John Conway – The Free Will Lectures (2009) [video] • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by lmm » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 6:18 AM UTC

Uhuhreally wrote: post #58

lmm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and I reply that I just record the "fresh" random roll ahead of time and you look that up. Doesn't make any difference. Well, per everything that Conway's said, it does make a difference - if the experimenter is somehow able to choose which axes to measure after all dice rolls have been fixed, and the mapping of dice roll to measurement result is fixed (and does not depend on which axes the experimenter measures),…

aren't you mixing models of reality here ? You're describing a universe in which there's free will and determinism, somehow combined with many-worlds. It's hard to follow such hypercounterfactual logic

Well, the theorem pretty fundamentally relies on some kind of counterfactual reasoning - many-worlds is my preferred model, but you can use whichever you like. Ignoring the twin/spatially separated part[1], the meat of the theorem is that there is no possible fixed combination of spin along different axes that has the property that we always observe experimentally (that if we simultaneously measure along three axes at right angles to each other, we'll see two of one type of result and one of the other). So if the results we were going to observe were somehow fixed ahead of time, then there must be a contradiction: for some particular counterfactual combination of axes that we could have picked to measure, we would not have seen the two-and-one pattern that we always see.

The most frustrating part is that this is a cool, exciting result; while it doesn't really prove anything that we didn't already know from the Bell inequalities, the fact that everything's discrete makes for a much clearer contradiction. It shows that quantum-mechanical randomness is very fundamental and genuine: it's not just reading dice rolls off some list that was decided ahead of time, unless we want to commit to the idea that the whole universe works that way. But talking about "free will" just obscures and confuses everything.

[1] IMO that part doesn't add anything new or relevant to the result; it's just stapling the existing EPR paradox onto this new paradox.

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

#62

Post by Uhuhreally » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 7:34 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #60

Uhuhreally wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by "sleight of hand" of are implying Conway isn't being honest ? I think he was entirely sincere.

I hate to criticise him under these circumstances, and I'm going to leave out the more personal side of things, but: The impression I got was that he was playing up the "free will" angle to appeal to a popular audience, at the expense of the physics. Most academics with a book to sell do that to a certain extent, but I felt that he went past what's reasonable. I won't speculate as to whether that was insincerity as s…

He devoted a whole lecture to explaining his belief in free will, going in depth into the philosphical history of the concept and his personal reasons which come across as entirely genuine. He also speculates as to how he thinks the limited free will of particles could result in our free will. It's six lectures and a lot of hard work with highly respected physicists by a mathematician who's old, accomplished and distinguished.

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

#63

Post by lmm » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 8:54 AM UTC

Uhuhreally wrote: post #62

lmm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to criticise him under these circumstances, and I'm going to leave out the more personal side of things, but: The impression I got was that he was playing up the "free will" angle to appeal to a popular audience, at the expense of the physics. Most academics with a book to sell do that to a certain extent, but I felt that he went past what's reasonable. I won't speculate as to whether that was insincerity as s…

He devoted a whole lecture to explaining his belief in free will, going in depth into the philosphical history of the concept and his personal reasons which come across as entirely genuine. He also speculates as to how he thinks the limited free will of particles could result in our free will. It's six lectures and a lot of hard work with highly respected physicists by a mathematician who's old, accomplished and dist…

Fair enough. I honestly find that a lot sadder than the idea that he knew what he was doing and was sexing it up a bit. Reminds me of Penrose going off the rails.