easier to do RNG work where the beta function for 4 dimensions is homomorphic to the geometry of GR's 3+1 spacetime, simply because that enforces the EFE on the RNG flow and because GR is background independent, however this approach is probably wrong because of renormalization problems in GR (and related UV cutoff or truncation problems in exact RGEs).

String theory gets a bad rap

ambitwistor has had some choice things to say on this topic that likely will resonate with you, although i haven't seen him or her discuss that (rather than climate change stuff) here in some time.

Hidden controlled by Hidden

[Twillerror]

I've often been skeptical of the idea that you could disproove a hidden variable. The hidden variable itself could be dynamic controlled by another hidden variable.

I guess I just assume that there is more we don't know about the universe that we do know about it.

Re:Hidden controlled by Hidden

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoa who modded this troll? The parent is making a valid point. The line between deterministic and stochastic can sometimes be blurry. Hidden variables don't have to exactly stochastic. A stochastic variable, for instance, can often be approximated by deterministic variables -- you just create multiple scenarios. This is often done in stochastic programming -- certain stochastic programs can be transformed into deterministic form (e.g. multiperiod formulations).

Someone's obviously trigger happy this morning.

Re:Hidden controlled by Hidden

[blueg3]

It's not really valid, though; it makes a false distinction between "a hidden variable" and "a hidden variable controlled by another hidden variable" as if they were different. Bell's theorem covers (or at least appears to cover) any additional information or state, regardless of the theory or process involved, provided that state is "attached" to the entangled particles (that is, it's local).

Re:Hidden controlled by Hidden

[mfnickster]

> The hidden variable itself could be dynamic controlled by another hidden variable.

You can't fool me, young man! It's variables ALL the way down! :)

Re:Hidden controlled by Hidden

[0xABADC0DA]

provided that state is "attached" to the entangled particles (that is, it's local).

A hidden variable:

      return self.state;

A hidden variable controlled by another hidden variable:

      self.state = self.last_observed_by->state;
      return self.state;

An entangled variable that isn't known yet:

      self.state = calc_state(self, self.last_observed_by);
      return self.state;

I think these three are very different cases, and afaik (not much) only the first has been ruled out. Just because the second and third may be 'the same' for some particular experiment doesn't mean they are in fact the same. For instance, what happens when "self.last_observed_by.self != self" (ie one particle interacted with something else and the other didn't). Is there no interaction in either direction, or is there a interaction in just one direction, or is there a different kind of interaction?

Re:Hidden controlled by Hidden

[locofungus]

Bells inequality rules out every possibility of the case:

result_of_experiment = me.some_function();

where some_function() has access to the entire history of me plus as much additional local information as you like (including internal variables) and it is deterministic.

There is a tiny "loophole" in that a truly rigourous test is extremely hard to do and not everybody agrees that the experiments done so far are 100% watertight.

Tim.

Re:Hidden controlled by Hidden

[vertinox]

It's not really valid, though; it makes a false distinction between "a hidden variable" and "a hidden variable controlled by another hidden variable" as if they were different.

I can't remember who said this (might have been Hawking or Sir Francis Bacon) was that there is a very important difference between "That which 'I know I don't know' and that which 'I don't know that I don't know'"

Re:Hidden controlled by Hidden

[Anonymous Coward]

What I'm getting at is, has there been any research on more than just two particles...

A and B are 'entangled', B interacts with C, how are measurements of A, B, and C related after that?

It seems to me that maybe there can be hidden variables and spooky interaction at a distance.

Re:Hidden controlled by Hidden

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, but the second and third scenarios aren't local because they make a reference to last_observed_by, which might be in a galaxy far far away by the time the reference is made. We already know there are lots of nonlocal models for quantum mechanics.

Re:Hidden controlled by Hidden

[blueg3]

I'm not entirely sure how you intend that to be applied to this topic, but it's certainly true. To use Rumsfeld's terms, unknown unknowns are completely different from known unknowns.

Re:Hidden controlled by Hidden

[locofungus]

Look up quantum error correction for multiple particles involved with "spooky action at a distance." Shor's paper isn't particularly hard to follow although I wouldn't have understood the notation until the final year of an undergraduate physics degree.

If you want a very gentle[1] introduction to Bell's inequality then look up Alastair Rae "Quantum Mechanics". IIRC it's the final chapter called "Conceptual problems with quantum mechanics". (The rest of the book is good too IMO)

Tim.

[1] "Very gentle" means enough maths to explain what is going on but nothing more. I'm pretty sure I'd covered all the maths needed for this chapter by A'level[2] (including further maths)

[2] A'levels are taken in the UK at 18 years of age immediately before starting a university undergraduate degree

Universe.tar.gz

[drseuk]

I'll believe it when it's finished downloading - I may be some time.

Re:Universe.tar.gz

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, god should have used bz2 or lzma when he made that tarball. What a bozo!

Re:Universe.tar.gz

[Culture20]

I'll believe it when it's finished downloading - I may be some time.

I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. You wanted Universe-src.tar.bz2. You're currently downloading a compiled binary.

Re:Universe.tar.gz

[Haeleth]

Heresy! You dare to suggest that instead of GodZip, the Almighty should have chosen BeelZebub2 or, heaven forbid, a LuciferZip Mephistophelian Archive?!

Re:Universe.tar.gz

[mokus000]

And it's for an architecture you don't have.

His model is all wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

In his model of the universe, everyone has a beard or goatee.

Re:His model is all wrong

[onemorechip]

I've been on /. too long...I first read that last word as something different.

Re:His model is all wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll? Classic Trek reference goes whoosh.

Come up with a generic theory...

[nweaver]

And then tweak it to match reality.

I'm afraid people do that all the time, each one new and different.

But why do they bother? We already have the ultimate "parameterize and tweak the theory to match reality" theory in String Theory, so why bother with anything else?

Re:Come up with a generic theory...

[Anonymous Coward]

Come up with a generic theory...And then tweak it to match reality.
I'm afraid people do that all the time, each one new and different.

Uh...yeah. That is how the scientific process is supposed to work. You form a hypothesis based on what you know already, you test it, and as the results of your tests roll in, you modify the hypothesis accordingly. Form and then tweak. This is the essence of all scientific progress we have made to date.

Why do you have a problem with this? I'd say the proof is in the pudding.

But why do they bother? We already have the ultimate "parameterize and tweak the theory to match reality" theory in String Theory, so why bother with anything else?

Because string theory lacks evidence, and we don't have the technological means to gather much evidence for it (at present). Also, at present, the theory fails to offer much utility (we can't build any useful devices based on string theory).

Your attitude sounds a bit scarey. I read it as, "we already KNOW the truth, so why continue looking?" This very attitude inhibited scientific progress for most of human history. I wonder if it also inhibits you?

Re:Come up with a generic theory...

[blueg3]

This argument only seems relevant if your generic theory is completely generic; that is, with the proper choice of parameters, it can be exactly equal to any alternative theory. This is true neither of string theory nor physics-as-cellular-automata.

Re:Come up with a generic theory...

[Captain Spam]

This argument only seems relevant if your generic theory is completely generic;

"Things happen. Sometimes."

I think that about wraps up everything.

Re:Come up with a generic theory...

[Daniel_Staal]

Things that in happening, cause themselves to happen again, happen again.

Re:Come up with a generic theory...

[firewrought]

Come up with a generic theory...And then tweak it to match reality. I'm afraid people do that all the time, each one new and different.

That is how the scientific process is supposed to work. You form a hypothesis based on what you know already, you test it, and as the results of your tests roll in, you modify the hypothesis accordingly. Form and then tweak. This is the essence of all scientific progress we have made to date. Why do you have a problem with this?

I think you misunderstood the parent's use of generic. When you can tweak the parameters of a theory to match any possible outcome, your theory no longer has any predictive power. For instance, there is a number--a universal constant if you will--that you can add to this post to reveal who killed JFK. This post, therefore, is a "theory" with only one parameter, but since we can find parameters describing all possible suspects, it's sort of a truism in disguise.

The parent was referencing string theory as an example of something that has become too broad... he wasn't endorsing it.

Re:Come up with a generic theory...

[Anonymous Coward]

We already have the ultimate "parameterize and tweak the theory to match reality" theory in String Theory, so why bother with anything else?

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Speaking as a theoretical physicist... Hahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Actually I think I know what you're meaning, but why work with string theory? Not least because actually it can't yet be matched to reality and has made precisely zero testable predictions -- and even zero testable *statements* of things we already know.

Re:Come up with a generic theory...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say the proof is in the pudding.

I'm deterministically compelled to complain that you would have made more sense if you said that the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Join the fight against linguistic entropy!

Whoa.

[neo]

Well that's a relief. I thought everything was my fault.

"Backwards" Causation

[etymxris]

Bell's inequalities fall apart if current particles can "know" about future measuring devices. However, for particle physics, neither direction of time is privileged. Particles are just as likely to be influenced by future interactions as they are by past interactions. Because of this, there is no "action at a distance". Influences travel along the backwards light cone and remain perfectly relativistic.

This simple, straightforward solution has been largely ignored.

Note that most interpretations of quantum mechanics are explicitly time asymmetric due to the "collapse" caused by observation. Cramer's transactional theory is an exception, it is symmetric and there is no collapse, but it doesn't get much attention.

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea what any of that means but I am so going to memorize it for the next time I need to have a fake cell phone conversation in public!

