[Way OT] Musings on free will

I mean if this free will isn’t using information from the past then it’s pretty much a random choice.
And if it is basing it’s information from the past then it’s basing it on something it has no control over.

An obvious example is your DNA, it has a huge impact on your personality, but you had no free will in its creation what so ever. Which would render all choices even remotly affected by your DNA or its affect on your personality not so free.

free will is up there amongst god and the soul and such, alot swear they exists but you can prove them as much as you can prove anything else you would make up.

Just ask yourself, when does free will appear, does animals and plants have it, how do I meassure it?

Having absorbed all of the assertions put forth by all interested parties, the Most High Court of Cannabis rules thusly:

You all missed the boat. Free Will is an oxymoron

As such, the question of its merits is adjudicated on the irresistably immovable plane.

By the way, the goat has starved to death for lack of attention.

Mitch

Now this interperatation of the results is heavily dependant on several assumptions.
First: That the brain is devided into "Modules" which have specific jobs. Now this assumption is in doubt as it was developed by a top down aproach. The brain opeprates more holisticly in that the "modules" overlap somewhat and can not be ridgedly designated.
Second: That the temporal cortex is the place where decisions are made. Again as in the first assumption this is based on a now out dated view of how the brain works.

There is still too much that we don't know about how the brain works, how much influence that our genetics and experence has on our behaviour. And I'm not going to go into Quantum mechanics and chaos theory (unless you want me to) and how it might have some influence on our brains.

This question, with curent knowledge, can not be answered. It is my oppinion that, weather or not we have free will, it is resonable (and practical for now) to act as if we do.

Now OT:

Suppose there are 100 doors, and the host knows which one has the prize. You pick one, and the host opens 98 other doors and shows that they are empty. Do you stick with the door you first picked? Or pick the door left over from the other 99? Of course you would be better off switching. You can only lose if you picked the right door at first, which has a 1% chance of happening.

What this means is that whatever choice you make now (to switch or not) has the same probability. When you first chose the door you only had the 1% chance. Now if you switch you have the 2/3 chance but the choice of keeping the door also has the 2/3 chance (is this right?). I just imagine that it would be just like reselecting the door after the host shows what is behind certain unselected doors.

Great answer! And to me, that solves this argument.

Rob

Determinism is an idea from a time where all that you could observe and meassure had a direct casue and effect.
These days we know you cant both have an electrons exact location and exact speed at the same time and thus everything becomes probability clouds.

Unfortunately the fact that we even theoretically can't predict the EXACT future from the present doesnt add a new nucleus or force anywhere that gives human consiousness exact control over if the electrons in their brains will go this way or that way. We have just as much control over the physics of the electrons (the probobility clouds) as everything else has.
That we are consious of some of our actions (choices) and assosiate it with certain feelings mean diddlysquat to how much control we have over them.

We are as stuck in the constant realization of proboility clouds as everything else.

Sure you can say that you beleive that your consiousness can tell the electrons in your brains exactly where to go and therefor give you a free choice. But if you go that way I can say that I beleive that there is consiousness for the whole of existance that has a say in what all but the electrons in your brain exactly goes, and I just made a quasy scientific explenation of god.
And we will never "prove" either of them.

Doesnt make them wrong though, just not possile to prove. And therefor put them into the categories of beleifs.

I was not trying to state that gives us free will or consiouness. I was saying that QM breaks the reliance on the past to determine our actions. It does not mean that we have control over the electrons in the brain (quite the oposite actually).

A little bit of "noise" in a complex (chaotic) system can produce behaviours that are not based on past states of a system. This does not mean that we must have free will or that it causes free will. Waht it dose do is state that our behaviour is not solely based on our past and therefore invalidateds the statement that we don't have free will because we are the sum of our past. We can still have no free will and not have our behaviour based only on our past (geneitcs included).

To even muddier (is that a verb?) the waters of determinism, it may be posable that the uncertanty due to QM could also be in time as well as position (with space-time) and have the cause come after the effect (some have speculated that this could be how the Universe came about - NB: very mind bending trying to understand this). If this is true (and is according to current understanding) then we can definitly state the the state of a system can not be wholey determined by the sum of its past states (history). but again this does not prove or disprove the existance of free will (or even consiousness).

I maintain that there is not enough evidence (and what evidence there is can be interpereted either way) to conclude that there exists free will or not (or even consiousness). However, I do not think that discussions of it are a waste of time as any attempt to try and understand it can only help increase our understanding of the Universe and our place in it (however insignificant :D).

I recognize that we aren't going to settle the hundreds-of-years-running free will vs. determinism debate here permanently (heck, I personally think the two are perfectly compatible for certain definitions). However, speaking as someone who actually studied QM in-depth before getting out of academia, I feel the need to point out a couple of things. Forgive me in advance? ^_^bb

First and foremost, quantum mechanics, and indeed most any scientific model, predictively describes observed behavior, not the underlying reality. Don't try to eat the menu. ^_^ Overstating the case just discredits the worldview you're attempting to support, and we end up with popular support for 'intelligent falling' or fanatical atheists.

