If We Have Free Will, Then So Do Electrons 610
snahgle writes "Mathematicians John Conway (inventor of the Game of Life) and Simon Kochen of Princeton University have proven that if human experimenters demonstrate 'free will' in choosing what measurements to take on a particle, then the axioms of quantum mechanics require that the free will property be available to the particles measured, or to the universe as a whole. Conway is giving a series of lectures on the 'Free Will Theorem' and its ramifications over the next month at Princeton. A followup article strengthening the theory (PDF) was published last month in Notices of the AMS." Update: 03/19 14:20 GMT by KD : jamie points out that we discussed this theorem last year, before the paper had been published.
Yawn. (Score:2, Insightful)
Well there you have it. A new breakthrough in the area of free will and our lives are...exactly the same.
If free will then free will (Score:5, Insightful)
I am sorry this proves nothing in the deterministic debate. All it says is If the observers have free will then teh particles must have free will. It does not answer the question: Does the observer have free will?
That's rich. (Score:2, Insightful)
Now all we have to do is prove that people have free will, something people have been trying to do for a thousand years, and then we'll know that particles have free will and by extension, the whole universe!
Jesus Christ what a waste of time. Proving free will is like trying to prove the immortal soul, except, if you proved the immortal soul you get all this interesting life-after-death crap, and if you prove free will you get the comfort of knowing that all your stupid decisions are your stupid decisions.
Re:That's rich. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, but if you can prove free will exists, then you can prove evil people will go to hell!
Seriously, this whole free will debate is pointless. Every manifestation of so-called "free will" can be adequately explained by assuming that our human brains can convincingly imitate free will (to other human brains). And that is a much simpler proposition that looking for free will in the fabric of the cosmos (what religious balderdash!).
I pretend to have free will, you believe me, and we're both happy.
I don't fret about it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yawn. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Worse yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
quote
More precisely, if the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus in a certain measurement, then the particle's response (to be pedantic--the universe's response near the particle) is not determined by the entire previous history of the universe.
end quote
I've not read the whole thing yet but it sounds like they've managed to prove that if free will exists then there is no non-local hidden variable theorem compatible with the results of QM.
Tim.
Re:I knew it! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I knew it! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Worse yet. (Score:3, Insightful)
Read flatland, or watch it. Contemplate a line erupting from a point, or a square from a line, or a cube from a square. Is the line transformed when a square erupts from it? Does it cease to exist? It does not. It is, forever.
That is the nature of your life. That is what your experience of time is. When you die, you will not cease. You will become complete, and you will exist, endlessly.
We are not changing. We are growing. We do not die, we become complete. We have all the free will of a plant reaching for the sun.
Re:I knew it! (Score:3, Insightful)
(With apologies to Dr. Feynman.)
If a layman could understand it, it wouldn't be worth publishing a scholarly paper about it.
If you want to really understand it, you gotta get into the hard stuff. Because it's hard.
Re:Misleading (Score:4, Insightful)
It is the theory that has been making steady progress since the introduction of quantum mechanics, using probabilistic interpretations. Progress like the development of quantum field theory, and the standard model.
Your complaints that that the consequences of probabilistic interpretations are absurd are like the complaints of opponents of relativity that relativity's consequences are absurd. The same sort of arguments that you're making now can be turned into arguments that we should be using an "ether-based" theory to explain electromagnetism. One which does all its work in some absolute reference frame, but makes the same predictions as relativity.
Yes, you can do it that way. But it's a pain in the ass, and the only benefit to it is that it pretends to satisfy the philosophical preconceptions of people who believe there's an absolute reference frame. It doesn't actually, it just pretends to. Same with Bohmian mechanics.
Re:Yawn. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Worse yet. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yawn. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yawn. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's what they call "materialistic determinism": basically its whether or not the laws of nature dictate your current and future actions (as opposed to a God, or whatever).
I still think its wanking. Not because it may not be true, but because, true or false, we have no other way of living our lives. We have to live as if our choices are ours.
Re:Worse yet. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yawn. (Score:3, Insightful)
Not true. You're ignoring the potential change in behavior that comes from "proving" we have no free will. If that is shown to be the case then, no matter what you do, even kill your wife and kids, it has been preordained.