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that Bell's inequality has been violated routinely in experiments any theory is going to have to give up on either local realism or causality. Is it really surprising that it's easier to toss out local realism? Personally I find it a lot easier to give up on locality than causality. Is a theory that rejects causality really straightforward?

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[etymxris]

If "causality" as you use it is explicitly asymmetric, then yes, it's fairly straightforward to reject it. Typical arguments against backwards causation don't apply to these quantum measurements. Why? Because it's impossible to get between the particle and the future measurement. Any attempt to do so just becomes a measurement in itself. "Causality" as described by Bell just seems like simplistic philosophy. The very inequalities Bell derived should serve as a counterexample to this notion of "causality".

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[lpp]

Given that Bell's inequality has been violated routinely

Aren't there laws against that?

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, it seems that most quantum mechanicists assume that the fundamental equations must be hyperbolic in nature. However, general relativity admits solutions with closed time-like curves. This means that a theory combining quantum mechanics and general relativity must as well. (Since in the classical limit it must reduce to general relativity.) Closed time-like curves mean that forward-evolving your hyperbolic equations of motion is impossible. In effect, the loops in time cause future boundary conditions that you must satisfy.

Coarse-graining over the spacetime foam at plank length must include the effect of these small-scale timelike loops. The result of this probably changes the fundamental equations to be elliptic in nature. If this is done, then most of the mystery of quantum mechanics disappears.

As you have said, Bell's inequality requires one of locality or causality to hold. (Most quantum mechanicists assume causality, which then implies that "funny action at a distance" exists.) However, if you drop causality, then the interpretation of wave-function superposition is just your lack of knowledge of future boundary conditions. It becomes a calculational tool to solve your elliptic equations. (Note that the same sum-over-histories technique used in quantum mechanics appears in purely classical situations like a billiard-ball table with a worm-hole that can alter the ball trajectories.)

This interpretation, locality over causality, is so much nicer since it removes the special "measurements" that collapse wave-functions. However, it implies that the universe is a static solution for all time, and has been completely determined. There is no such thing as free will etc. This obviously annoys some people. However, I contend that even if we don't have a free will, we might as well act as if we do, since the future boundary conditions that constrain everything are unknown.

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[medv4380]

However, for particle physics, neither direction of time is privileged.

Einstein's Law of Causality states pretty clearly that Time is Uni-driectional, and you'd have to present a pretty solid proof to disprove the Law of Causality. People have tried but short of building a time machine I'm pretty sure the Law of Causality isn't about to fall just yet.

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[Anonymous Coward]

This interpretation, locality over causality, is so much nicer since it removes the special "measurements" that collapse wave-functions. However, it implies that the universe is a static solution for all time, and has been completely determined. There is no such thing as free will etc. This obviously annoys some people. However, I contend that even if we don't have a free will, we might as well act as if we do, since the future boundary conditions that constrain everything are unknown.

Actually, it does imply free will, just not your free will.

Being able to choose a single path in a branching multiverse implies the existence of a choice function (selection among possibly indistinguishable elements of a set) defined on each branching point.

No matter how you interpret the structure of the universe, there's always at least one choice in there somewhere and your choices are embedded in the universe's choices.

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[shma]

Particles are just as likely to be influenced by future interactions as they are by past interactions

This seems to be a poor understanding of time reversal symmetry. Particle physics works if you run time forward, or if you flip its sign and run time backwards. But that does not mean the same thing as what you said above. You can look at an experiment with each event in reverse, but you can't, for instance, say that event 2 was caused by event 1, but event 1 was caused by event 3. It only can follow the laws of physics if the causal order is 123 or 321.

The idea of 'backwards' causation has obvious major problems. First of all, you run into causal paradoxes. But more importantly, if the outcome of your experiment rests on future events, how can you do science? Every result becomes meaningless because you don't know if a future event caused it.

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole point of having elliptic fundamental equations is to avoid any branching, and thus the requirement for any choice function at all. Notice how the wave-function collapse process of measurement loses all importance.

However, you are right that there may be many possible universes due to eternal inflation. This existence of a multiverse does not imply free will. Pretend the multiverse is a pack of cards. Our universe is one of those cards. Which of the 52 we don't know until the end of time when the suit and value are revealed. Another version of yourself might be in a universe with a different suit, but same rank. This person doesn't get to pick that though - it is implicit within the existence of that card within the deck itself.

The 5 of spades does not get to pick to be the 5 of spades... and somewhere within the standard deck lies one card that must indeed be the 5 of spades.

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[etymxris]

First about causal paradoxes. The going back in time to kill your grandfather type of paradox is impossible for the quantum measurements we are talking about. This act of preventing a future event is known as "bilking" and is a pretty sound argument against time travel. However, bilking is impossible for entangled particles. I cannot measure the particle so as to change the future measuring device since the observation becomes the new measurement.

Second about science being impossible. I doubt that. On macroscopic scales not much changes since backward causes are limited and most "causes" actually derive from the entropy decrease of local systems. So far we've only seen entropy increase towards the past. This is a mystery in itself given the largely symmetric nature of particle physics, but is besides the point when we're discussing quantum measurements of single particles where thermodynamics plays little or no role.

Moreover, sometimes science and mathematical calculations are hard. But that's the way the world is and the simplicity of calculations can't stand against the reality of observations. Calculation difficulties have been around since the three body problem.

Finally, I'll address your first point that it's either all forwards or all backwards. Well certainly, if you limit yourself to theories where determination only goes one way, then that must be the case. But that's question begging since the very issue at hand is whether influences can go both ways in time to influence certain events. Typically calculating influences from both directions is not done. But the very point I'm making is that it should be. And it certainly can be done. Cramer's transactional theory is a case in point.

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[etymxris]

Einstein had a lot of trouble dealing with the results of quantum mechanics. His ERP paradox ironically ended up being a reductio of his own views of causality. If you want to cite authorities on QM, you'll need to look elsewhere.

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[RoccamOccam]

I contend that even if we don't have a free will, we might as well act as if we do

Okay, this one is really messing with my head.

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that Bell's inequality has been violated routinely

Aren't there laws against that?

Personally, I've always believed that all particles should be equal in the eyes of the law. Therefore Bell's inequality is innately unjust and violating it (while accepting the consequences of course) is proper civil disobedience.

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[Anonymous Coward]

There seem to be physical processes which will operate differently depending on whether time runs forwards or backwards. An example is certain subatomic interactions involving the weak nuclear force. Theory suggests that violation of the conservation of both parity and charge conjugation, can happen if time runs backwards. An example of this is kaon decay. This result postulates why there is an abundance of "matter" vs. "anti-matter" due to this symmetry violation. If time ran backwards it's believed that there would be more "anti-matter" than "matter" which we do not seem to see.

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[shma]

This act of preventing a future event is known as "bilking" and is a pretty sound argument against time travel. However, bilking is impossible for entangled particles.

I'm talking about backwards causation as a general principle.

On macroscopic scales not much changes since backward causes are limited...

Says who? What is the definitive study of backwards causation? I'd like to see some sources which claim that violating causality would not cause experimental problems. What about simple particle physics experiments where we are working on microscopic scales?

Moreover, sometimes science and mathematical calculations are hard. But that's the way the world is and the simplicity of calculations can't stand against the reality of observations. Calculation difficulties have been around since the three body problem.

You're not understanding my point. I didn't say the calculations or experiments would be difficult. I said that in any experiment where future events would have to be taken into account, you couldn't make definitive statements about your results. If I do an experiment to show A causes B and future events can also cause B, there is no way for me to state definitively that a seemingly positive result is caused by A and not some future event I can't control for. This is what makes causality so essential for science.

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[etymxris]

Yes you're right. The neutral kaon is a small but definite counterexample to the symmetry of particle physics. And it's difficult to say exactly what symmetry is or should be. The standard symmetry illustration is to take billiard balls bouncing on a frictionless table: you cannot tell whether a video of this is being run forward or reverse. However, something like gravity would violate this as it's very easy to distinguish items moving towards each other vs. away from each other.

Symmetry is well known at the fundamental levels of physics, so I went with that. But the argument to allow reverse influences doesn't need it. It just needs that neither direction of time is privileged. The commensurability of quantum mechanics and relativity would be a great reason in itself to allow influences contrary to the standard direction of time.

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[Anonymous Coward]

I just binged for "bilking" and it's a rather dirty sexual practice performed in public. Shame on you.

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[etymxris]

On macroscopic scales not much changes since backward causes are limited...

Says who? What is the definitive study of backwards causation? I'd like to see some sources which claim that violating causality would not cause experimental problems. What about simple particle physics experiments where we are working on microscopic scales?

Without an entropy gradient from past to future we would be in heat death. The only bodies of knowledge that have any relevance in heat death are particle physics and perhaps some chemistry. Anything that depends on the entropy gradient for its existence, such as all biological creatures, will be strongly asymmetric in time. Thus, animals die after being born and not vice versa. What I'm saying is that backwards influences will exist, but they will be incredibly overpowered by the asymmetry of the entropy gradient such as to be ignorable. For disciplines studying anything influenced by entropy, reverse causation is ignorable.

As for micro physics...

You're not understanding my point. I didn't say the calculations or experiments would be difficult. I said that in any experiment where future events would have to be taken into account, you couldn't make definitive statements about your results. If I do an experiment to show A causes B and future events can also cause B, there is no way for me to state definitively that a seemingly positive result is caused by A and not some future event I can't control for. This is what makes causality so essential for science.

