Obviously why I said that hidden variable theories must be nonlocal. “Fairly accurate for this discussion?” What I said was exactly accurate for this discussion.
It’s a red herring because while copenhagen is more widely “accepted”, it is also widely accepted that it has a big problem called “the measurement problem,” the solution of which is not generally considered “science fiction” (it has been worked on by major figures in the field of physics), despite the fact that all mainstream solutions to the measurement problem are equally unfalsifiable. The most mainstream is probably decoherence, which is essentially equivalent to (and evolved out of work on) the MWI. The point is that it is a matter of taste whether you agree with Half Man Half Wit – it is unfair to diminish the point as “bunk.”
In the case of the MWI, the situation is very much reversed. Schrodinger evolution is simple, experimentally correct, and deterministic, and the most parsimonious explanation of wave function collapse is that it doesn’t occur. There is simply no reason to assume that the process is non-deterministic – it is trading one unfalsifiable explanation for another that is less parsimonious.
And I don’t see why you say the John Bell was wrong. He showed that Hidden variable theories must be nonlocal. Bohm theory is nonlocal. That doesn’t make it bunk.
QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic;13609223]Why do you assume most people want to disregard morality and do bad things?
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I don’t assume that. I assume, and this is what the research shows, that people who don’t have hope that they are “masters of their own fate,” (or whatever you might want to call it,) tend to act on their impulses rather than making the hard choice, (and hard work,) to change their impulses. Once they don’t believe they are in control of their choices, they don’t bother to choose to do difficult things except for their own personal gain. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore.
QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic;13609223]If it could be proven to you that free will didn’t exist, would you start doing unethical or hurtful things to others just for the hell of it?
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I doubt strongly that that will ever happen. A Newtonian universe where every little “billard ball” strictly determines the new course of every other “billiard ball” it interacts with would be deterministic with no room for free will. But we don’t live in that world. I’ve been reading some of the quantum discussion, and it still seems to me that as long as we don’t know why two seemingly identical systems produce different results, there will remain a place for belief in free will. And I don’t think that is knowable in quantum mechanics.
No. But then, I would still believe that it makes a difference to our choices whether we believe in free will. I would see that it makes a difference in a way that promotes a society I would rather live in. And therefore, I would simply choose to belive in free will anyway.
QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic;13609223]That’s nonsense. Actions still have consequences, and those consequences (or the potential for consequences) still affect and shape the “will.”
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It’s just that without belief in free will, people tend to only look at the potential consequence of “will I get caught?” and “what will I get out of it?” If that equation comes back in favor of “acting badly.” it’s likely to happen. Morality doesn’t come into it anymore, since people don’t think they have any say in their choices they don’t see that there is any reason to care about what those choices do to others. Why don’t you look at the consequences of promoting a lack of free will?
And it doesn’t matter whether it exists or not. I think the world is better if we choose to believe it does. And so I do.
I think it would be better for society if people read the precepts of their religion before attacking others. I don’t believe that the major religions that people accuse of promoting violence do. The “supposed” followers do while misunderstanding what they claim they believe.
Shoot, forgot about this. notbatman, HMHW, the way I see it it’s an aesthetic choice not a science one. You either start from determinism or not, and that determines everything, including which flavour of QM you go for (and I *agree *that Copenhagen and the derivatives suffer from some of the same falsifiability flaws I object to in the MWI) My main objection was to you treating the MWI as the Gospel rather than one of many contrasting theories, HMHW.
I guess the upshot is that I believe in free will because I’m *not *a hard determinist. I’m a …I dunno, a macro-determinist? I think determinism appears to holdsfor the level of Newtonian mechanics, but I think it’s a coarse approximation, not an axiom.
I don’t see, from a philosophical viewpoint, any logical reason to accept causality as a necessary starting premise. Every justification I’ve encountered seems circular to me.
Well, maybe my last post was a bit overeager, but I really don’t see, overall, that I did this. I’ve referred to a host of different interpretations, trying to point out that the issue of determinism vs. indeterminism is simply not settled by quantum mechanics, such that you can either accept or reject it, according to whatever your predilections may be. But the same thing you can do with classical mechanics, so QM is a red herring in this discussion. My objection is merely to overly definitive claims that quantum mechanics proves there is indeterminacy in the world; this is simply false.
