Free will is back, and maybe we can measure it

But this isn't even deterministic on its own terms. Particle decay is stochastic. Quantum tunneling is stochastic. There's a constant, silent rain of neutrinos that don't interact nearly all the time.

Fully deterministic analog electronic computing is impossible because we cannot eliminate Johnson noise and shot noise. Why do people then think that neural computing would be noise-free?

That is not true. The quantum mechanics doesn't disprove determinism, but is clearly states the result can not be predicted, because an act of measurement changes the outcome.

That means it's not magic, but uncertainty that makes exact outcome of a system unpredictable. We can just know probability of the outcome.

Of course this unpredictability doesn't mean there's free will, it just means that we will never be able to find out with a 100% certainty what we will think even if we measured every little detail about the brain.

And if the argument is "But let's imagine we knew every little detail about a brain to atomic level, then we would surely know what he will think in the future" then we are talking about imaginary things. Magic knowledge doesn't exist.

.. which are vastly incomplete, themselves, because we have not reached the limit for where the atoms stop and the particles begin, and even beyond that, there is much evidence that we have not gotten, in fact, to the bottom of things.

>The counter argument requires 'magic' in the form of something that we can control that can't be measured. That's a big ask for any rational scientist.

Good thing rational scientists are willing - pun intended - to continue the investigation and discover just what it is we have not measured, and cannot measure, until we decide to do so.

Can decisions be weighed? Do they have mass, energy, substance? Does a decision exist somewhere in the universe, or is it able to move around the physical universe unhindered by physics? It could be argued that there are no definitive answers to those questions ..

Predictabilty hasn't anything to do with freedom either.

it should then follow that a perfect computer model of someone's brain would make the exact same decisions as that person

So what?

In other words, we don't actually make any decisions for ourselves. It's all determined by chemistry.

Nonsense. We are the chemistry, we are our brains. Are we "determined" by ourselves?

the fact they shot their wife was actually nothing they could have had any control over, and it's very unfair to lock them away for 30 years

That comes from the ancient and barbaric conception of penal justice as retribution. Punishment is a disincentive and the very right thing to do to prevent crime.

Edit: also that's again the faked duality. "...nothing they could have any control over" as if the subject is a pure soul completely apart from the universe and its forces. The subject is part of the universe, exactly the part of the universe that could have any control over killing or not killing. We put that part of the universe behind bars to prevent it from killing again and sending a message to other parts of the universe that could feel tempted to do the same. Also, in theory, to try to modify that part of the universe so it wont kill again.

But if the mind (note wording change) were not just atomic particles (that it, God, souls, or some such was involved), when you cut brains up and looked, what would you see?

>The theory goes that, on an atomic level, interactions between particles is a deterministic process - it's wholly and completely predictable because the outcome is determined by a knowable set of rules. Given the fact that our brains are just[1] a huge set of particles and chemical processes it should then follow that a perfect computer model of someone's brain would make the exact same decisions as that person.

yes. Absolutely true. In theory. The coin head/tail outcome can be modeled and predicted even more easily than brain. Thus the coin is an example of determinism. In theory. On practice though it is the thing that comes among firsts to mind when we talk about in-determinism.

Giving the amount of computations necessary to perfectly model even a coin, less a brain, and the minimum energy cost of a unit of computation, it may be so that such perfect computer is just not possible inside our Universe (it may happen that Universe is the smallest computer that can run such simulation and that exactly that it is doing right now :)

Politics. Any question that has remotely been associated with different ideologies, religions or any other polarizing groups division is bound to provoke this kind of reaction.

Free will is associated with religion, so non-religious people tend to oppose to the idea.

Actually I believe that religion is in the origin of the no free will conception.

Nature vs nurture is another of such debates. I'd add a few more, but enough of making friends for today :-)

Of course, it's both, we're part of nature!!!

describing it as "free will" is not really sensible, since it is neither "free" except in a very limited sense nor a "will"

That's nothing more than semantic juggling. I've defined precisely what I understand as freedom, not an esoteric concept at all, but the absence of obstacles. You just ignored it, invoking exactly the falacy I mentioned: "except in a very limited sense". Why is it "very limited"? You don't even try to justify that qualification.

And "not a will"? Oh, come on! What is your definition of will? Something that has no causation? Of course our will is caused, by instincts based on natural needs: food, sex, group bonds, in the aspiration to dignity, improvement and solidarity. We're not free in a vacuum, but free to decide what means lead more effectively to goals and a personality that are given to us.

With free will, the problem is complicated by the fact that people do have a feeling of free will.

No, that's the most simple and truthful intuition. The complication comes from people trying to apply abstractions out of place and concluding that nothing heavier than air can fly.

First of all, there is a difference between what you can predict about the system and what you want the system to be. Since even on nondeterministic system you can build a deterministic one, it doesn't matter what you can or cannot predict about the underlying system. If you want a deterministic system, you can simply ignore the unpredictable parts by averaging over them.

Although, if you know the other software, you could predict the system. But normal application, unless it has root privileges or there are privilege escalation loopholes, cannot inspect the whole system and cannot see all the processes that go on. Therefore, deterministic modelling of the system from a perspective of one application is impossible.

But there is actually a simpler example. Just take an application using the pseudorandom number generator. You can't know if there are other processes using the generator too, so once you use pseudorandom generator, your application becomes non-deterministic. If on the other hand the application wants to be deterministic, all it has to do is not use system-wide generator of randomness, regardless of whether the generator is actually deterministic or not.

The point is, for free will to exist, it doesn't really matter if the universe is deterministic. Just as it doesn't matter in D&D game if the result is determined by dice rolls or a pseudo-random number generator with a known starting seed. People cannot calculate the latter in their heads, so the difference won't affect their reasoning (these things are conditionally dependent on the observed reality); that's all that matters.

Now, since we have cleared out what a "choice" is and there is no more argument about that, it is easy to show that frontal cortex output is determined by input that are prior experience (or electrical signals coming in), genetics (how it reacts to them and how it is initially wired) and chemical environment (drugs/hormones/others). So there's no room for any kind of free will.

So as you see there is no conflict between lack of free will and morals/ethics. We just need to accept that your frontal cortex is "YOU" and if it produced defective output (a crime for example), it has to be punished regardless of predetermination to do so. And accept that it is ETHICAL and MORAL to do that. That is all.

If a robot went around killing people with an axe, we would stop it and dismantle it. We wouldn't shrug out shoulders and say "The robot can't help it so we can't hold it accountable for what it's doing."

If an individual does something to break the law, we hold that individual accountable for it. There are tons of modifiers, maybe the individual was under the influence of drugs, maybe the individual was mentally challenged, etc. These things modify how we hold the individual accountable.

And I feel that MW would need a pilot wave that carries the information for every parallel possible outcome for entanglement to work, wherein certain pilot waves cause universe splits starting from the point where they overlap and others merge - if you measure the spin of two entangled particles you get two waves that meet where X+X and Y+Y don't interact, but X+Y and Y+X does and thus create new universes. I don't see how the wave-less versions hold up when there for example are orientation-dependent probability and a ton of other crap like that. What else makes the particles interact with exactly the right universe?

Edit: Not to mention how complex MW would have to be to explain the delayed quantum eraser experiment.