Furthermore, the uncertainty principle undermines observability through the use of electromagnetic radiation rather than fundamental existence properties. We pretty much never observe a particle directly...we observe where a photon goes after interacting with it. When light gets a short enough wavelength to pinpoint a precise location, it also carries a lot of energy and momentum. Thus, by bouncing the light off of the particle whose location you want to observe, you either get a very fuzzy answer due to long wavelength of the light you're using, or you know very well where it WAS, but give it a strong kick in an unknown direction from the observed photon bouncing off it.

That's IT. The UP doesn't prove that the electon has no definite position or momentum, just that we can't KNOW what they are, using a particular set of tools (albeit the only ones handy). No many-worlds, no fundamental proof of non-determinism, and probability clouds are not necessarily physically realized objects in any meaningful sense. While the Copenhagen Interpretation has certainly been popularized over most of the last century or so, that's all it is, one interpretation.

So by all means, carry on. The fact that you can't disprove either determinism or its inverse doesn't make the discussion meaningless. But do please try to avoid the implicit argument from authority, regardless of the belief system from which your preferred authority speaks.

This rant brought to you by Too Little Caffeine Man (TM).

(and re the last paradox, and for that matter free will in general, determinism does not imply that a system can predict its own behavior. See a reference on the Halting Problem if you don't believe that...)

I'm talking QM on a board game forum...I was a bit more worried about erring on the other side. ^_^

'Particles' and 'waves' are theoretical constructs, neither of which completely and accurately describe what's really going on down there. I do try to avoid anthropomorphizing subatomic particles, though...it's spooky enough as it is, and besides they hate it when I do that. In any case, to say that the UP intrinsically implies wave/particle duality is a bit of a stretch, IMHO, despite the common conflation of the two in popular literature.

The paradox lies in the apparent reversal of causality if you believe in the machine's predictive capacity: your choice (in the future) determines the contents of the boxes (in the past and present). It's not actually a contradiction, as I see it...just awkward for our fragile little minds. I've seen some fascinating discussions on the question elsewhere, if you're interested. I was more trying to emphasize that determinism does not imply the constructibility of a predictor such as that you describe. Do not taunt Happy Fun Godel.

Apology accepted, but I'll admit a bit of clarification might be in order. I may have seemed to be saying something worthy of the stated surprise.

I wasn't claiming that QM in general claims a determinate position/momentum for particles, only that the UP in particular refers only to measurements as originally put forward by Heisenberg. If you're talking about wave function collapse, talk about wave function collapse...you don't see people saying they use trigpnometry to do their taxes just because they learned how to do both in math class. Didn't intend to make a big deal of it, just a pet peeve, if you will.

Besides, though the Copenhagen interpretation (very popular) claims that position/momentum are indeterminable in principle as well as in practice, Einstein argued for a hidden-variable interpretation, which I personally find less objectionable despite the knotty issues surrounding the Bell equation. Just as you don't completely reorganize a game design because someday someone might be able to construct a machine which predicts the outcome of a die roll the instant it leaves the roller's hand, the math leading to QM's predictions doesn't suddenly change if you use the weaker assumption of no KNOWN method rather than the common no POSSIBLE method to violate UP. Proving that sort of negative is a major pain, if you haven't noticed. ^_^

As I said previously, please be careful what you refer to as 'fact'. Compared to something like evolution (which we can trivially construct experiments to observe in real-time), many of the finer points of modern cosmology are built on a web of best estimates and haunted by more anomalies than you can shake a stick at. By claiming the authority of 'fact' inappropriately, we lend credence to pseudoscientific claims...rationality has enough of an uphill battle heading into the new millenium without handing ammo to the enemy.

And being a chemistry/physics major doesn't entitle me to use the argument from expertise any more than anyone else, so if I'm full of it, please feel free to point out how. There's just nicer ways to say so, that's all. Sorry if I'm coming across snarkily myself; I know I could use either a Mountain Dew or a nap in the near future.

I wasn't so much trying to speak with authority as offering an excuse for being pedantic. ^_^ I can see how that might have come across the wrong way, and apologize despite my lack of intent. I REALLY don't like the arguments from authority/expertise (I got out of academia for a reason, y'know...) and would never use it intentionally except in extreme circumstances (i.e. "I _really_ think you should boil that water before drinking it, even if you don't believe me about the tiny demons.")

