Is free will compatible with the probabilistic nature of QM?

[Demystifier]

Does QM allow "free will"?

Some people argue that QM is complete because if there were deterministic hidden variables behind QM, then the determinism would not allow free will.
However, such an argument for completeness of QM is completely meaningless for the following reason: If QM is complete, then fundamental laws of nature are purely probabilistic and physical events are fundamentally random. Fundamental randomness does NOT allow free will. For example, if there are 50:50 chances for two different behaviors of a human, then the human cannot decide to behave allways in the same way.

Thus, everyone who believes in free will should reject completeness of QM!

 

[Aidan130791]

There are no deterministic values. Wavefunctions represent the probability ofthings happening, and eigenvalues represent one possible state of the collapsed wavefunction. Thus, no determinism. And a wavefunction with 50:50 values, in its uncollapsed state does occupy both states at once. Like Schrodinger's cat.

 

[HumbleStudent]

But you still have to follow Schrodinger's equation. So, you don't have complete free will.

 

[Fra]

I'm not sure about the free will stuff, but I agree ordinary QM is incomplete.

But not for the same reasons that Einstein thought it must be so. My problem is not the "God plays dice" things, my problems lies more in the foundation of probability theory. The postulation of the probability spaces. This is fine from a mathematical point of view, but the connection to reality is another story. I think the probability space itself is only estimated, and thus it is evolving too. However this should be curable, but it will get consequences for the current model.

/Fredrik

 

[Demystifier]

There are no deterministic values. Wavefunctions represent the probability ofthings happening, and eigenvalues represent one possible state of the collapsed wavefunction. Thus, no determinism. And a wavefunction with 50:50 values, in its uncollapsed state does occupy both states at once. Like Schrodinger's cat.

And what about free will?

 

[ziad1985]

Why free will exist ?
free will is just a concept.

 

[Aidan130791]

And what about free will?

Free will is a macroscopic concept, and QM is microscopic. I don't really think that photons and electrons have the concept of free will. I think that we are getting bogged down in philosophical issues.

 

[Demystifier]

Free will is a macroscopic concept, and QM is microscopic. I don't really think that photons and electrons have the concept of free will. I think that we are getting bogged down in philosophical issues.

Completely agree.
But do you think that there is a fundamental cut between microscopic and macroscopic? If yes, where exactly this cut is?

 

[madness]

Doesnt saying freewill is a macroscopic concept cause more problems? Newtonian physics is completely deterministic as far as I am aware. The reason people have argued that QM allows for freewill is that it seems that only conscious observers can collapse the wavefunction, meaning that conscious observers do indeed affect physical reality.

 

[Demystifier]

Doesnt saying freewill is a macroscopic concept cause more problems? Newtonian physics is completely deterministic as far as I am aware. The reason people have argued that QM allows for freewill is that it seems that only conscious observers can collapse the wavefunction, meaning that conscious observers do indeed affect physical reality.

But consciousness and free will are totally different concepts. Consciousness may exist without free will.

 

[madness]

I agree completely but the important part is that consciousness can act on matter in a way. That doesn't necessarily imply freewill but it doesn't exclude it either, especially with the non-deterministic nature of QM. It seems that freewill is possible in QM but difficult to argue for in Newtonian physics.

 

[Demystifier]

I agree completely but the important part is that consciousness can act on matter in a way. That doesn't necessarily imply freewill but it doesn't exclude it either, especially with the non-deterministic nature of QM. It seems that freewill is possible in QM but difficult to argue for in Newtonian physics.

My point was that in standard QM the physical events are not only non-deterministic. Instead, they are much more than this - they are random. While non-determinism is compatible with free will, randomness is not. That is my main point.

 

[Aidan130791]

Completely agree.
But do you think that there is a fundamental cut between microscopic and macroscopic? If yes, where exactly this cut is?

I think its where QM becomes to complicated, i.e. on the scale of anything above molecules.

Doesnt saying freewill is a macroscopic concept cause more problems? Newtonian physics is completely deterministic as far as I am aware. The reason people have argued that QM allows for freewill is that it seems that only conscious observers can collapse the wavefunction, meaning that conscious observers do indeed affect physical reality.

