John Conway – The Free Will Lectures (2009) [video]

Post by spindle » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 9:09 AM UTC

dan-robertson wrote: post #3

I’ve heard rumours of a course of five or six lectures Conway did many years ago (before he went to Princeton). The goal is to prove Gödel’s incompleteness theorem but somehow using geometry in some way. I think you need to allow comparing two lines and knowing which is longer (and this foundational thing is hard or maybe impossible) in some sense. I don’t know what is left of eg Gödel numbering or the formal languag…

Post by lmm » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 9:48 AM UTC

Uhuhreally wrote: post #42

lmm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shows that to whatever extent an experimenter can behave nondeterministically, so can an elementary particle. So it's useful as a simple way to convince people that quantum mechanical randomness is a true fundamental phenomenon (in particular, that hidden variable theories are all inherently invalid). I've never seen a coherent definition of "free will", but I don't see how someone whose decision is random has any…

Conway distinguishes Free Will from randomness by showing that randomness is just a special case of determinism. The random numbers could have been written down before the big bang and looked up when needed, which is still predetermined. What makes Free Will free is that it's the selection of some future state independently from the information in a particle's past light cone. Only the particle determines that part o…

Post by lmm » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 11:23 AM UTC

Uhuhreally wrote: post #44

lmm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Conway distinguishes Free Will from randomness by showing that randomness is just a special case of determinism. The random numbers could have been written down before the big bang and looked up when needed, which is still predetermined. What makes Free Will free is that it's the selection of some future state independently from the information in a particle's past light cone. Only the particle determines that part…

> That's a distinction without a difference - how would you tell whether the particle is magically looking up its results in the universe's big book of random numbers or deciding for itself? It's true that quantum-mechanical randomness is localised, in a provable sense, but there's no contradiction between that and what "randomness" is usually understood to mean. one of the points the theorem makes is that you can't…

Post by JoelJacobson » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 12:03 PM UTC

Post by adjkant » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 12:45 PM UTC

DenisM wrote: post #22

sysbin wrote: post #4

The HN crowd from my impression wants to deeply think of themselves as being in control of how their life transpired. I'm an outlier and I think free will is an illusion. Not only do I think everything is fated beyond our control but I have the belief that society would function better if people were educated young about understanding the concept of determinism and why we don't have control over how life transpires.…

> Not only do I think everything is fated beyond our control but I have the belief that society would function better if people were educated young about understanding the concept of determinism and why we don't have control over how life transpires We can’t really decide to do that because we don’t have the free will for it. Preordained fate has decreed for there to be no such education. I mean, you argument appears…