We already control the future in the particle experiments. The future is the interaction with the measuring device. The measuring device is partly controlled (however we choose to set it up) and partly determined (otherwise our experiment would have no results). As for the general case, you shield yourself from future influences the same way you shield from past influences: set up a lead wall or something.

How do you know what causes what? There isn't any fundamental problem. You just have two dependent variables where you used to have one. S1, S2,...Sn as the source setups. M1, M2, ...Mn as the measurement setups. And then the dependent variable will the reading of your device in the future: R1, R2, ...Rn. This is already what is being done and is what allowed Bell to determine his problematic inequalities.

Perhaps you can give me a more concrete example to work with. I'm having trouble understanding your actual objection.

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[medv4380]

Given that QM has yet to give an accepted theory for gravity which is easily provable as at least existing I'm not going to give it credit for proving reverse causation until it can demonstrate it occurring. The ERP paradox messes with the Principal of Locality not the Law of Causality. In fact the ERP paradox supports the Law of Causality as long as Special Relativity is still accepted.

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[etymxris]

It's been too long since I've gone into a historical analysis of the EPR experiment and how it relates to the tensions between QM and relativity. So instead of giving an inadequate response I'll defer to someone much more capable: http://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/9406028

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[Anonymous Coward]

INAP, and this is almost certainly wrong, but maybe someone will explain why it's impossible which it probably is since I'm naive enough to say something stupid.

What if..

It's dark and it's cold and it has been for quite some time. This is the Dark Era of the Universe. There are a few electrons and positrons around, but it's mostly photons which are their own antiparticles. Sometimes these photons interact with the few particles, but mostly they don't.

When a antimatter particle and a particle meet, they annihilate and form a photon, but is that really what is important? What does a photon in the dark era have left to do that is interesting? Maybe the way to view this is that a photon and a particle of matter meet, and the particle of matter is transformed into a particle of antimatter with a special destiny.

That antimatter particle is sent on a trajectory that will have it coalescing into a black hole via hawking radiation played in reverse. The black hole will shrink as it ejects anti matter and light which then forms old stars which grow younger and younger as time passes their anti-iron storing the photons that shine on the stars as more energetic fuel until it becomes anti hydrogen which eventually diffuses into hot gas and then into hotter plasma until it deflates down to a pinpoint and smaller. That pinpoint then explodes in two directions in time, but then we've been here before haven't we? If we keep time rolling the same way, then we're matter again.

Viewed from the point of view of antimatter the present would be long past the dark era and into the era where matter stars have formed and are storing the energy from the photons that shine on them as matter hydrogen. If antimatter falls up ( which we don't know if it fall up or down, then might our future hold more and more antimatter as photons transform more and more matter into antimatter? Might this drive the expansion of the universe? Might the repulsive ( and other? ) effects of the antimatter universe in reverse drive the way things have played out in our universe thusfar to have played out the way they did ( think QM randomness being the influence of the antimatter universe which forms in the far future ( for antimatter which travels from the future to the past this makes sence, after all, if it's going backwards in time, where did it come from? Where did the photon come from that could be seen as traveling backward in time to the point of matter to antimatter transformation as easily as it could be seen as emanating from the point of annihilation? From an antimatter star perhaps?

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[Weezul]

Isn't Bohmian Mechanics a perfectly solid hidden variable theory that handles this?

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[Anonymous Coward]

The Many Worlds interpretation also lacks the concept of this collapse due to observation.

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[etymxris]

As far as I'm aware Bohm's interpretation is non-local, and thus not compatible with relativity.

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[Anonymous Coward]

I contend that even if we don't have a free will, we might as well act as if we do

Okay, this one is really messing with my head.

The GP means, if we don't have Free Will, but still act as if we did it doesn't matter. This is because our actions are purely deterministic, and perhaps even pre-determined, but since we will never have totally accurate and complete information about the entire universe it is unfalsible. In this view even if we are all just biological scripts, either spontaneously re-compiling or pre-compiled at some point, it doesn't matter because we will never be able to prove it, regardles of what our script tells us to believe.

I hope this helped!:)

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[Anonymous Coward]

Ignored for good reason:
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001833/
http://books.google.com/books?id=u357_V0Tu4QC&pg=PA251&lpg=PA251&dq=maudlin+cramer&source=bl&ots=3q77fGuIZC&sig=9RyZBJTi4ch7WRTpLddE7za0MRE&hl=en&ei=FqKYSvuPCZWz8Qayg4G2BQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=maudlin%20cramer&f=false/

Re:"Backwards" Causation

[etymxris]

Maudlin indeed argues that any backwards causation interpretation fails. As far as I can tell, however, his argument is little more than one from ignorance: "How can we do science if stochastic influences are going both directions in time?" Berkovitz finds Maudlin's argument to be not very strong. And Kastner, in the very paper you linked, supports Cramer's interpretation against Maudlin. As far as I know, Maudlin has yet to respond to Kastner or Berkovitz.

Spin on it

[MosesJones]

The phrase "spin on it" clearly means different things to different physicists but not having rotational symmetry sounds like more than just a big flaw it sounds like the sort of flaw that you really should try and fix before saying that you've just proved huge numbers of physicists wrong.

Its a mind-bending idea to model the universe in this way and personally I think it will fail because of H2G2

"Some people believe that if man understands the universe then it will be automatically replaced by one even more bizarre and inexplicable, others contend that this has already happened"

Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/505/

Dammit, there goes the planet.

[BigGar']

If Stephen Wolfram turns out to be correct, his ego will collapse into a singularity form the rapid mass inflation it will under go, taking the Earth with him.

Re:Dammit, there goes the planet.

[maxume]

So dark matter results from intelligence arising and becoming arrogant?

Who knew.

Re:Dammit, there goes the planet.

[0xABADC0DA]

Actually if Stephen Wolfram turns out to be correct then his ego must be defined by Rule 110 which, as has already been proven, is universal; it expands forever and is full of hot gasses.

Einstein dice

[Anonymous Coward]

So at last where hidden dice and they were controled with a hidden magnets

Obvious

[MarkPNeyer]

Most likely, I'm missing something here, but this seems obvious to me, as a simple result of the fact that cellular Automata are Turing complete:

A model of the universe is nothing other than an algorithm for converting initial conditions into empirical measurements. Initial conditions and empirical measurements are both describable in terms of numbers. Therefore, any model of the universe is an algorithm for converting numbers into numbers, and thus expressible as a Turing machine. Since cellular automata are Turing complete, any model of the universe is expressible as some cellular automaton. QED, bitches.

As an aside note, the fact that some model (e.g. cellular automaton) is capable of predicting everythign we've experienced in no way implies that the model is 'real' - i.e. that the universe is really a finite automaton / Turing machine.

Re:Obvious

[gtall]

The kicker is that, according to quantum mechanics which t'Hooft is attempting to dispute (I think), some of your numbers will be probabilities. So it isn't like you could predict the position and velocity of an electron. And even the probabilities might not conform to a logic system you would use, they might conform to a quantum logic. So reasoning from your automata might not be entirely straightforward.

Re:Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many, many problems with this idea. Having a deterministic model of the universe does not imply that the universe is deterministic, for starters. This Turing-complete automata thing is a red herring. Keep in mind the limits of computation: there are many numbers and functions which cannot be computed.

Mathematics is not the universe, although it can be used to approximate what we see in it. The map is not the territory.

The 'map' actually has big blank margins that are unlikely to ever be filled in. I suggest you research the work of Heisenberg. This is in addition to your required reading on quantum physics; you've really failed to have any idea what is being discussed.

I have free will

[kiick]

...because I choose to believe that I have free will.

If you don't believe in free will, then there's no use arguing with me, because it's been pre-determined that I will believe in free will.

PS:
Isn't trying to change someone's mind pretty much a futile gesture to a determinist?

Re:I have free will

[Rockoon]

No.

I am a determinist because I believe that everything that ever happened and everything that ever will happen can be explained by particles following one simple rule: The path of least resistance.

The fact is that in following that path, my brain insists on convincing you of my wisdom. It may very well be that in following that path, your brain begins to believe that I am in fact extremely wise.

That this is inevitable, I cannot say.

Re:I have free will

[Anonymous Coward]

> Isn't trying to change someone's mind pretty much a futile gesture to a determinist?

Not if you are destined to have your mind changed by somebody destined to try!

Re:I have free will

[Code Master]

Not if the person has been predetermined to change their mind after the attempt. It's not like they have a choice to be changed.

Re:I have free will

[Torodung]

And the path of least resistance is inevitably entropy. The abyss called, it wants to stare back at you.

Scary to consider, but I think you're dead on.

--
Toro

Re:I have free will

[amRadioHed]

Isn't trying to change someone's mind pretty much a futile gesture to a determinist?

Where do you get that idea? Saying that the mind is deterministic doesn't mean it is static and unchangeable. It means that choices you make are determined by the physical structure of your brain combined with your memories and sensory input.

The words someone uses to convince you of something are sensory input and so they are obviously capable of changing the state of your thoughts.

How does "no hidden variable" not apply?

[gweihir]

If anybody here can give a short explanation on how this gets around these proofs, I would be grateful. I remember being pretty convonced by the proof and did not see a way around it. Although, personally, I believe that hidden variable fits reality better, as entanglement with non-determinism needs an extension of the model of the Universe, while "hidden variable" can get by without. Being a CS, I prefer simpler solutions any time ;-)

Re:How does "no hidden variable" not apply?