There was a time not so long ago when the existence of an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, omniscient, ominpresent being was accepted by most scientists. It's a popular, internally consistent theory which would be difficult to disprove, but that's not quite the same thing as a fact. I'd characterize the observation of the annihilation line as a fact, and probably the shifts corresponding to the extreme accelerations near the object as well, but when cosmologists keep invoking new flavors of pixie dust each decade to make their latest equations close, I hope you'll forgive a bit of skepticism regarding stuff as near the edge of our detection limits as the ultimate structures of collapsed neutron stars and the nonexistence of sub-subatomic particles.

If you're allowed to use 'fact' to mean 'popular', I'm allowed to use 'free-will' to mean that there exists for every finite computer a program of such complexity that it can be run but not decompiled. ^_^

It is QM, just not the flavor that's been pushed in schools/poplit. QM is mostly just the math, and that's spooky enough before you get into what it means. With apologies to Gaiman and Pratchett, God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players (i.e., everybody), to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

That's OK, I don't approve of Einstein either. ^_^ Pointing out Lorentzian Ether Theory during the unit on the Michaelson-Morley experiment may not have been the best of ideas, but when else were we going to discuss it?

You can not alter the past, only add to it.

As somewhat less than the Big E's biggest fan, I'll give you absolute time for the sake of argument.

Who you are, your personality is the result of the past including your past choies/ experiences and everything else ever happened.

Assuming you include what you ate for breakfast this morning, the ambient magnetic field, how long it's been since your last fight with your SO, and the exact positions and momenta of every relevant particle in the system (^_^), etc. let's say the system is deterministic.

Now it's pretty obvious that I can't make a complete model of my own thought processes from within them, only a rough approximation at best. Further, the complexity and sensitivity of the system is such that any known method of detecting all the relevant variables from without will likely change them significantly enough to lead one to question confidence in any thought-predicting machine.

So even if the system is deterministic, it is not necessarily determinable. So given that this particular system has no problem referring to itself as "I", why should it have any more or less problem saying "I did this" or "I chose this". If your issue is more one of accountability, then who else could be responsible? We don't blame parents completely and directly for the actions of their children...if the prime mover is not omniscient, how much less so should we blame them? If they are, perhaps they know better than we do what consitutes a universal good and can see past the short-term unpleasantness to the ultimate payoff. If the goal in assigning responsibility is to effect a change in behavior through punishment, Skinner will tell you that you'll get better results targeting the immediate actor rather the original cause. Even if you do get Him to promise to be good and create a better universe next time. ^_^

In short, if will is free 'for all practical purposes', what difference does it make whether it's actually deterministic or not? It's fun to discuss, but I'm spiritually at peace with the possibility that I'll never know. Wouldn't mind a peek at the rulebook after the game, though. ^_^

Oh, you can't help that, we're all mad here. ^_^

Absolutely. Just not (necessarily) the end state.

^_^
Science is itself something of a religion, with the core tenet that objectively verifiable truths are of intrinsically greater value than others, and an assortment of beliefs such that physical law is universal and doesn't change arbitrarily, that our memories and recordings of the past are reliable with enough corroboration, etc. Given that the rewards offered by such faith can be quite tangibly obtainable in this life, it's very understandable that the meme virus in question has taken on the symbiotic level of popularity that it has. While many scientists would consider it insane to consider the possibility that their fundamental assumptions are flawed, so too would many theologians with their own. But you don't have to take a postmodernist "all ideas are equally valuable" mindset to recognize that logical positivism fails its own test. Sorry, one too many philosophy classes mixed in there. ^_^

Anyway, a common companion meme to the one described above is that the latest accepted models are a correct representation of the underlying reality rather than just a predictive description. I can understand that desire to believe that you understand how things work, and it makes sense that people who really believe in what they do on that level will be more likely to devote themselves to advancing the theory. Personally, I feel it's better to just admit when you don't know the answer. And if you don't think science has dogmatists, I dare you to try the aforementioned bit with questioning Einstein in an academic context. It's not quite as much fun as trying to explain radioisotope dating to a large room filled with 7d/6000yr creationists, but it'll do much more for your career opportunities in the field.

Well that hardly seems fair, since I never claimed the hidden-variable model to be a fact, and I'd still consider the explanation for the annihilation line to be a theory, albeit one more or less undisputed. Nonetheless, I'll try and take on your challenge, if not your judgment method. A fact is a falsifiable datum which is objectively and replicably observable, and has been verified beyond reasonable dispute. I await my comeuppance with something approximating dignity.

I think I've found the perfect summary of my stance: I'm not sure whether my will is free, but I'm pretty sure it's not open source. ^_^ And for the record, it's not that I believe in hidden variables, it's that I DON'T believe in the Copenhagen Interpretation. I'm always open to being proved wrong. And I have no issue with God...just certain elements of his fan club.

Us QM guys have to make a game now. Put a laser, cathode emitter, rotating mirror and a bunch of different kinds of cards with slits in the box and call it "Don't Collapse the Wave-Function!" or some such... Hey, Bryk, I've got next month's Challenge for ya!