Randomness and probability is not an issue in Newtonian mechanics, as relationships are compleely causal. Also, conscioussness isn't really a problem either; a computer isn't conscious, yet it can collapse wavefunctions (if you hook it up to a detector). All that is necessary is a measurement. Observation isn't always the correct word to use.

 

[jostpuur]

Thus, everyone who believes in free will should reject completeness of QM!

Isn't the usual concept of free will in contradiction with any physical theory? The theory being deterministic or not, is not a key factor in the paradox, at least not obviously.

I believe that this is a matter where progress will happen through improved understanding of the free will, and not through new physical theories.

 

[madness]

Whether a computer can collapse the wavefunction is debatable, as is whether a computer is conscious. I think that observation is the correct word to use, since any physical measurement made without conscious observation would be indistinguishable from normal physical interactions which are constantly happening without any collapse of the wavefunction occurring. Even if the wavefunction collapses in a random (probablistic) fashion, the fact that it collapses is caused directly by conscious observation, meaning that mind does act on matter in some sense. It is not random whether or not the wavefunction collapses or not, only how it collapses. Furthermore, some have argued that the way a wavefunction collapses may not be random but influenced by mind, ie it might be the mechanism by which freewill operates. This is just speculation however and i don't see how it could be easily falsifiable

 

[RandallB]

TWO big problems here - First;

If QM is complete, then fundamental laws of nature are purely probabilistic and physical events are fundamentally random. Fundamental randomness does NOT allow free will. For example, if there are 50:50 chances for two different behaviors of a human, then the human cannot decide to behave all ways in the same way.

That is upside down, This argument should have QM favoring free will not apposing it – the human can only decide once and will never see the exact same decision to be made again. Both the inputs and the human condition (mood, importance of which of many parameters, etc) all weigh differently on how the final decision is made. A variety of important parameters that cannot be known in advance with any certainty. Certainly not an argument the demands Free Will destroying determinism is true.

And even worse - Second:

Thus, everyone who believes in free will should reject completeness of QM!

What a terrible way to reject or accept the completeness of QM.

In this "Physics" portion of the forum you should more interested in using the Scientific Method. You know, something like Bell Tests or if you can devise one, something better in the form of a real scientific experiment.
After all, almost anyone should doubt QM just based on Commons Sense (At least a commonsense not educated with the experience of using QM in 70 years of scientific technological advancements far exceeding the advancements of 2 millennium prior years). Only using an Ordinary Common Sense would reject QM simply based on the Weirdness of it, without debating “Free Will”.

If you do not want to expand the Common Sense used on issues like this, with information gained from real experience and applying the scientific method – shouldn’t you have this issue moved to the Philosophy Forum instead?

 

[vanesch]

The question of free will is a completely philosophical issue and has not much to do with a physical model and whether that physical model is "random" or "deterministic". A deterministic model simply means that if we were to know up to infinite precision the "state of nature" at a certain moment, then we can know the state of nature in the future. A random model means that even if we know the precise state of nature at a certain moment, we can only describe the future by the means of probability distributions. So the nature of a model to be deterministic or probabilistic is only a way to describe how we can KNOW the future.

Now, think of "nature" as a big bag of events, distributed in spacetime. That means that anything in the future is "in that bag", and hence is somehow "determined". There is an event in the bag that tomorrow, you'll pick chocolate pudding for dessert, and not fruit salad. It simply means that tomorrow you will indeed pick chocolate pudding. In a deterministic model, there is in principle a way to find that out if I'd know all the events on the "today" hyperplane, while in a probabilistic theory, I can only find a probability distribution which assigns a certain probability to the event "you will eat chocolate pudding" tomorrow and another probability to "you'll take fruit salad" (which you eventually won't). Does this mean that the fact that you will "freely decide to eat chocolate pudding" is not free in one case, or in another ? Not really. The only thing we're talking about is our ability to KNOW what you WILL DECIDE, given all events on the "today" hyperplane. It doesn't change anything that you will decide to go for the chocolate pudding tomorrow! We're only talking about our ability to link events today and that event tomorrow.