[ceoyoyo]

It allows non-local influences. The hidden variable proof assumes a local universe.

Re:How does "no hidden variable" not apply?

[mbone]

See my response below - it has to be either non-local, non-causal or exceed the speed of light. (These are of course coupled possibilities.) If he has found another way around Bell's Theorem, I bet he would be touting that, not cellular automata.

Re:How does "no hidden variable" not apply?

[gweihir]

Hmm, yes, I think that would do it. Thanks.

Seems to me that the Quantum-Theory people know a lot less at this time than some of them pretend to.

Re:How does "no hidden variable" not apply?

[ceoyoyo]

Not exactly. These are all different interpretations of quantum theory. The interpretation most people think IS quantum mechanics is called the Copenhagen interpretation. There have been others right from the beginning. They all use the same equations and produce the same results, but the story that goes along with them is different.

Hilbert Space

[neo]

The invocation of Hilbert space in the article suggests a LINEAR cellular automata. It would suggest the possibility of any two points in space affecting each other through a very long, but singular line. The concept is akin, if I understand it correctly, to saying that the entire universe is one long line in Hilbert space and thus each iteration of movement affects all others.

but, IANAP

A Nonlocal Hidden Variables Theory?

[internic]

Firstly, I find the title of the submission a little odd. I mean, Entanglement can easily be understood as "deterministic" in a sense in conventional quantum mechanics. The generation of entanglement via the Schroedinger equation is quite deterministic. What's usually understood as non-deterministic is what happens when you measure.

I saw a talk by t'Hooft a number of years ago (I actually had lunch with him and my adviser). He was talking about a similar idea then, and my interpretation was that it evaded Bell's Theorem by being a non-local hidden variables theory. I haven't read the paper, so I'm not certain if this new idea is significantly different.

For background: Bell's Theorem is a result that shows that a local realistic hidden variables theory (a theory where each, say, particle has some hidden degree of freedom that determines the outcome of a measurement on it before the measurement is made) cannot reproduce the results of quantum mechanics for an entangled quantum state. To get around this obstacle, it's generally said that you either have to give up determinism (things don't have one specific state, etc. , before they're measured) or locality (the outcome of an experiment in one place may be totally changed by events happening at the same time arbitrarily far away)

Re:A Nonlocal Hidden Variables Theory?

[Chemisor]

> Bell's Theorem is a result that shows that a local realistic hidden variables theory
> cannot reproduce the results of quantum mechanics for an entangled quantum state.

Another thing they don't tell you about Bell's theorem is that it's for particles. The reason quantum mechanics violates the inequality is that photons are waves. Look at the calculations done for the Aspect experiment; the classical calculation makes the assumption that photons are particles and scattering probability is linear by angle. The experiment, thus clearly shows that photons are NOT particles, and that's ALL. If you discard the idea of photons as particles and use Beer's law to calculate what passes through your mirrors, then the results will match the quantum mechanical prediction (because a field intensity probability function will have the same value as the field intensity function if you know what it is).

Re:A Nonlocal Hidden Variables Theory?

[radtea]

He was talking about a similar idea then, and my interpretation was that it evaded Bell's Theorem by being a non-local hidden variables theory.

I haven't finished reading the paper, but as well as violating rotational symmetries he's violating Lorentz Invariance and apparently also Liouville's theorem (conservation of density in phase space) because he wants different states at time t0 to evolve into identical states as time t1 > t0.

In a universe that allows those kinds of things, it isn't even clear what "local" might mean! He refers to the latter phenomenon as "pseudo-non-local", but non-locality by any other name would smell as bad to local determinists.

He further points out that in most of the family of theories he's dealing with the equivalent of a Hamiltonian doesn't appear to have a ground state, which he also points out "makes it impossible to do thermodynamics"! My own biases lean heavily toward theoretical approaches that are fundamentally thermodynamic, so the unitary and other invariants of probabilities are what give rise to the more complex relations we are wont to call physical law. So a theory where the possibility of doing thermodynamics is a special case seems to me deeply flawed. But that's just my bias... reality may differ!

His ideas are interesting, in a good way, but at best are a step on the very long road to reconceptualizing physics in a way that will admit of both quantization and general invariance.

Re:A Nonlocal Hidden Variables Theory?

[radtea]

I saw a talk by t'Hooft a number of years ago (I actually had lunch with him and my adviser). He was talking about a similar idea then, and my interpretation was that it evaded Bell's Theorem by being a non-local hidden variables theory.

Ok, I've read the rest of the paper sufficiently closely to get the gist of his argument, which is that that universe must have been created in a quantum-entangled state, and so the only measurements we are allowed to make on entangled pairs are actually incredibly limited. He chooses to reject any notion of free will--why he makes this choice is not precisely clear, but I'm sure a lot of people who don't understand free will are jumping in on this thread to argue about why we should choose not to believe in free will, the way they have. Needless to say, those of us who choose to believe that self-consistency is desirable will not be swayed by these arguments in favour of choosing to believe that free will does not exist.

To call a theory "local" when it argues that the entire universe is carefully fine-tuned at almost all scales to produce what amounts to a rigged demo, seems to me to be stretching the meaning of the word beyond all recognition.

Re:A Nonlocal Hidden Variables Theory?

[internic]

Another thing they don't tell you about Bell's theorem is that it's for particles.

Bell's Theorem can actually be formulated in a very general way, so that it doesn't really pre-suppose any particular structure other than two measurements that can be made independently of one another and treated via probability theory. It certainly does not imply anything about treating particles or waves specifically.

FTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

"A two photon state with total spin zero is not an eigenstate of the beables of the theory."

Hidden variables and metaphysics

[CustomDesigned]

As I understand it, there are hidden variable theories completely in sync with experiment. But they are experimentally indistinguishable from true randomness - and hence serve no scientific purpose (although answering Einstein's famous objection, "God does not play dice"). A hidden variable theory where the "hidden" variables can be deduced by experiment "inside" the universe is no longer a truly "hidden" variable theory.

Re:Hidden variables and metaphysics

[blueg3]

"Hidden" in this sense doesn't mean "impossible to deduce by experiment" but simply "currently unknown to us".

Its just a matter of modeling

[Brain-Fu]

When you model the universe in terms of will-less mechanisms, you will (amazing!) discover that free will is a logical impossibility.

Trying to model free will in terms of physics is like trying to describe the combustion engine using only the words found in a book on home gardening.

The only reason some people find this personally problematic is because they have decided that our current model of physics is also the concrete, accurately-represented holy truth. In fact, our current model is just an abstract representation of something we can't see, and it is just the best we've come up with so far (in fact, any scientist worth his salt will predict that our models will change in the future).

So the quantum-mechanical model of the universe is incompatible with any free-will-is-real model of the universe. So what? This incompatibility doesn't make either theory right or wrong. The evidence for each theory is all that matters.

As Epicurus (one of the fathers of the modern scientific method) advised, "if several theories are consistent with the observed data, retain them all."

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[Guignol]

Bravo. Excellent.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[Korin43]

And how would you model the universe.. In terms of magic?

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[Anonymous Coward]

The current model of the universe is not necessarily composed of will-less mechanisms.

In fact the non-determinism of QM (if it is so) could be exactly the mechanism by which free will is introduced into the universe. QM does not have to be random as insinuated by the GP, but it instead could be the method by which free will forces (perhaps our 'souls') outside the universe (as we see it) inject their free will into the universe (by slight manipulation of the odds so to speak).

I don't believe this myself, but I also don't see why it isn't theoretically possible.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[Torodung]

Why not? Belief systems still function even though we don't understand why or how they work. For most of the population, quantum physics might as well be magic!

I have a particular opinion about which is a better model, but I'm an admittedly lousy "magical thinker." ;^)

--
Toro

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[blackraven14250]

That's really insightful, and I'd give you a +1 for it. You're completely right that the introduction of our will could very well be us, without knowing due to barriers beyond science, changing a quantum particle from a superposition into one of it's potential positions. In fact, there's no proof that the essence of a person's mind actually is created on this plane of existence, lending a large amount of potential to this argument.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[Anonymous Coward]

When you model the universe in terms of will-less mechanisms, you will (amazing!) discover that free will is a logical impossibility.

The flaw in that case is modeling the universe in terms of will-less mechanisms. As most people know, leptons (such as electrons) have free will.

(as they just proved; my capcha thingy I had to type in to post this was "charge")

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[internic]

When you model the universe in terms of will-less mechanisms, you will (amazing!) discover that free will is a logical impossibility.

So the quantum-mechanical model of the universe is incompatible with any free-will-is-real model of the universe. So what? This incompatibility doesn't make either theory right or wrong. The evidence for each theory is all that matters.

I've never seen a definition of "free will" that would be empirically testable. Actually, I don't think I've ever seen a definition of free will that is even logically coherent. Those would be preconditions for debating whether science endorses free will. My own position for the moment is that the concept is not well defined and, hence, the question of whether we have free will is meaningless.

I once had someone argue to me that free will was a necessary condition to make an arbitrary choice, so that was a test. But, of course, making an arbitrary choice just shows you're non-deterministic. If that's your definition of free will, then an electron has free will. However, if your actions are just determined randomly I'm not sure why you'd call that a "will".

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[oreaq]

free-will-is-real model of the universe

Since we are in a scientific context: What experiment would falsify the thesis that "free will is real"?