Personally, I don't believe this crap - science is edging pretty far into metaphysical claptrap these days, which feels like a pretty clear sign we're missing some fundamental knowledge and are instead creating a rehashed version of "Gods Bowling In The Sky" to explain things we don't fully understand. But if this is "proven" scientifically, you can bet your ass it will have a pretty deep impact on how people behave.
Show me the fasification (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet I close my eyes and I see symbols, emerging from those computations, right???
"this is your fallacy"
So where's the falsification, individual ants don't "know" the optimum search method but nevertheless the ant's nest performs that feat.
"you have no understanding of neurology."
I never claimed to have an "understanding of neurology" but zero is a little harsh. If you're not just shooting your mouth off and do know something then show me the falsification...
Martin Gardner (Score:4, Insightful)
Then I read Berlekamp, Conway and Guy's "Winning Ways For Your Mathematical Plays" and found that just as much fun.
Re:I knew it! (Score:5, Insightful)
If a layman could understand it, it wouldn't be worth publishing a scholarly paper about it.
Naturally, the converse -- "If a layman couldn't understand it, then it must be worth publishing" -- isn't true, but it's a reasonably effective way to increase your publication count.
[/cynicism]
Re:Worse yet. (Score:3, Insightful)
If the universe is deterministic, then it follows that it is predictable, but unfortunately you don't get to choose outcomes, because your choice is determined by firing of neurons in your brain, which is caused by chemical processes based on the history of your brain. In other words, your choice is predictable, and therefore isn't really a choice at all.
Re:unless, of course... (Score:4, Insightful)
If we are purely matter, we have no free will. If there is more to us then matter, then we might have free will. There is no way for physics, the study of matter, to decide whether or not matter is all there is.
Sure there is. If there's "more to us than matter" then it still has to interact with matter somehow. If this "more than matter" exerts a force on our bodies, our bodies must exert a force back. That should be measurable.
If the metaphysical interacts with the physical, we should be able to detect it through physical means. If it does not interact with the physical, then it is entirely irrelevant.
Re:Worse yet. (Score:3, Insightful)
And we can't turn to quantum mechanics for the source of free will. Primarily b/c it is a system that is not predictable (uncertainty) and is apparently random. And, a random process cannot be the locus of free will. Free will connotes control - and by definition things randomly occurring are not controlled.
I believe that someone like Dan Dennett would somewhat agree with you - that we can have something like free will (it looks that way to us) in a deterministic world. But he's written more than a few books to argue his compatibilist viewpoint - I'm not even gonna try b/c I couldn't do it justice.
At the end of the day, I see arguing about free will to be little more than mental masturbation. I feel free. I believe that I am able to make decisions. Why worry about crap that better minds than me have been stumbling over for millennia. No need for any existential funks - fuck it.
Re:I knew it! (Score:5, Insightful)
If a layman could understand it, it wouldn't be worth publishing a scholarly paper about it.
If you can't explain it to a layman, you don't really understand it.
From this it follows that: If it's worth publishing a scholarly paper about it, then you don't really understand it.
Proves why philosophy is increasingly stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
You're exactly right, and it proves how stupid philosophy has gotten ever since its divorce from science and the law was finalized.
"Free will" in the philosophical sense does not matter, because the way philosophy defines it, it is some ethereal abstract thing. In practical applications the concept of "free will" can be much more concretely defined as the ability to choose one course of action over another. This is the definition of free will upon which U.S. law is based (because how can you be "guilty" if you could not have chosen any other course of action--see the concept of "mens rea" as well).
In addition a foundation of science is our ability to conduct experiments to test theory. We've not yet been able to reliably and precisely predict the behavior of an individual human over any appreciable span of time.
In terms of particle physics, nothing is alive, let alone possesses consciousness or free will. Electrons work exactly the same way in me as they do in a cloud of smoke. And like a cloud of smoke there is no way to predict the precise movement of me beyond a very short span of time. And yet there is a lot of practical utility in distinguishing between things that are "alive" or not at the level of our everyday experience.
Re:If free will then free will (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I knew it! (Score:4, Insightful)
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem resembles a nail. The universe seems mathematical if you use mathematics. If you wear blue glasses, the sun itself is blue.
Particles don't exist (Score:4, Insightful)
"Particles" are just a modeling tool. They are a means of conceptualizing mechanical causes for the behavior of the world as we experience it.