In order to illustrate this, let's look to the past instead of the future. Let's look at Julius Caesar, and his getting over the Rubicon river. We know that he did. Does the fact that we KNOW that he'll cross the Rubicon (by looking at all events today, and especially events related to history books) on the "today" hyperplane mean that Caesar didn't have any free will at that moment ? Because that event in the past cannot be changed into "he'll not cross the Rubicon", and is strictly determined by events in our "today" hyperplane ?
Would he have had more or less "free will" if our historical record would be less clear, and we'd have to assign a certain probability for him to have crossed the Rubicon and another probability if not ?

 

[nrqed]

Some people argue that QM is complete because if there were deterministic hidden variables behind QM, then the determinism would not allow free will.
However, such an argument for completeness of QM is completely meaningless for the following reason: If QM is complete, then fundamental laws of nature are purely probabilistic and physical events are fundamentally random. Fundamental randomness does NOT allow free will. For example, if there are 50:50 chances for two different behaviors of a human, then the human cannot decide to behave allways in the same way.

Thus, everyone who believes in free will should reject completeness of QM!

I agree 100% with you.

This is kind of eerie...I made exactly the same point to a friend of mine about a year ago!

Clearly, there is no place for free will in the context of classical mechanics. However, I have read statements sometimes to the effect that free will is actually "salvaged" by quantum mechanics. However, just a few seconds of thought makes it clear that this is not true at all! A random quantum mechanical process does not allow free will more than a completely deterministic (classical) process. In both cases, free will has no room!

It seems to me that the very idea of free will can have no explanation within a scientific theory. Because the very idea of free will involves an effect without a cause. So it seems to me that either free will is an illusion or if it is real, there *must* be something beyond science that is at work.

My personal opinion is that free will is simply an illusion created by our mind.

I am no expert in mind and brain studies, but there are clearly situations in which our brain perceive some external stimulus and reacts in a way that gives the impression that free will is not involved...we simply "react" "instinctively" to something and we do it so quickly that we say "I did not think, I just did it". I have read about two pathways of decision making in the brain, and one would go through a shorter route (which involved avoiding the neocortex or something like that... I don't remember but I could dig it up). It was theorized that this path involved reactions in which we don't consciously have the impression that free will is involved. My point is of course that even in the case of the other path, free will is not really present at all, but the illusion of it is generated.

I experienced this once (well, probably more than once but this time was really striking). I was driving late at night on a dark highway and I suddenly see a moose. I was driving at about 55 miles an hour. My hand gave a jerk on the steering wheel to the left and I barely avoided the moose. If I had given a jerk in the other direction, I would have hit it. Now, the point is that it went so fast that I don't remember at all *deciding* to go left. It seems as if I barely had registered consciously that there was a moose in the road when I had already passed it. It *felt* as if "someone" had grabbed my hands and made me turn left. I honestly describe the way it felt. It was so sudden that I did not feel that *I* had decided to do it. Now, if I was religious or had spiritual beliefes, I would probably have thought that "God" or an "angel" or a "spirit" had helped me. Of course, I only believe that my bran "did" it. But it did it in a way that simply made me feel that "I" was out of the loop. That there was no free will involved.

My point is that I think that it's not only in those type of situations that free will is not involved. I believe that in *all* situations, free will is an illusion.
Except that in most situations, the brain creates an illusion of free will. The questions is obviously why we would have evolved this need. I have some ideas about this but I am sure nobody will be interested in my ramblings so I will stop!


Patrick

 

[ptalar]

I agree 100% with you.

This is kind of errie...I made exactly the same point to a friend of mine about a year ago!

Clearly, there is no place for free will in the context of classical mechanics. However, I have read statements sometimes to the effect that free will is actually "salvaged" by quantum mechanics. However, just a few seconds of thoughts makes it clear that this i snot true at all! A random quantum mechanical process does not allow free will more than a completely deterministic (classical) process. In both cases, free will has no room!

It seems to me that the very idea of free will can have no explanation within a scientific theory. Because the very idea of free will involves a cause without an effect. So it seems to me that either free will is an illusion or if it is real, there *must* be something beyond science that is at work.

My personal opinion is that free will is simply an illusion created by our mind.