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[lgw]

And how would you model the universe.. In terms of magic?

That question seems to miss the point. The word "truth" means something different in science. Science seeks to answer the question "what is a useful and predictive model of how the universe works", and often calls that concept "truth". Science is just not involved with the question of "OK, that's a model, but how do things really work?". Scientists are of course as interested in that philosophical question as anyone else, but "how do things really work?" is a question of philosophy, not science.

If the best model is clearly not "how things really work" that's not a flaw in the model, nor a flaw in science, it's simply outside the scope of what science does. Seek elsewhere for those answers.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[mindbrane]

Threshold is a good working concept when addressing how to model a complex thing. In science threshold can be ostensibly seen in terms of the first microscope and the first telescope. From there spectroscopy presents another method with certain thresholds. Studying sound to model the inner sun is a recent example to getting around limitations to extend our present thresholds enabling and constraining our ability to model the Universe. The fact that we've hypotheses like String Theory suggests there are thresholds we've not yet crossed that would enable us to answer certain questions. The question arises as to why most people seem desperately to need a concept like truth rather than living in an interesting and engaging state of doubt.

Models of the world or the Universe should express elegance, or, simplicity, like Einstein said, a theory should be as simple as possible but not too simple, but for a theory to be elegant it should, IMHO, be rigorous, where rigorous is taken to mean all or 'enough' particulars have been inspected to warrant an elegant theory. This idea seems to me to go back to threshold.

Ideas about free will are speculative. I don't know that free will is viable except as a fiction because I'm not sure it's right to say an individual exists in any meaningful way. Language is heavily vested in purposiveness and unsuited to some subject matter. Whenever I think about free will I recall my idea for a slasher flic starring Ludwig Wittgenstein wielding Occam's Razor (it's still in development, but I like it).

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[css-hack]

And that, friends, is precisely what the GP was talking about when he said:

...like trying to describe the combustion engine using only the words found in a book on home gardening.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[lgw]

My own definition of free will, from the philosophical side, is the same as "conscious choice". Free will reduces to the question of sentience or self-awareness (or actually a precondition for that), which is not itself well-defined but is still interesting. Basically, if you think you have free will, you can't be wrong, any more than if you think you're in pain you can be wrong. It's empirical, but only as a concious state, just like pain.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[ceoyoyo]

No, you don't. Newton's clockwork universe is certainly composed of "will-less mechanisms" yet once you investigate closely you notice that there are nooks and crannies where unpredictability hides, allowing for things like free will. Likewise, the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn't have any "and here there be willful bits" in it, yet quantum uncertainty and randomness leaves the door open for free will. Most hidden variable QM interpretations, likely including this one, also leave room for free will by suggesting that there are hidden variables with concrete values but that we can never know exactly what those values are.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[internic]

I can accept that sort of definition as somewhat reasonably, but that seems to remove it entirely from the realm of metaphysical arguments people like to have about free will.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[GargamelSpaceman]

I'd start by making a universe doll and then I'd start sticking pins into it to see if it screams.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[Chris Burke]

The thing is, I don't see it just as a matter of existing models being incompatible free will. I don't see how any model of the universe, whether deterministic or probabilistic, supports the idea of free will.

So I can certainly see your point that the current model may be wrong, and that we may simply not be using the right language to describe the universe, but my question is, how do you introduce that language to expand the models that can be expressed to include those that allow free will? And don't just say "will-full mechanisms", tell me what that means and how it can be useful scientifically.

As Epicurus (one of the fathers of the modern scientific method) advised, "if several theories are consistent with the observed data, retain them all."

A very poignant observation, and exactly why we keep both GR and QM despite being certain that they are in some ways contradictory.

Except there isn't exactly a theory of free will, outside of my Descartian observation "I have free will because I have it" which I am certainly not going to elevate to the level of "theory". It's more of an axiom that I'm comfortable with.

So I think the problem is much deeper than the problem of finding a unifying theory for relativity and quantum mechanics.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[Anonymous Coward]

And as Occam would have replied, "Plurality ought never be posited without necessity"

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[Will.Woodhull]

Implied in the idea of 'modeling the universe' is a recognition that the model will be smaller and simpler than what it is modeling. Just like a map is by implication smaller and simpler than the territory.

It doesn't matter that there may be no model of the universe that supports the idea of free will. There is no map of the Pacific Northwest that conveys the grandeur of the Columbia Gorge; maps simply don't address that aspect of reality. Similarly, the issue of free will is outside the capabilities of the modeling processes. That doesn't mean free will does not exist, nor does it mean that there is free will. It means the question is outside the realm of physics.

Or, to put in simpler terms, we have gone from classical physics to modern physics: that was Zen, this is Tao.

Meh.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure it is not true that most people know that leptons have free will.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

... than if you think you're in pain you can be wrong.

of course you can be pretty obviously wrong about being in pain

A very wise man must once have said (in other words I'm just making this up) : "Never underestimate the stupidity of humans". Let's not forget there are suicide-cults, people who enjoy watching "neighbors" AND well ... there are religions, even horrible ones. I mean religions by itself are not an especially good sign of intelligent life, but killing little girls and/or homosexuals because in some desert ages ago some massacring thief told some people to do so ... I mean ... we humans defineatly are pretty fucking stupid.

Of course your entire sentence means nothing. "Your own definition of free will" ... is never elucidated. Nevertheless this non-existent definition is supposed to prove all sorts of things. That's not how it works. First you make a definition of something, then you combine that with axioms and other definitions and then you get an exact conclusion. Everything else is just random babblings of philosophers.

And this is my thoughts about philosophy. In history, you always had empiricists, and you had philosophers (or proto-philosophers, called theologians, or proto-theologians like the village priest). They generally argue in opposite directions. Guess who always turned out to be right ?

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[turbidostato]

"I've never seen a definition of "free will" that would be empirically testable."

That's because it can't be empirically testable (thus science is out of the loop about testing it as acceptable or not).

On one hand, "free will" means that you can choose "this or that" on a freely concious manner untangled to any real world influence (I did this because *I* wanted that way -of course, it implies we can define what "I" in fact is in a way untangled to reality -Plato's two riders myth). On the other hand, Heraclitus in the phylosophical front and quantum mechanics in the physical one both state that "you can't step into the same river twice", so there's no way to make the experiment where all the external conditions are the same and yet, out of an exercise of concious voluntas, the experimental subject once choose "A" and "B" the other try.

"I once had someone argue to me that free will was a necessary condition to make an arbitrary choice, so that was a test."

The ability to make an arbitrary choice is a necessary condition for a free will, but not a sufficient one or else, as you stated, an electron would have free will. In order to be considered "out of free will" a choice should be arbitrary and concious of such arbitrarity.

"if your actions are just determined randomly I'm not sure why you'd call that a "will". "

That's the "conciuos" part. On one extreme we have your electron example: arbitrary choice without will; on the other extreme is Buridan's dork: unconcius will unable to take an arbitrary choice.

The difficult part is "testing", even on a phylosophical ground, both extremes: arbitrary choice and concious willness. The typical example is based on some kind of decision logically undefensible (since choices logically backed can be assumed to be a product of our intelligence instead of our free will). In (a typical) example: an heroic soldier, despite of obvious danger to his own safety choices to do something in others' favor. It seems "free will" but would any other heroic character do anything different in the very same scenario? Even more, would the very same person be able to do anything else in the very same circumnstances? Obviously in order to test this we would need to fast-rearward time to put the same person in the same situation and ask him to do different without our asking altering the environment (the quantic situation of the observer mangling the observed by the very fact that he is observing).

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[turbidostato]

"Since we are in a scientific context: What experiment would falsify the thesis that "free will is real"?"

No one since you ask for an exception. Just ask yourself what experiment would falsify the thesis that "there are black stars". No "black stars" have been ever observed still you state them as an 'a priori' and ask for a falsify argument, no wonder nobody can provide it. Just the same, you accept an unprobed object (free will -everybody seems to know what is it, but the fact is nobody in whole History can point to something and say "that's an undoubful case of free will") and still you ask for a probe of its unexistance. That's not a scientific problem but a logical one -related to the "evil question".

Still, you can have it as an operational 'a priori' related to Ockham's principle: since nobody can point to something and say "that's real free will in action" let's assume that there's no such a thing as "free will" and see what happens. Now you have a working and falsable principle since "there's no such a thing as free will" is easily falsable: you just need an undebatable example of free will. The fact that there's probably no real ability to produce the experiment to test for "an undebatable example of free will" -you probably would need a time machine, is not a problem theoretically-wise.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[lgw]

Yeah philosophers hate it when that happens - does it surpise you that I'm a published philosopher who doesn't work in the field? Got out of town ahead of the lynch mob. ;)

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, our current model is just an abstract representation of something we can't see, and it is just the best we've come up with so far (in fact, any scientist worth his salt will predict that our models will change in the future).

You might not be suggesting as much, but I think a lot of people have the misconception that scientific progress involves revolutions where old ideas are overturned for new ones. A look at the modern history of science shows this to not really be the case. What tends to happen is that old theories are expanded by new ones which allow for greater precision. Take the classical Newtonian theory of gravity. It's fine for describing cannonballs and ballistic trajectories. Of course general relativity offers a much more accurate depiction of gravity, but it would be odd to suggest that general relativity "overturned" Newton's theories.