Perhaps to get back on track a little, what about what other physical theories have to say about the issue? In special relativity, for instance, the notion of simultaneity breaks down – whether two events occur at the same time, or one occurs before the other, is essentially observer dependent (provided they are not able to causally influence one another – i.e. if a light ray from one event could reach the other, then that event is observed to occur before the other in all frames of reference). This leads to things like the Andromeda paradox (often also referred to as the Rietdijk-Putnam argument): Let’s say the Andromedan government decides to invade Earth. Then, to two observers passing each other on the street, one moving towards Andromeda, the other away from it, it’s possible that in one person’s frame of reference, the Andromedans are just now deciding whether or not to invade, i.e. the choice is still ‘up in the air’; however, in the other person’s frame, they have already launched their attack*. What’s with the Andromedans’ free will in this case? Both persons will go on to experience the Andromedan attack on Earth (well, if they lived long enough, that is). So to the person in whose frame the Andromedans are just now deciding, the outcome of that decision is fixed. A similar argument can be constructed for every decision being made anywhere.
*There is, however, no actual paradox of causality: To the person to whom the departure of the Andromedan fleet is still in the future, the distance to Andromeda will seem length contracted appropriately, such that both observers would project the same date of arrival for the fleet.
I’ll just point out that it is…interesting to see MrDibble and iamnotbatman, who are both diehard eliminationists when it comes to consciousness and qualia, be at loggerheads over these other issues (which are putatively related to consciousness).
The determinism argument is a side issue to me. Deterministic or not, I just don’t see how the existence of a purely random component to decision making has any relevance to a discussion of free will. It’s a trivial case. If you want to call pure randomness “free will,” then be my guest, but it’s surely an uninteresting example of it.
To backtrack a moment, just so others aren’t lost, what I’m saying is that quantum mechanical behavior is described by 1) deterministic evolution of the wave function, and 2) wave function collapse. Some (HMHW for instance) would argue that 2) is deterministic in the MWI (and thus all of physics is deterministic). But if we take MrDibble’s Copenhagen interpretation, then 2) is purely random (within the envelope provided by the wave function). There is no sense in pointing to this as “look! the world is not deterministic! there is room for free will!!!” because it is a totally trivial case in which the “will” is purely random. That’s right folks, “free will” = “random flip of the coin”. Is this what you mean, MrDibble, when you say you think you have “free will”? That the only non-deterministic aspect of your decision making is purely random?
No, because the will isn’t shaped out of whole cloth by the purely random elements. Will arises at the *interface *between random and deterministic, not fully in either.
And I don’t favour the Copenhagen interpretation/s, anyway. Wave function collapse is not a necessary component of QM for me, although the *appearance *of such IMO is. But non-determinism is pretty much essential, so I gravitate to the stochastic, decoherent and consistent histories side.
So no, I don’t think free will is completely entailed in the random - the random is just a gloss on the broadly deterministic. But it’s a significant gloss when it comes to neural processes, since we’re talking a dynamical system, where the sort of differences in starting conditions that randomness generates, really do matter. Largely this is because I subscribe to Dennett’s view of the apparent or experienced Mind as the result of multiple drafts competing in an active community until written to memory, and I can see many steps there where *one *random difference, one slightly different electrolyte gradient or neurotransmitter slightly differently timed, would rapidly ramify into conscious difference. Will arises as a result of the interactions, and since it is possible in my view that identical starting conditions can still produce variant outcomes, free will seems like a no-brainer. Will isn’t a concrete first-order process, anyway. It’s a second-order abstraction that has had a chance to impose rules on top of initial semi-random conditions, but then, that’s not a problem for me either.
You don’t need non-determinism for sensitivity to initial conditions, nor for effective stochasticity in a dynamical system. So no, I don’t at all see how it could possibly matter – unless you do indeed think that free will is completely entailed in the random.
And regardless – forgive me for saying this – but this seems to be lazy thinking: that in some vague way the difference between true and apparent (deterministic but chaotic) randomness makes “free will” possible. These are complex systems, yes, but ultimately they are either 1) fully deterministic, or 2) deterministic + <random number generators>. Regardless of the complexity of the system, the addition of coin flips inside decision-making algorithms in order to render the ultimate “will” non-deterministic is nothing more than the “will” having been “chosen” by the whismy of chance. No matter how complex the system, this is true as long as the system behaves according to quantum mechanics, because quantum mechanics involves deterministic evolution followed by purely random collapse. And so it is also easy to see: if decision A is made, trace the decision-making process back to where it was last non-deterministic: there you will find that the cause of the difference between A or B being chosen is due to a purely random component. That purely random component on which the decision A hinges is not “intelligent” or anything other than pure blind random chance. I don’t think this is what you mean when you say you have “free will”.