I am no expert in mind and brain studies, but there are clearly situations in which our brain perceive some external stimulus and reacts in a way that gives the impression that free will is not involved...we simply "react" "instinctively" to something and we do it so quickly that we say "I did not think, I just did it". I have read about two pathways of decision making in the brain, and one would go through a shorter route (which involved avoiding the neocortex or something like that... I don't remember but I could dig it up). It was theorized that this path involved reactions in which we don't consciously have the impression that free will is involved. My point is of course that even in the case of the other path, free will is not really present at all, but the illusion of it is generated.

I experienced this once (well, probably more than once but this time was really striking). I was driving late at night on a dark highway and I suddenly see a moose. I was driving at about 55 miles an hour. My hand gave a jerk on the steering wheel to the left and I barely avoided the moose. If I had given a jerk in the other direction, I would have hit it. Now, the point is that it went so fast that I don't remember at all *deciding* to go left. It seems as if I barely had registered consciously that there was a moose in the road when I had already passed it. It *felt* as if "someone" had grabbed my hands and made me turn left. I honestly describe the way it felt. It was so sudden that I did not feel that *I* had decided to do it. Now, if I was religious or had spiritual beliefes, I would probably have thought that "God" or an "angel" or a "spirit" had helped me. Of course, I only believe that my bran "did" it. But it did it in a way that simply made me feel that "I" was out of the loop. That there was no free will involved.

My point is that I think that it's not only in those type of situations that free will is not involved. I believe that in *all* situations, free will is an illusion.
Except that in most situations, the brain creates an illusion of free will. The questions is obviously why we would have evolved this need. I have some ideas about this but I am sure nobody will be interested in my ramblings so I will stop!


Patrick

I would like to hear your ideas on why we have a need for free will.

 

[RandallB]

Clearly, there is no place for free will in the context of classical mechanics.

Once again, I do not see any Scientific Method or justification behind this conclusion ether.

If Classical Mechanics was deterministic we should have a definite complete and none generalized solution to the three body orbital problem. Even if there were, in a realistic world with unknown external N bodies introduced from outside a giving orbital system, I do not believe there is any scientific justification for declaring any theory deterministic.

I am convinced that whether or not this thread winds up being moved has not been pre-determined, but will be up to someone’s “Free Will”.

 

[Mephisto]

i believe that the world behaves deterministically... all the way. There is 1 or 2 fundamental particles, and a single law that governs the interaction between them. Under this view, given an initial arrangement of the particles, entire future is determined... So there is only one single destiny, and only one way things can happen... After all ... what is free will? The ability to choose? Choice is a result of electrical impulses in your brain, which follow the laws of physics... so faced with a decision, you should always respond in exactly same way, and it was all predetermined in the big bang...

 

[Fra]

Now, think of "nature" as a big bag of events, distributed in spacetime. That means that anything in the future is "in that bag", and hence is somehow "determined".

Not that I find the link to fre will very interesting but I'd like to see that bag in it's entitry on my desk for analysis

This is IMO at the root of the probability interpretation, and IMO it's a serious issue and one of the weak points of QM in my eyes.

The problem is that this bag is not totally determined from experiment, in the axiomatic treatment it's imagined to have some existence without beeing explicity "observed". This is inconsistent with the ideal that everything should be measurable or follow from experiment, directly or indirectly. It is however true that this bag can be indirectly inferred from experiment, but the we get a statistical bayesian estimate of the bag only. Thus the probability space that is used for founding QM, is at best identified to a bayesian-like estimate over the space of probability spaces (and even that is fuzzy because by the some token the space of spaces is itself not given).

So I'd say that quantum mechanics is complete only to a certain level of estimated confidence. Sufficiently confidence to provide a basis for fairly successful (but strictly speaking speculative) predictions, but to postulate this is speculative from my fundamental philosophical standpoint, except for practical and "effective" purposes.

The standard motivation about statistical ensembles is easy to buy, but IMO it does not stand up suffciently well to an analysis of the line of reasoning, and in the quest for bigger theories I don't hesitate to throw these postulates back where they came from.

/Fredrik

 

[vanesch]

Once again, I do not see any Scientific Method or justification behind this conclusion ether.

The point is that the question is not open to scientific inquiry via the scientific method - that's why I said that it was a purely philosophical issue.

