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.
Disturbing (Score:5, Interesting)
That a particle has free-will using the standard definition is rather disturbing. Particles, capable of making a decision implies an inherent intelligence or at least a built-in "table of actions" at some level.
Wave equation? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yawn. (Score:5, Interesting)
Even if I did choose to change something about my life, it would have no bearing on free will.
The problem with free will is whether you have it or whether you don't it makes absolutely zero difference in your life (we're talking philosophical free will here, not material, so no one give me the snarky "I'm in jail you insensitive clod" response).
Everyone makes decisions with the implicit belief that their decisions matter. Now, if we have free will, then they actually do. If we don't have free will, then they actually don't. Regardless, you make the same damn decision, and it will have the same consequences.
So why the eternal wanking over whether or not we possess a property that cannot be measured and doesn't effect our lives in any way?
Re:Disturbing (Score:5, Interesting)
Or is that a gross oversimplification resulting from me not being a whizz at maths?
unless, of course... (Score:4, Interesting)
Crazy? No - read Barbour. [platonia.com]
"Free Will" that word doesn't mean what... (Score:1, Interesting)
In this context, "free will" does not mean what you think it means. Please read the articles, especially the discussion section at the end of the Notices piece.
Re:If free will then free will (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you sure this is a problem? I'm not a physicist, but I thought that a) "spooky action at a distance" has been demonstrated in a lab and b) there's no way to use it to transmit information at superluminal speeds. Maybe someone with a real physics edumacation could enlighten me?
Re:This sounds silly to me (Score:5, Interesting)
Obvious absurdity (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:If free will then free will (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed. Lots of people are under the impression that free will is a function of randomness. Sorry guys, but randomness is insanity. I would prefer that my actions flowed deterministically from my inner mental state. How else could I act according to my convictions?
Anyway, the question is only relevant in the context of religion. Without a bearded guy giving out passes to heaven, it doesn't matter whether the universe could've progressed differently. Our actions ought to progress lawfully and predicatably from the programming that we've build into our minds.
Or maybe people are just afraid of the concept of predictability. In a jungle or a battlefield, predictability is terrible, so perhaps we've got a race memory against it.
Re:If free will then free will (Score:2, Interesting)
And now we know that if a human has a fated destiny, then particles must have a fated destiny. Since it's nonsensical to talk about a particle with a fated destiny, it's also nonsensical to talk about a human with a fated destiny.
The whole thing is based on several confusions. Let me recommend Raymond Smullyan's essay Is God a Taoist? [mit.edu]:
Re:Worse yet. (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if they have taken into account the history of the decision being made, or the machine actually being set in the chosen direction. Now, just from this one quote, it would seem that the act of making a decision may actually influence the history of the universe. So, choice is a part of the entire universe -- the only question is whether or not free will actually exists?
Dayum. To be or not to be.
Sounds more like religion than science (Score:2, Interesting)
Similarly, imbuing inanimate objects with human properties is a catchy way of persuading non-scientists (and by extension, the media) to engage, but it gives a completely wrong view of the world.
Bad science, don't do it again.
Re:If free will then free will (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed. Lots of people are under the impression that free will is a function of randomness. Sorry guys, but randomness is insanity. I would prefer that my actions flowed deterministically from my inner mental state. How else could I act according to my convictions?
Randomness does not imply equal probability for all possible outcomes. While it may be mathematically possible, it's a safe assumption that the randomness of quantum mechanics will not cause you to jump off the next bridge you come to instead of just crossing it normally.
Re:I knew it! (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't it? In the paper that the story links to, the authors refine their use of the term "free will" to mean that the universe is "not determined by the entire previous history of the universe." That sounds a whole lot like "random," which (it seems to me) must surely mean "not subject to cause and effect."
I would welcome pointers to layman-appropriate corrections if I'm wrong.
Re:If free will then free will (Score:4, Interesting)
In psychology, this the question of free will is important because it can change how a psychologist views abnormal behavior (and even normal behavior). It can change how psychotherapy is conducted. A lot of people don't think about the philosophical theory underlying science but this discussion of free will is not just for religion, it affects all science for you can take a deterministic approach to science or you can take a non-deterministic (e.g., free will) approach.
One last thing, you show a free will bias (at least non-deterministic bias) in your post: "Our actions ought to progress lawfully and predicatably [sic] from the programming that we've built into our minds" (emphasis added). That's using non-deterministic language to explain determinism. Most people just assume free will while most science assumes determinism. However, even the scientists usually assume free will in their day to day life (there are some who don't but they are rare). That's the funny thing. Science usually assumes determinism but people in general have a strong - innate you could say - bias towards non-determinism and free will.
Re:That's rich. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I knew it! (Score:3, Interesting)
A random event would be unlikely to be considered evidence of "free will" by most people.
But an event that follows strictly from cause-effect definitively is not.
Possibly people consider something "free will" if there is some limited level of randomness in the brain so that the same history of the external universe could lead to different thought processes.
I just can't see any way of defining "free will" that doesn't involve randomness.
Re:I choose... (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps there is no such thing as choice. What if you make your choice based on circumstances beyond your control? New Scientist ran a story yesterday Faster-than-light 'tachyons' might be impossible after all [newscientist.com] where some math guys came up with the possibility that we live in a deterministic universe:
Re:Sounds more like religion than science (Score:3, Interesting)
Similarly, imbuing inanimate objects with human properties...