I don’t know what you mean by “effective stochasticity” - the system’s either truly stochastic or it’s not.
“necessary for” =/= “completely entails”. Deterministic pathways are also necessary for free will.
There’s nothing vague about it. It is my assertion that several macro-processes, like diffusion and neural ramification, are driven by truly random processes. These have a hand in determining neural outcomes. As such, the everyday function of the brain has, continually, a random input that has a real effect. But it is not vague. I’m not talking about some mysterious misfire on one neuron or a single cosmic ray strike pr something. I’m talking about the way true randomness is built into every chemical and physical process - stuff like fluid motions, neural net layout, sense perception. Every bit of brain function has a random component.
Firstly, I don’t (internally) use a logical system where “A | !A” is an axiom. “A && !A” is perfectly valid to me. So in general, no.
But anyway, that’s all you’ve really said - “either they’re deterministic … or they’re not”. That’s not very profound
That’s a nice bit of poetic reification, but it doesn’t really say anything of note. I haven’t said “it’s all just coin flips” - it’s coin flips combined with internal negotiation combined with social programming combined with genetic determinism combined with current external influences combined with the kitchen sink.
Actually, yes, it is. Which committee member gets the ultimate say in the community of the mind is slightly influenced by random chance, even if not as much as by the logic of its arguments in the mind’s internal polling system/fame game. Decisions don’t hinge on the random. But their hinges are oiled by it, and that’s freedom enough.
So there is an element of the random in what choices we ultimately make. That’s free will. That’s exactly what I mean to say by it. You’re welcome to take this as an excuse to play “No True ScotFreeWill”, that’s your prerogative. Freak freely.
Wait, I would have thought that’s the default position? After all, there isn’t really any collapse in many worlds, only the unitary (and hence deterministic) wave function evolution… Are there indeterministic MW variants?
By the way, is it possible to formulate an indeterministic interpretation of relativistic quantum mechanics/QFT? Naively, I wouldn’t think so, due to considerations similar to the Andromeda paradox – different observers moving relative to each other might give different Fock states of the same system, and thus, the system’s evolution should be fixed. And I don’t see how one could give an account of an objective collapse while retaining Lorentz invariance.
I think part of the problem comes in that you seem to be using some holistic definition for free will along the lines of the standard argument, and I’m using the two-stage model a la Dennett, libertarians and Heisenberg (Martin, not Werner).
I thought Dennett’s a compatibilist, not a libertarian? The difference here, to me, seems to be that a libertarian would consider it possible to ‘act differently in exactly the same situation’, while to Dennett, that’s nonsense.
On a tangent, are you familiar with creativity machines? They’re pretty much a neural-net realisation of such a two-state model: one neural net, the imagitron, creates essentially randomised outputs, producing variants of some specific data it has been trained on; another neural net, the perceptron, coupled to the first, selects from this output ‘useful’ productions. It’s a (admittedly somewhat fringy) paradigm of AI espoused mainly by Stephen Thaler, who has a tendency of making somewhat grandiose claims about his invention, but apart from that, it’s a genuinely fascinating work, and it’s apparently already capable of producing some useful output already – it seems that the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush was designed by such an AI. (Somehow, this tickles me to no end, the thought that behind such a mundane household item lurks a sophisticated, automated design process…) I’ve provided some more info in this GQ thread, which never really got any takers.
No, I’m guessing you just mis-read or misunderstood what I said. The MWI is not the default position (which I know you know, so I’m unsure what you misunderstood). The MWI is deterministic, while vanilla Copenhagen is not.
I think a system’s evolution can be “fixed” and yet non-determinate. In the same sense that the digits of a random string of numbers can be “fixed”, and yet the relationship between neighboring numbers may be purely random. This gets into semantics though… but again, this is a case where I think that even though you could call the “fixing” a form determination, it’s a trivial case, because the relationship between neighboring states can still be truly random (ie non-determinate).
