John Conway – The Free Will Lectures (2009) [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
I believe the contents of this course were lost to time but I’d like to be surprised.
[0] https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Lawvere's+fixed+point+theorem
Any system will appear unsystematic until the precise rules governing it are known.
Since we can’t ever demonstrate that we’ve exhausted all possible theories of a system, the possibility always remains that tomorrow we would discover a perfectly effective one, and from that point the system would be as plainly deterministic as anything else.
In other words: we lack the capability to definitively distinguish between our own lacking knowledge and a system’s (potential) intrinsic non-determinism.
We might instead interpret the Free Will Theorem as demolishing a position otherwise claimed: People have free will, but people are special; most other things don't have free will, and certainly particles don't! But the Free Will Theorem explicitly contradicts this position.
In terms of philosophy, there are several nuances to consider. There's Kochen-Specker itself [1], its untestability and its applications. There's free will itself [2], including whether free will is definable, is useful for ethics, and indeed whether free will exists. I think it's interesting that [2] has no mention whatsoever of [1] or the Free Will Theorem more generally.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern%E2%80%93Gerlach_experime...
I've never seen a coherent definition of "free will", but I don't see how someone whose decision is random has any more or less of it than someone whose decision is nonrandom, so IMO it doesn't really have anything to do with free will one way or another.
In one of the lectures Conway goes in depth into the philosophy of free will, which he believed in at a time when it was (and still is) almost universally unfashionable.
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 implication is that our brains, being composed of particles, derive their free will from the sum of the particles' free will.
This is unfounded speculation.
one of the points the theorem makes is that you can't get the behaviour of fundamental particles by injecting randomness into an otherwise determinstic system. Free Will is different from randomness.
Have you watched the lectures ?
What is the distinction you're drawing, concretely? There simply isn't one unless you're using some very non-standard definition of randomness.
> Have you watched the lectures ?
I attended the 2005 version IRL.
AFAIUI by noting that the dice could have been thrown ahead of time and then looked up, we can treat it as a function of time and then it becomes as though another part of the information in the past light cone which doesn't explain the behaviour of particles, as exemplified by FIN, MIN & TWIN
I assert that this is not terribly surprising, and Conway is actually just doing a sleight of hand around the definition of "random". We would normally expect a truly random event to be (by definition) uncorrelated with anything else, in this case including counterfactual versions of itself - the random measurement you get from a given axis must not be correlated with the measurement you would have got if you'd measured a different combination of axes. That's maybe a little odd, but I don't think it contradicts people's normal notion of "randomness", particularly in a QM context. It's like how in early online poker games people would cheat by figuring out the "random seed" and know all the cards - because that's not real randomness.
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), then that creates a contradiction.
To my mind that's normal quantum behaviour - we see the same thing in the double slit experiment or Bell's inequalities (which this is just a variation on). Quantum behaviour cannot be explained by rolling dice ahead of time, because random results in different possible universes/branches must be uncorrelated with each other, even though we tend to assume that only one of those branches "actually happens". And this result is a cool demonstration of that. But there's no contradiction between that and most people's normal notion of "randomness", IMO.
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.
Strictly speaking, the whole discussion of determinism vs free will suffers from this defect.
My life got better after I rid myself from those thoughts. I firmly believe, they are dangerous.
What is your reasoning?
You're bad at writing, you're not smart, you're poor, you're a man, etc.
Interestingly, there is a local deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics: the Many-Worlds Interpretation. The interpretation is considered by many to be what the Schroedinger equation by itself with nothing extra added (like wave function collapse) implies about the world. There is no objective randomness. The 10,000-foot view of it is that any random quantum event with multiple possible outcomes causes the world to branch into a separate world for each outcome. (Generally random quantum events have a continuous outcome space instead of discrete outcomes, but it's harder to talk about a continuous spectrum of "worlds". The "worlds" of MWI aren't necessarily discrete atomic things; the word "world" is more of a fuzzy label for our convenience, like the word "pile". Also, per the Schroedinger equation, there's situations where multiple histories leading to equivalent worlds can cancel out, decreasing the measure and therefore observed probability of that world occurring; that's how we could possibly know this whole splitting business is going on.)
However, a system like this would still have subjective randomness, in the sense that there's no way for you to predict the value of a random quantum event. (Say you have a device that when you press the button, it will measure radiation from a radioactive object inside it for a period of time, and then output "heads" if it measured more than the average amount and "tails" if less.) Assuming it's set up as advertised, the idea of predicting the result doesn't even make sense, because after the measurement, there will be a cluster of worlds with a version of you that sees "heads", and a cluster of worlds with a version of you that sees "tails". Predicting which one you'll be makes as much sense as predicting who you will be before you were born. (I find it interesting that no matter how deterministic of a universe you imagine, there's always the subjective randomness resulting from the indexical uncertainty in who you find yourself being. MWI extends indexical uncertainty like that to more situations.)
I really love the way this article puts the issue: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NEeW7eSXThPz7o4Ne/thou-art-p.... The idea that determinism takes away free will from us is inherently based on the idea that we're something outside of physics, and that physics is exclusively deciding the future instead of us. However, if you make the common assumption that our brain is a material object running within physics and producing our decisions, then there is no contradiction between deterministic physics and whatever is meant by free will.
Another way I like to think about it: If you made an AI and ran it in some closed simulation, would you expect it to care whether the simulation was completely deterministic (with all probabilistic events operating from a pre-chosen seed and a strong RNG) or had some kind of randomness? The question won't directly affect the AI's life inside the simulation either way. Wouldn't you find it weird if it did actually care and had a preference about that detail of its world, or if it thought it wasn't a true free AI if there was no randomness in its simulation? If the AI thought the world had randomness or not, and then learned the opposite, you'd find it weird if the AI restructured everything it knew about itself and the world directly based on that. If you the operator happened to toggle whether the simulation had randomness several times over its run while working on its code, and at some later point the AI was let out of the simulation, you wouldn't expect the AI to take offense at this change. There's nothing about its quality of life, decision-making abilities, or life circumstances that would be affected by the answer. It's just an implementation detail of its world that's not directly relevant to an intelligence, except in matters of modeling how the world works.
HN says i'm posting too fast so I cannot reply to other comments. I can only edit this comment.
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 self-defeating to me. Is it not?
So in this case, it has all been determined that we do not have the education currently, but that says nothing of what the future is determined to be.
I am compelled by the notion of free will described by Schopenhauer (expanding on Kant). Namely, that 'one can do as he wills but not will as he wills'. Lived experience leads us to infer an indeterminate/inseparable energy/force/Will that we perceive with our senses and organize through the concepts of time/space/causality. However, we, being on the 'inside' of one particular object, are in a peculiar state: we are free to accept or reject this Will.
If I ask you to think of a number between 0 and 10, a number may pop up in your head (seemingly out of nowhere, though clearly through some process affected by genetics/neurochemistry). Despite this, you (whatever 'you' is) are still free to accept or reject this proposition.
In this sense, people can still be punished for accepting propositions of murder in some coherent way. You are affected by, but not the sum total of, your genetics and neurochemistry. Nevertheless, the latter might play a large role that we shouldn't discount.
The outcome happens from all the previous moments you lived. Randomness doesn't make a person have free will and randomness may just be an illusion from our lack of understanding when it comes to what's resulting in the outcome we appear as random.
We're the sum total of genetics, environmental factors and all the external forces upon us since birth. That means if we're being punished it was outside the realm of it could have been different.