So far, they have proven to be a very useful means of said modeling. The predictions that particle/force-based models make are quite accurate these days, and have been successfully applied to do a huge variety of useful work (playing world of warcraft being my particular favorite). Accurate predictive power is the final judgment of the scientific process, so from that perspective particles are sure winners.
But the fact remains that particles are abstract representations of phenomena which we cannot directly perceive (we infer the behavior of subatomic particles through detection devices which were themselves built upon these inferences, for example). The popular visualization of tiny little solid spheres bouncing around was rejected based on evidence gathered way back in the 20's, and rival visualizations that also have predictive power had been proposed since the dawn of recorded history. However, these are technical details which need not confuse non-scientists, so simply saying "particles are where it's at" makes life a lot simpler.
The issue of free will is not properly within the domain of science. Science doesn't study that sort of thing. Free will is the proper subject matter of philosophers, theologians, and so on. Trying to determine its scientific validity is trying to talk about aviation technology using only the vocabulary of gardening techniques.
"Do particles have free will" is an absurd question. You may as well ask about the nutritive properties of thrust and lift. That visualization just doesn't fit the subject matter.
The inclination to think of things in these terms comes from the popular notion that science has the market cornered in "truth," and that the word "truth" has a single and unambiguous meaning within all conceptual domains (which it clearly does not). We think, "science proves or disproves things, right? So lets get the final proof or disproof of free will." But I maintain that we are confusing ourselves by asking the questing incorrectly, and of the wrong people.
Re:Misleading (Score:3, Insightful)
the only benefit to it is that it pretends to satisfy the philosophical preconceptions
The point is precisely that that is *not* the only benefit. The benefits are quite real and necessary for any progress to be made in melding quantum and relativistic theories. Bell and Bohm have already covered all the implications in decades-old papers. Check out the bibliography in that SEP entry for the details.
Re:Worse yet. (Score:3, Insightful)
There it is folks:
Free will always results in throwing your hands up and saying "fuck it".
When is the government going to ban free will?
Won't somebody please think of the children?
Re:I choose... (Score:1, Insightful)
All this proves is that scientists so far lack the capability to measure what constitutes "free will" or "souls" or "spirit".
Any person of a mystical persuasion can tell you that there are other planes of existence that we have trouble measuring, but they impact ours. It is very hard for me to discount all religion and mysticism throughout history just because a modern-day scientist lacks the tools to measure it.
It really is quite a startling assumption to believe that you have measured everything in all dimensions, thereby pronouncing that the electrons measurable in this dimension must somehow be responsible for the free will that we (appear?) to see.
Re:I knew it! (Score:4, Insightful)
No, at the bottom, the universe is non-deterministic. Quantum events adhere to statistical measurements, but any given event is truly random. You can say that half of the uranium in a given sample will decay in a certain amount of time, but you cannot predict when any single particle will decay, and it's not just because you don't have enough information. It's because the event is truly random.
Re:I choose... (Score:1, Insightful)
Either way, the source of our decisions boils down to three options:
1. 100% deterministic. Set in stone at the beginning of time.
2. 100% random. Roll of dice.
3. Some combination of the above. Roll of dice weighted by factors set in stone at the beginning of time.
Personally, I don't see any room for free will there.
You assume Mind is Deterministic (Score:3, Insightful)
Implicit in your argument is the assertion that the Mind is deterministic. We actually don't know enough about our minds or the brain to know if this is the case. We have very strong reasons to believe that our mind follows deterministic natural laws, but we cannot completely eliminate the other possibility.
Re:I choose... (Score:3, Insightful)
Show some evidence even for an effect in the brain which can't possibly be accounted for by everything we currently understand about it, and people might be more willing to believe your ludicrous claims.
Simple. The fact that I (and you, too) am aware of our existence. We can argue about free will, but perhaps more important is the perception of free will, or indeed any will at all.
(Not that I necessarily agree with the grandparent's ludicrous claims, either).
Re:If free will then free will (Score:1, Insightful)
On the other hand, in a purely deterministic universe, some kind of free will could be possible. Donald MacKay came up with a logical argument that demonstrates that there is no prediciton of an agent's future behaviour that could be given to that agent that the agent would be logically compelled to believe.
So, in other words - he came up with an argument why there would be an illusion of free will even though in reality, none actually exists?
That sounds very much like our own universe.