Humans are made of inantimate objects; amino acids, atoms, protons, quarks...
Re:I choose... (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps there is no such thing as choice. What if you make your choice based on circumstances beyond your control?
We make all our choices based on external stimuli, which are largely beyond our control. Of all the philosophical nonsense that's bandied about, the whole "fate vs free will" debate is the most exasperating. "Free will" is an artifact of the limits of our perception, and nothing more. Every "choice" we make is nothing more than a cascade of logic (in the electronics/programming sense) based on running recent perceptions through a network of previously conceived notions and instinctual prewiring. It's all completely deterministic. The only time it's labelled "free will" is when the decision system is too complex for anyone to predict the outcome. Dropping a hot potato isn't called "free will" because we understand the grossly simple neurological mechanism that causes it. Dropping a puppy off a cliff is seen as "free will" because there's no telling what twisted up crazy logic went into that decision. In both cases, though, it is a logical necessity that some deterministic mechanism precipitated both end results. Even the theist cop-out of "the ghost in the machine", i.e. the immaterial soul, doesn't really escape the problem. All things happen because of something else. Even the "ghost" argument requires that outside stimulus trigger an analysis based on pre-existing stored information.
So enough with the "free will" crap already. It's like arguing about how much longer the upper line in this optical illusion [wikimedia.org] appears to be
Mathematicians should not make pronouncements (Score:4, Interesting)
of Philosophers, and Philosophers should recognise they can only conjecture, without direct access to the mystical experience of unity.
Those bound by the conceptual frame of will and determinism are like the inhabitants of Flatland. Their 2-dimensional mathematics cannot account for Reality.
Trapped in a world that must conform to logical constructs, they are unaware that what they are measuring is their perceptions, not the World. What they observe is merely the particular quality of their minds, not the Truth.
Plato's cave cannot be escaped, by creating more precision in the measurement of shadows! Logic is a useful tool for effecting work and accomplishing a task - but not for perceiving the nature of existence.
The only escape is to defy and revile the "self". Ah. As long as anyone is their "self" they have no "free will" in any meaningful sense, anyway. As Spinoza, a mere philosopher, would have it:
Humans have no free will. They believe, however, that their will is free. In Spinoza's letter to G. H. Schaller, he wrote: "men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." (Letter number 62)
Re:Worse yet. (Score:3, Interesting)
If the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus, then their actions are not "determined" by the entire previous history of the universe. The experimenter is part of the universe near the particle, so universe near the particle is not determined. Congratulations, it's a tautology.
That's it's not immediately recognized is because the one of the confusions that results in the whole free will versus determinism brou-ha-ha: the mistaken belief that the observer is somehow separate from the observed.
The other confusion is the question of what "determined" means. We think of it was fated, pre-destined. We still carry around this notion of a Newtonian clockwork universe, that given the initial configuration of the universe you could apply a simple set of laws to figure out the state today. We worry that the universe is losslessly compressible to that set of laws plus initial conditions. Once the-powers-that-be flipped the switch it was all fated, so they really need not have bothered, so where's that leave us?
But the universe is not compressible, not without loss. There is no fully comprehensive model of the cosmos that is simpler than the cosmos itself, no way to tell what an individual particle is going to do at time T other than to run the entire universe up to and including time t. You can't even run it up to t minus epsilon and they say, oh, it'll definitely do X. The damn universe keeps producing new information, in the algorithmic sense of the word [wikipedia.org]. And you're part of it! It's like that Kilgore Trout story, "Now It Can Be Told" [geocities.com] -- not even the creator of the universe knew what the man was going to say next.
Mathematics or philosophy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Has anyone looked into the proof enough to assess whether it's a proof in the mathematical sense or a proof in the philosophical sense? As in "I've proven that god exists". I don't know about you, but I've never run across a mathematical proof involving statements about free will and subatomic particles...
Re:I knew it! (Score:3, Interesting)
No, if you can't explain color to a blind person, you don't really understand it. Color is a truly baffling phenomenon.
Re:If free will then free will (Score:3, Interesting)
Fascinating stuff. I've recently become interested in Calvinism, which holds (among other things) that we do NOT have a choice in the matter of whether or not to become a Christian. God made that choice before the beginning of time, and some of us ("the elect") are predestined to come to accept Christ, while others are predestined not to, and nothing anybody says or does can possibly change that outcome. Romans 8:28-30, 1 Corinthians 1 and 7, Galatians 1:15, Ephesians 1, 2 Thessalonians 2:13-14, and Hebrews 9:15 make mention of this idea.
The practical side of this is, while Christians are still called to proclaim the Gospel because doing so brings glory to God, it's no use trying to convert people to Christianity. Forcing one's religious beliefs on others cannot work, and should never be attempted.
Nothing To See here... (Score:1, Interesting)
Article: To be more precise, what we shall show is that the particles' response to a certain type of experiment is not determined by the entire previous history of that part of the universe accessible to them.
Me: So they have taken Quantum mechanics, substituted the words "free will" for "undetermined result" and so changed the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox from "old news in physics" to "new result in philosophy!".