21–30 of 118 posts
There is a great conceptual distance between the self-assertion popuparized by Descartes and the theories and observations of physics. Science, even cosmology, has a very long way to go before its methods begin to answer the questions of philosophy.
What does it mean for "will" to be "free"? If you could rewind time around one of your decisions, and replay it, you'd make the same decision every time, unless there was a random element involved, because the state would be the same every time.
And if there's a random element involved, it's not really your will, is it?
> Another customarily tacit assumption is that experimenters are free to choose between possible experiments. To be precise, we mean that the choice an experimenter makes is not a function of the past Garbage in, garbage out. It isn't clarified whether an experimenter in a nondegenerate superposition of states (will choose x, will choose y, will choose z) is considered to have "free will". If you call that free will,…
It's a conspiratorial line of thought on a par with Descartes' evil demon, but in a rigorous proof you have to rule these sorts of things out.
The axiom comes into play at the top-right of p.229:
> ...since by MIN the response of b cannot vary with x, y, z, θ^G_0 is a function just of w
I really think this, along with much philosophical musing about free will, is entirely missing the point. Pre-determination is essential to free will. You literally cannot have free will without it. Random choice, or even non-predetermined correlated outcomes of entangled objects don't lead to free will, they lead to uncertain decisions and those are not the same thing. If my decisions are not a product of my prior s…
> The definition of 'me' is my prior state. I don't think this is true. We know that thought and memory are constrained (accessed) at a physical level - at least to some extent. That is, damage to your physical brain can result in diminished or eliminated access to those things. Indeed, thought as we know it seems to be a physically mediated process (perhaps not completely defined by our physical bodies, but at least…
I don't see how this is at odds with the prior state view. You are a state machine. As time moves, you have no choice but to choose, and this is entirely dependent on your previous state and your current environment. The physical layer is the choice engine, and it physically must continue to make choices until it is incapacitated or dies.
You are a state machine that must step through its state transitions to the beat of the universe, navigating your small corner of it, enjoying the ride (or not), until you cease to function, and the state machine of the universe runs on without you.
I really think this, along with much philosophical musing about free will, is entirely missing the point. Pre-determination is essential to free will. You literally cannot have free will without it. Random choice, or even non-predetermined correlated outcomes of entangled objects don't lead to free will, they lead to uncertain decisions and those are not the same thing. If my decisions are not a product of my prior s…
It's fairly clear that the author's are using the light-cone sort of definition, but they discuss this ambiguity towards the end on p.230:
> Some readers may object to our use of the term “free will” to describe the indeterminism of particle responses. Our provocative ascription of free will to elementary particles is deliberate, since our theorem asserts that if experimenters have a certain freedom, then particles have exactly the same kind of freedom. Indeed, it is natural to suppose that this latter freedom is the ultimate explanation of our own.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “If my decisions are unpredictable given complete knowledge of my prior state, and the ability to extrapolate it forward, then the decisions do not come from me.” I don’t see how that conclusion follows from that premise. In fact, the whole free will debate is uninteresting to me exactly because it seems like a dissolvable semantics question regarding what does “me” mean. Is it a totality of some prior physical sta…
You're better off thinking about the logical properties that entail moral responsibility. Consider that it makes no sense to hold a car engine morally responsible for malfunctioning and killing its passengers, but it does make sense to hold a driver responsible (and it might make sense to do the same for a general AI in the future). Why? What distinguishes how we deal with one deterministic system over another? That'…
"Moral responsibility" is a heuristic for our monkey brains, tapping into evolved ideas of justice, accounting for imperfect prediction of future events, attempting to control human behavior one way or the other. The reason we don't lecture engines about morality is because it is perfectly clear that they obey only one kingdom of rules, the physical.
Humans also must obey physical rules, but there are so many layers between base physics and human behavior that we speak in very fuzzy heuristic terms about morality. This does not mean free will is anywhere to be found in one of those intermediate layers, just that it's too complicated a machine for us to analyze like an engine, so we resort to using the levers and knobs that evolution gave us. IOW, free will is a "god of the gaps", only existing while we still lack the knowledge to better understand the layers between our gross beliefs/actions and base physical processes.