It would be accurate to say that many pre-scientific theories have been overturned. The germ theory of disease certainly overturned the idea that imbalances in the humours are responsible for poor health.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[lgw]

No, that's just false. Ghost pain really is pain! This is a fundamental philosophical point about perception. The illusion of pain hurts just as much. In every way that matters, it's pain, from prompt neural activity to long term psychological consequences. The fact the limb that is in pain is no longer actually there is wholly unrelated.

Empiricism is a philosophy, not the opposite of philosophy. Most branches of science started as philosophy, and gradulally came to be called "science" as empirical methods became practical. But even some of the earliest "philosophical babblings" are still interesting and meaningful even within the framework of science. Xeno's paradoxes of motion are so simple, and we still don't have the answers to most of them.

BTW, you didn't really have empiricists before the Renaissance, and the idea didn't really take off until the time we call the Age of Enlightenment. There's a causal connection there.

As far as "my definition" of free will, I'm a compatible determinist, which is to say I believe in free will in a deterministic universe, because free will is nothing more than the process of conscious decision-making. That just moves the problem to the question of self-awareness, of course, but if you make a decision in a self-aware way, then free will applies to that decision. If your hand jerks back from a hot stove without conscious participation in that action, then it was not the result of free will. This is not a popular view, because most people have never actually thought about what "free will" means, and consider it to simply be the opposite of determinism.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[gomiam]

In fact, there's no proof that the essence of a person's mind actually is created on this plane of existence,...

So, in theory, it might be possible that what shows up on brain scans are "reflections" of our minds acting at the quantum level. Besides the question of why should the brain reflect the mind if it's not based on it, could this mean that minds are playing The Ultimate Matrix Online Game (TM) in our Universe? Considering that the mind doesn't show up again (unless you believe in reincarnation) when the body dies... ;)

It seems to be a bit convoluted. Then again, reality doesn't have to be simple.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[jheath314]

I'm okay with the rest of your post, but your point about Xeno bugs me. How exactly are his paradoxes unsolved? All of his paradoxes are basically just the same logical error rephrased in different ways, namely "you can't get a finite sum from an infinite series." Even Archimedes was able to prove quite easily that actually, yes, any convergent series will give you a finite sum. Just because Xeno didn't understand basic mathematics doesn't mean his paradoxes are unsolvable.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

No, that's just false. Ghost pain really is pain! This is a fundamental philosophical point about perception. The illusion of pain hurts just as much. In every way that matters, it's pain, from prompt neural activity to long term psychological consequences. The fact the limb that is in pain is no longer actually there is wholly unrelated.

Funny, the only way your sentence makes any sense whatsoever is if you assume "real world = illusion" AND "illusion = real world".

Science means creating hypotheses and then checking them. So let's check your assumption : I am currently imagining I have 1 trillion dollars next to my, you know, Obama's weekend spending money.

Checking ...
Checking ...
Checking again ...
Re-checking ...

Nope reality and illusions are totally different things it seems. Can you spare 500$ ?

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[Korin43]

But what model would give you a better answer? I would say science asks "How does the world seem to work?" vs. religion/superstition's "How do I want the world to work?" So if I want to know how things really work, is better to go on how they seem to work, or how I want them to work? Or am I missing another option?

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[johanatan]

The question arises as to why most people seem desperately to need a concept like truth rather than living in an interesting and engaging state of doubt.

Mystery and doubt need not be synonymous. Some absolutes may hold even though particulars are not known.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[oreaq]

That's what I was trying to say: "Free will exists." is not a scientific statement. You can not incorporate it into a scientific model.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[tenco]

No, that's just false. Ghost pain really is pain! This is a fundamental philosophical point about perception. The illusion of pain hurts just as much. In every way that matters, it's pain, from prompt neural activity to long term psychological consequences. The fact the limb that is in pain is no longer actually there is wholly unrelated.

Funny, the only way your sentence makes any sense whatsoever is if you assume "real world = illusion" AND "illusion = real world".

Primate brains are imaginative things. Even without being run on funny chemicals (although some neurotransmitters like dopamine might qualify). When dreprived of sensory input, we start to imagine things.

What your brain constructs based on your sensory input is just a more or less correct intrepretation of the real world.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Problem is these days we got stuff like postmodernism, which assume that our interpretation is 100% "more or less" and 0% "real world".

It's beyond ridiculous how easy it is to disprove postmodernism, and yet everyone seems to buy into it. These days actual policies are defended using postmodernism.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[turbidostato]

"That's what I was trying to say: "Free will exists." is not a scientific statement. You can not incorporate it into a scientific model."

No, no, no: that wasn't what I told. Free will is quite easy to demonstrate: you just need an operative definition and a test for it "free will exists" is as proveable as "the Moon exists". What "free will exists" is not is a theory but an observable. Since it's just an observably you can't falsify it; you just measure it (aka observe) or not.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[oreaq]

I do not know of any such "operative definition and test for it". I don't believe it exists and I'm not convinced that there ever will be one.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[lgw]

"You can't get a finite sum from an infinite series" was not at all the point of Xeno's paradoxes. People often spend 15 minutes on Xeno in high school or college and that's what they take away form it, but the sum of an infinite seires is unrelated to his point.

Xeno of Elea basically says "you cannot take an infinite number of actions in a finite amount of time", then goes on to show in many ways that e.g. movement is infinitely divisible, so movement requires an infinite number of actions. Xeno argued that modeling motion as continuous just doesn't work if you look at it deeply. This is quite profound.

Twenty-four centuries later, a group of physicists said "modeling the motion of an electron around an atomic nucleus just doesn't work if you look at it deeply" and changed physics forever. Today is seems likely that motion is at its most fundamental somehow quantized, but no one has a good model. A growing group of physicists are wondering whether cellular automata might be a better model for the univers3, though it's too soon to say whetehr they're just a bunch of kooks, or they will change physics forever, but they're addressing the same question Xeno did.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[lgw]

You're missing the entire point. The point is that all we know is the sense data that our consciousness percieves internally. Everything else is assumption, but we know what filtered sense data is received by whatever software/soul/etc houses that-which-thinks. Or as Wittgenstein once said at a dinner party: "I know I am holding an apple" (meaning that regardless of whether he was in the matrix, he had a justified true belief about the sense data reaching his consciousnss). At a gathering of philosophers this provided for an entertaining discussion at the dinner, and for a few decades following.

Also, life might be an illusion without being an illusion that you control! Your experiment covered a very small portion of the parameter space, I fear. Nice try, though. More profoundly, the universe that you have access to is only a model (some would say an illusion), created by your senses and heavily filtered. The input to those filters might be an objective reality or not, but it's pretty distant from what your consciousness has to work with.

Pain is an example of this filtered sense data that you have to work with. Look up the word "pain" in a dictionary. See if people other than you use the word in a way that requires physical injury for pain to exist. The stimulus may be false, but the result is really pain.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[lgw]

Err, I should amend that to "all we know first hand is the sense data ...". One can obviously reason from that data to know other things which that data logically implies. But you can't argue from "the sense data incorrectly models the reality I assume exists" to "the sense data is false". Data is data, it's the theories we build on those measurement that may be false.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[turbidostato]

"I do not know of any such "operative definition and test for it"."

"Free will" is how I call when the Sun first appears over the horizon in the morning. I have a video recording of such fact. See? Demonstrated.

"I don't believe it exists and I'm not convinced that there ever will be one."

One? Which "one"? I told two things:
1) Operative definition of "free will"
2) A test to demonstrate the object defined on point one does indeed exists.

See? Easy.

What you can't probe is that a previously unseen object does *not* exist (for all that we know, it can be on the far side of the Moon where, unkown to us, the Universe is managed by totally different physics laws; not a specially interesting idea, as Ockham would tell us, but still possible and, from time to time, even tried -i.e. non-local non-entanglement theories for quantum mechanics). And you can't falsify observables, just theories. Since "free will" is such an observable (a kind of measurable "object") you can't falsify it in principle. You either observe it or not. But the path to be able to observe an object is an easy one: you first clearly define it (in order to avoid the "true scotchman" fallacy) and then you plan for a test that will detect it (the fact that you don't have the technology to make the measure is not a problem on the theory -take gravity lenses when first proposed, for instance; the fact that your test does not detect it is not a problem with the process either, take gravitons, for instance).

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[oreaq]

Take the "force" in Newton's Laws as an example. F=ma. It gives a concise definition of force and thus on the one hand makes force (in any particular instance) observable. On the other hand it is also scientific statement because it can be falsified (and has been by Relativity). Free will lacks both. It isn't well defined and hence can not be observed. And there are no scientific universal statements about free will that I know of.

You are right that my initial statement "'Free will exists.' can not be falsified." was very imprecise. I hope this helps in understanding what I meant.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[turbidostato]

"On the other hand it is also scientific statement because it can be falsified (and has been by Relativity)."

That's false. "Force" has not been falsified -it can't, Newtonian dynamics has... which was my point. You can declare a cosmogony that includes both a definition and a test for "free will" and you either observe such "free will" or not, and that's all about free will. But if within your cosmogony includes some predictions (such as "free will will appear on such and such occasions and will measure this or that") that result to be false, it will be the theory as a whole the one that will be falsified not any of their defined observables. Again, you don't falsify F=m*a, you falsify the theory that predicts that says F=m*a (by finding, for instance that F!=m*a).

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[oreaq]

Is my English really so bad that you can not understand what I'm trying to say or are you trying to not understand what I write? I appreciate that you're trying to correct and improve my English but that's not really the point here, is it?