> Another customarily tacit assumption is that experimenters are free to choose between possible experiments. To be precise, we mean that the choice an experimenter makes is not a function of the past Garbage in, garbage out. It isn't clarified whether an experimenter in a nondegenerate superposition of states (will choose x, will choose y, will choose z) is considered to have "free will". If you call that free will,…
You need this sort of axiom to eliminate superdeterminism. If an experimenter's choice of direction is fully determined by their past light-cone then a shared physical state in the overlapping past light-cones of A and B could conceivably drum up any correlations it wants. It's a conspiratorial line of thought on a par with Descartes' evil demon, but in a rigorous proof you have to rule these sorts of things out. The…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need this sort of axiom to eliminate superdeterminism. If an experimenter's choice of direction is fully determined by their past light-cone then a shared physical state in the overlapping past light-cones of A and B could conceivably drum up any correlations it wants. It's a conspiratorial line of thought on a par with Descartes' evil demon, but in a rigorous proof you have to rule these sorts of things out. The…
Right, I see how it's being used in the proof, my point is that what the theorem proves, regardless of how the notion of "is determined by" is clarified, is not at all interesting or surprising.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a similar reaction. Nondeterministic conceptions of free will similar to that of this paper are really more like an intoxicated state or something, where behavioral outcomes are totally unpredictable. It's the absence of free will, but due to complete randomness rather than complete control. The prior state idea seems more accurate, but even that (at least in its extreme state) doesn't seem to me to encapsulate…
>The prior state idea seems more accurate, but even that (at least in its extreme state) doesn't seem to me to encapsulate the idea of free will because it disallows the idea of a decision being undetermined and free to decide. I certainly think randomness comes into play for sure, but conceptually my personal prior state might include a source of randomness. It could be just one factor, and I might make choices base…
I think at some point notions of intervention or change become critical. So, for example, I think implicit in the idea of free will is the idea that an individual can freely choose to change their decision in some repeatability sense, and this change cannot necessarily happen in any other way, such as from outside influence.
Just to make it clear, let's say there's two choices or choice types, A and B. A is "bad" and B is "good," in whatever sense (utilitarian, moral, whatever).
Key to the notion of free will it seems is that one could change, of their own volition, their choice, from A->B or B->A. In practice we can't rewind time or transport to possible worlds in a counterfactual sense, but we do talk about decisions as interchangeable and repeatable. E.g., someone can choose whether or not to take a drug at one point, and then, at a later point, choose again whether or not to take the drug. In one metaphysical sense, those decisions are not the same because circumstances have changed, but we treat them as the same.
I think the idea of free will is that someone could change their decision, to an extent that another person could not. That is, I cannot make you change your choice, only you can.
This is fine at some level, but what if someone wants to change their mind but cannot? E.g., a drug addict or someone trying to lose weight? What about something simpler, like decision under a lapse in attention? How do we define volition or lack thereof?
Or, maybe more importantly, let's say the external individual in question is omniscient. If an omniscient external individual cannot alter your behavior, why would you hold that individual responsible in a free will sense? That is, let's say someone truly wants to change, but an omniscient being could not even help and change them. Why should the non-omniscient individual seeking change be held responsible?
This is all stream-of-consciousness, but I think at some point the notion of free will starts to lead to counterintuitive problems and/or becomes very poorly definable. At some level I suspect it implies not only autonomy but complete agency, which is suspect.
I really think this, along with much philosophical musing about free will, is entirely missing the point. Pre-determination is essential to free will. You literally cannot have free will without it. Random choice, or even non-predetermined correlated outcomes of entangled objects don't lead to free will, they lead to uncertain decisions and those are not the same thing. If my decisions are not a product of my prior s…
In classical physics a closed system is purely determined by its initial state. So considering the universe as such a system, everything that is happening, including me typing this, is a deterministic and predictable function of the state of the universe at the big bang, and thus free will is an illusion.
In that sense, actual free will requires unpredictability in the physical world because free will is unpredictable behaviour. That's where quantum physics becomes crucial.