You wrote "Free will is quite easy to demonstrate: you just need an operative definition and a test for it." If it's really that easy: Can you give me a operative definition of free will and a test for it? Here and now? I don't believe that you or anyone else can.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[turbidostato]

"Can you give me a operative definition of free will"

Not, or at least not now. I never said that providing an operative definition for free will was easy; all that I say is that testing for free will is easy. Is it easy to see a big schumultz the size of a truck? Well, is it really that big? yes; is it colorful and opaque? yes. Then it's easy to see a big schumultz; it's only a matter that somebody puts it in front of you. That you don't know what in hell an schumultz is and that you know nobody able to hunt one down to put it in front of me so I in fact see it it's a whole different story. You'll probably think I'm nitpicking but logics is full of such nitpicks and that's what make it work.

Re:Its just a matter of modeling

[oreaq]

Not, or at least not now.

That was all I was trying to say. Thanks though for introducing me to the finer aspects of logic where things that are "quite easy" are in fact not possible, or at least not possible now :)

all that I say is that testing for free will is easy

Well it's not easy now but it will be easy after somebody comes up with a test that will make it easy.

3 choices

[mbone]

Hidden variables in this case should be thought of as a hidden micro-states. A hidden variable theory would have quantum mechanics be something like thermodynamics; i.e., a theory that is not really basic, but appears so as we cannot see the fine scale true reality. Einstein was convinced that this had to be the case.

The tests of Bell's Theorem shows that no locally causal hidden variable theory is viable. This says basically that one of these must be the case

There are no hidden variables (i.e., true quantum uncertainty applies, and quantum mechanics is correct).

The speed of Light can be violated (i.e., there are hidden states that can exchange information faster than the speed of light). This implies, by the way, causality failures would be possible, so that in principle you could do something like kill your grandfather and prevent your own existence.

There is action at a distance (i.e., the theory is non-local).

There has long been a viable theory, that of Bohm, that replicates normal quantum mechanics. It's non-local.

I cannot tell from a read of the article (and without seeing the underlying paper) if 't Hoof has a non-local theory or just how he stays consistent with Bell's Theorem.

Re:3 choices

[jbengt]

The tests of Bell's Theorem shows that no locally causal hidden variable theory is viable. This says basically that one of these must be the case
There are no hidden variables (i.e., true quantum uncertainty applies, and quantum mechanics is correct).
The speed of Light can be violated (i.e., there are hidden states that can exchange information faster than the speed of light). This implies, by the way, causality failures would be possible, so that in principle you could do something like kill your grandfather and prevent your own existence.
There is action at a distance (i.e., the theory is non-local).

Or, since we're talking about quantum states, it could be that any combination of the three and not the three are the case, only to collapse to one (or more) of them when you make your observation.

Re:3 choices

[Ryvar]

The speed of Light can be violated (i.e., there are hidden states that can exchange information faster than the speed of light). This implies, by the way, causality failures would be possible, so that in principle you could do something like kill your grandfather and prevent your own existence.

Not necessarily. One possible alternative is the Novikov Self-Consistency principle, which posits that if a faster-than-light communication or a classical 'time travel' ever did occur, the probability of those events violating causality would be zero. Some undefined sequence of events would always prevent any attempts at violating causality from ever succeeding. Time travel or faster than light communication events might even be fixed within the timeline and actually be *required* of the participants.

It's just a bonghit, but an interesting one. Within Copenhagen Many-Worlds it could, for instance, be interpreted along the lines of the Anthropic Principle: universes which *would* contain causal paradoxes cancel themselves out entirely, leaving only universes in which no such paradox managed to occur.

--Ryvar

Re:3 choices

[mbone]

Yes, and I have to wonder if that sort of self-cancelation could be built into a cellular autonoma model. That would be interesting.

I recently read Alastair Reynolds House of Suns, and this deals with causality violations, by name. I don't think his solution would work as physics, but it's not impossible, and I thought it was very cool that he recognized and described the issue.

Another avenue: Invariant Set Hypothesis

[isd.bz]

Dr. Tim Palmer wrote a wonderful paper in which he makes an argument which would result in similar implications (disregarding the particular solution of using cellular automata): the Invariant Set Hypothesis. I haven't read t'Hooft's paper yet, but I have read and (attempted) understood this paper. He argues that there may be an invariant set behind quantum mechanics that is scale-variant but repetitive (this, if you knew the invariant set, it would be scale invariant). I'm not sure if this the same kind of determinism, but I suspect not.

It's an interesting read, anyhow.

Re:Another avenue: Invariant Set Hypothesis

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I had an idea very much like that a few weeks ago. I didn't have a chance to study much quantum mechanics (I was a math major) so I'm not completely sure what I do and don't understand, but I had the thought that if you ran the universe backwards, warped the geometry, and flipped the notion of density and lack of density (i.e. sparsity), you could get time symmetry in that the starting point (a big bang, infinite wave function density) would map onto the end point (an infinitely dispersed wave function).

That lead to me wondering if you could reformulate general relativity so that it warps spacetime in a manner consistent with this backwards mapping. The big bang has an infinitely small space and the point at infinite time has an infinitely large space.

Yes, I know it's obvious I'm out of my depth here, but on occasion I've known my subconscious to come up with ideas that are too complicated for my conscious mind to understand. Yes, I know that sounds crazy, and it probably is.

Konrad Zuse?

[Haxamanish]

Why ascribe the idea's of Konrad Suse to Wolfram?? Calculating space, 1967 (PDF)

Re:Konrad Zuse?

[Blissett Luther]

thank you, very intersting reading.

Re:Slashdot Today

[onemorechip]

And that both involve the Dutch.

Does Holographic Universe explain entaglement?

[Anonymous Coward]

Entanglement is described as 'spooky action at a distance'. Of course, if what appears to us to be distance really isn't, i.e. if the measured electrons are in some way tightly packed still at the point in time when they are measured, then measuring one can be expected to have a knock-on effect on the other.

If what we see as matter is really a manifestation of the interference pattern of multiple waves, then matter-to-energy is extremely obvious. You simply exert some kind of effort to make them decoherent. Cumulacy applies, so a big thing can be split into smaller, which can be split into smaller again etc. This also explains thermodynamics etc. Matter/antimatter is simply a destructive interference pattern.

In this case, at the point two electrons are emitted, they aren't coherent, just somehow.. close to each other in 'true' 2D space =p At the point you measure, hence which one you measure is really pretty random, because they are both actually in the same space. When you _do_ measure one, then the other one _must_ take on the opposite spin, regardless of where it happens to be in 'fake-3D' space.

The hidden variable is really the position of these waves in 2D space.

Well, duh....

[3waygeek]

anyone who's ever tried to wind up power cords or ethernet cables knows that.

Re: Well, duh....

[Black Parrot]

anyone who's ever tried to wind up power cords

Like this?

not much of a theory

[speedtux]

Cramer's transactional theory is an exception, it is symmetric and there is no collapse, but it doesn't get much attention.

As far as I know, Cramer's "theory" doesn't make any testable predictions. Hence, it's not actually a theory, it's more like religion or philosophy.

Re:not much of a theory

[etymxris]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it accounts for all the same phenomena that standard collapse models do, with the bonus of not requiring crazy metaphysics like the Observer or action at a distance. You're right it doesn't predict anything new over the standard models, but it seems like avoiding the tension with relativity should be enough in its favor.

Ask an alchemist.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe a Sorceror.
Or maybe a Christian.

Modeling the universe in terms of magic is what humanity has been doing for most of recorded history.

Modeling the universe in terms of mechanical interactions of particles or waves is the new-and-cool. And we are still getting our heads around how to do it.

Sounds like global warming theory

[Anonymous Coward]

The theory is sound, except for the fact that it can't predict reality.

Facinating news for the mathematical universe

[Torodung]

We are describing the universe with mathematics. Mathematics are wholly invented by man. The rules are deterministic. Where we get unexpected results, such as with chaos mathematics, all we can do is map the boundaries and boggle.

Eventually, when you do enough math, everything you can understand about the universe with math alone is going to look deterministic because of the semantic properties of the language you are using to describe it.

So the question is, what are we leaving out by boiling the universe down to a mathematical model, and is that undiscovered area of knowledge worth studying/of use to us? What is the end point of Newton's insistence that God described the universe with math, instead of just Newton alone, projecting his own ideas upon a God that may or may not exist?

I get excited when I see reports like this, because it may indicate a time for a paradigm shift, proven necessary because we've exhausted the mathematical possibilities, and that may lead us to a new revolution in knowledge.

Maybe we'll see technological singularity yet. Is it too much to hope in my lifetime?

Wondrous.

--
Toro

Re:Facinating news for the mathematical universe

[tsotha]

But the math is adapted to explain what we observe. I don't see math as a limitation to our understanding. Rather, our understanding of the universe is a limitation to expanding mathematics.

Re:Facinating news for the mathematical universe

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry that you think math is hard.

You seem to be laboring under the confusion that some sort of flaw in physics will necessitate throwing out the whole thing. Sorry, not going to happen. An understanding of the significance of the work of Einstein (with respect to Newton) would be helpful to you.

To throw out the role of math in physics, we have to throw out the idea that the universe works in ways we can understand, that things happen for a reason, or really that any knowledge is attainable.

Maybe if the Technological Singularity happens, we won't have people throwing around TS-related non sequiturs.

By the way, you're a crackpot and you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Have a nice day.

Re:Facinating news for the mathematical universe

[John Hasler]

> We are describing the universe with mathematics. Mathematics are wholly
> invented by man.

Some believe that math is discovered, not invented.

Re:Facinating news for the mathematical universe

[Torodung]

I'm sorry that you think math is hard.

I'm sorry that you labor under the confusion that math is easy. Try going to an average cocktail party and see how many can do something very basic real math, like derive the quadratic formula from the general quadratic equation.

You seem to be laboring under the confusion that some sort of flaw in physics will necessitate throwing out the whole thing.

Oh, okay. You misunderstand me. That would be nuts.

I am expressing the idea that the usefulness of math might have a logical end point. That there might even be a mathematical proof for that. Thus my later non sequitir about TS.

I'm not always clear. Sorry about that.

The premise: Eventually, the entire history of physics as we know it will be taught in High School like advanced ABCs. It will be used, as settled fact, to form the unimaginable words that one can put together with such an alphabet.

And my question is: Will that new language be considered math or will math be the foundation of something new?

Perhaps that is naive. Perhaps math is the beginning and the end of it, and it will eventually become the only meaningful way to describe anything. That is also possible.

Sorry you got me wrong. The math has value. It matters, and it is demonstrated to be the most successful way we have to describe and model the physical world, and generate new technology from it.

And I'm none too keen on the evidence of a "meta-physical" world.

Try re-reading my post understanding that I have the utmost respect for the quality and difficulty of the math involved. It isn't incongruous.

--
Toro

Re:Facinating news for the mathematical universe

[Torodung]

I see both as possibilities. They work together, and it isn't an "either/or" proposition.

They are sides of a coin to me. Our assumptions cut both ways, based on "what we observe."

--
Toro

Re:Facinating news for the mathematical universe

[Anonymous Coward]

Some believe that math is discovered, not invented.

Almost all great mathematicians are platonists, Kronecker being the most important exception.

Mod parent -1 Troll

[CorporateSuit]

Keep this sort of drivel on Digg.

Re:Mod parent -1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Were you offended by the posters inclusion of Christianity in the list of things that model the universe in terms of magic?

Troll does not mean "I disagree."

Saying "God worked a miracle to make this happen" is very different than saying "a bunch of atoms responded to the basic forces in this way," but not so different from saying "A magical fire spirit cast a spell to make this happen." From a scientific perspective, the Christian world view looks a lot more like magic than science.

Re:Mod parent -1 Troll

[CorporateSuit]

Offended? No. He was trolling. You happened to be just the kind of brain-washed idiot who picks up on that and eats it like it's cocaine-laced Frosted Flakes. It was about as offensive to me as if a 13 year old told me their parents are just a sheep because they don't want to accept vampirism as their career choice -- nothing but the derisions of idiocy that were hardly directed at me, but I could still identify as stupidity. Idiots who think this sort of spineless persecution toward something that you don't like should be lauded as an intellectual success have already rotted a nest out for yourselves. Digg. So go play with the rest of your kind.

The ignorance he showed toward a thousand year history of astronomy and physics? That's what I found a bit more offensive.

Re:I knew it. P.S.

[HiThere]

There are theoretical arguments that imply that it's impossible to accurately model why you are making your decisions at any great level of detail. They're rather convincing, but not totally so, especially when I slip in the constraint "at any great level of detail" rather than claiming perfection in the modeling.

But they're still rather convincing. And then there's the time element. By the time you've finished your modeling, the decision is likely to be long past.

So free will is a good working approximation, rather like Newtonian Mechanics.

Autoverse in Greg Egan's Permutation City (1994)

[argent]

Sounds like the Autoverse in Greg Egan's novel "Permutation City".

Any model will do

[HarryatRock]

It doesn't matter what you base a model on, the value of a model is purely a matter of how good it works as a predictive tool (or as an aesthetic object for the artistic). If I model the moon as cheese and it gives the right answer for seismic readings, then it's a good model. If you are looking for absolute truth in a model, then I am afraid you are living in the wrong universe.

Whats really going on...

[Anonymous Coward]

As scientists put forward more and better models for the universe, the act of creating and developing better models is actually changing the universe a-la Heisenberg. The act of creating the model, changes the universe. Once we get a version of the model thats sustainable, the kind of universe that can support that model will be created, and you will be able to see it.

No, really

mod parent

[conspirator57]

troll for interrupting the flamefest of overated mumbo jumbo with reason and facts. it is intolerable.

Hide and go seek

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time a hidden variable theory is disproven someone invents a new one to take its place.

Its only ever seen as a minor issue when said brave new theory continues to contridict known observation or is couched in a way that reasonable evidence for it is impossible to ever produce.

Re:Hide and go seek

[pugugly]

Yeah, pretty much my reaction. I remember reading "A New Kind of Science", and although I don't want to claim it wasn't interesting, it certainly wasn't anything paradigm shifting.

Sorry - Cellular Automata are algorithmic systems, subject to the exact same logic that Bell Theorem proved could not reproduce the results of Quantum Mechanics.

Bell's Theorem for the Win

Brought to you by Mssrs. Dunning and Kruger

[xigxag]

The part you blokes don't get is that I don't understand Bell's theorem or actually any aspect of quantum physics, or logic, mathematics. But due to the Heisenberg uncertainly principle or maybe that thing with the dead cats, the less I know paradoxically makes me more qualified to stumble upon the truth. They laughed at Bozo the Clown, didn't they, and he turned out to be right about a lot of things.

Free will

[mellestad]

The only reason we can say we have free will is because creating an exact model for human behavior is a practical impossibility.

The false "non"-choice

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

I choose NOT to make a choice!

Which is both by itself a choice, and the denial of intention. It's a psychological tool, not a valid moral position. It will have the same effect of a choice. It is, in other words, merely a lie. Just like "neutrality" in a war does not exist. It is merely a device people use to feel good about their choices, usually when those choices are more than just a bit self-serving and egoist.

Neutrality is a choice, despite the name "not choosing", and just like any other choice it has repercussions in the real world. It advantages some parties, and sabotages others. Think about it, neutrality or "not making a choice" favors the agressor in a war, for example. It favors the status-quo in government, or in a social situation. It favors ... and so on, and so forth.

Quantum effects don't necessarily imply weirdness.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

... in the case of the brain, it's even more explicit. There are mechanisms in place that act to massively amplify signals, specifically geared to utilize quantum effects.

Which doesn't mean that quantum weirdness is mapped into the thought process in any useful way (other than, perhaps, a good random generator).

Doesn't mean it's NOT either, of course. Yet TBD.

Maybe the brain is just made out of high efficiency (and perhaps somewhat noisy) logic devices. Maybe it includes elements that make use of quantum mechanical entanglement and similar effects to aid computation.

Maybe it uses odd quantum mechanical effects to interface to a "soul" (perhaps a dark-matter construct), "ghosts", a "God", "gods", or other "supernatural" beings, or construct additional senses, communication channels, and/or means of manipulating matter and/or energy outside the usually accepted list of capabilities - or even the usually accepted limitations on macroscopic action across time and space. B-)

We could speculate all day. It will be interesting to see what physicists and biologists come up with.

This is probably why the definition is flawed

[Anonymous Coward]

As entropy for the whole system is unidirectional, but for localized events it is completely undetermined.

A determinist believes the future is unchangeable for every single scale and location, that is why it is philosophically troubling.

Re:This is probably why the definition is flawed

[Torodung]

Solve it with alternate universes like Hawking.

Accepting the premise that it is deterministic, in any given universe for any scale and/or location, actions (causes) cause our determined universe to change (effect).

--
Toro

superdeterminism

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

Why it matters

[Msdose]

The description of the elementary particles is couched in the wave function. It does not allow for observation of the particles as this would represent the collapse of the wave function. Nonetheless, the particles are observed. Since there is no other parameter shown to be responsible, it must be admitted that the act of observation is responsible for the collapse of the wave function into a particle. Thus, the particle and the field it represents can only exist due to man's observation of it. The Higg's particle and the Higg's field can only come into existence once the Large Hadron Collider has caused an observation to take place. When the Higg's field comes into existence, it will expand to the size of the universe in nothing flat, representing a force which will strip all the characteristics from the particles and leave the universe in a supersymmetric, zero entropy, timeless state. It will then cool and undergo a phase change, giving back the characteristics to the particles and restart the universe again.

If the only tool you have is a socket, all your problems look like connections.

I Love Rush

[improfane]

I've seen them twice now.

We dance on strings on powers we don't perceive...

I love Rush!

Re:Quantum effects don't necessarily imply weirdne

[Toonol]

Oh, I know we are far from having a complete and certain understanding of the mechanisms of the brain. And I certainly don't mean to suggest that quantum mechanics gives some mystic answer to the mind/body problem. Rather, just that quantum mechanics is a physical phenomenon that is exploited by the brain, just as chemistry and electricity is.

Disproof of Bell's Theorem

[Tony]

Bell's Theorem has previously been disproven. As with all universal negatives, you only need to find one exception to disprove it. Joy Christian presented a disproof using Clifford algebra.

Citing Bell's Theorem no longer constitutes a rebuttal against local variables.

As for the cellular-automata models, it's really not that outlandish. Consider how molecules are made up of atoms, or any other emergent system. They are all cellular automata to one extent or another.

Still, we'll have to see. Quantum physics has been at a near-standstill for the last twenty-five years. It's good to see some movement, even if it turns out wrong.