Indeed, how do you discriminate experimentally between "entity A (say, a person) will decide by free will, X and not Y" on one hand, and "entity A has no free will, but will decide X, but will have the illusion that he decided that" ?

You can only observe that entity A picked "decision X", and declared that he freely decided to pick X. Whether an "alternative" Y was potentially possible, but it wasn't picked, or whether the alternative Y wasn't really a genuine alternative and only X remained, is unexplorable by the scientific method. We can only observe that it didn't happen, and that X happened. In as much as we are lacking information and still don't know that Y couldn't really happen, or in as much that it "could actually happen but didn't", we have no way to discriminate.

 

[nrqed]

The point is that the question is not open to scientific inquiry via the scientific method - that's why I said that it was a purely philosophical issue.

Indeed, how do you discriminate experimentally between "entity A (say, a person) will decide by free will, X and not Y" on one hand, and "entity A has no free will, but will decide X, but will have the illusion that he decided that" ?

You can only observe that entity A picked "decision X", and declared that he freely decided to pick X. Whether an "alternative" Y was potentially possible, but it wasn't picked, or whether the alternative Y wasn't really a genuine alternative and only X remained, is unexplorable by the scientific method. We can only observe that it didn't happen, and that X happened. In as much as we are lacking information and still don't know that Y couldn't really happen, or in as much that it "could actually happen but didn't", we have no way to discriminate.

Very true. But I would say that in addition, there is simply no place for the concept of free will in any scientific theory. I mean, it's on par, in my mind, with the idea that the universe might have been created 6000 years ago (or for that matter 6 seconds ago) with everything set up so that we would be led to believe that the universe is 13 billion years old and the solar system is 4.6 billion years old and so on. There is no way to disprove *that* but it is just completely in conflict with the most basic principles of science. To *me*, the concept of free will is of the same nature. But the difference is that I have seen statements that seem to imply that the undeterministic nature of QM may allow free will to be reconcilable with physics. My point is that I think that it still isn't, and could not be. Not anymore than the concept of the universe having been created 6000 years ago)

 

[Talisman]

Instead of adding to the fray with my own ideas, I'll recommend the work of Henry Stapp, a quantum physicist at Berkeley who has thought more deeply than I:

http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/stappfiles.html

 

[Fra]

To add fwiw, another personal philosophical balancing reflection on this...

But I would say that in addition, there is simply no place for the concept of free will in any scientific theory.

First I agree that the free will discussion is fuzzy and poorly defined. Beeing a human I clearly understand what we are talking about, but still only to a given resolution so to speak. Things that are seemingly fuzzy and unclear may in fact still to principle harbour large potentials. By rejecting things we don't understand, we may discard possibilites.

SO I personally don't think that apparent fuzz truly invalidates the question here, because many things starts out fuzzy. That's somehow the way of life.

If we picture that two systems (say two "identical humans") but one tries to develop a strategy of life incorporating the concept of free will, and the other one does not. If one of them is more successful beyond what could be attributed to expected variation, this is indirect bayesian support for the concept of free will. I just wanted to say that, at least as someone interested in the philosophy of science, I agree that at first glance and in this context, the concept of free will seems sort of uncalled for or truly fuzzy, I would personally not categorically reject it as complete non-scientific baloney. That is to make it too easy for ourselves, at the expense of future possibilities. Of course is my brain is completel full and I could not handle one more definition of terms, of course in this case free will are on the top of the list of be flushed out.

Even "science" may be born out of "non-science", that's what I even think that beeing "overly categorical" to irreversibly reject unclear things is not very scientific either.

/Fredrik

 

[Fra]

I like to think that a scientific approach should keep even the utterly unlikely an open possibility. However as I see it, the one "scientific reason" to really "collapse" a utterly unlikely possibility into a non-event, is that we run out of memory :) Which is clearly the other valid side of things, it is a matter of measurement resolution and data representation and compactification. The unification I see is again a balance between generality and reasonable responses in the strategy of life as a strategy of learning. Here is occams razor as a basic selection rule. An unneccesarily complex strategy is larger overhead in several ways, and is thus unfavouralbe unless the benefit in terms of generality or fitness of the more complex model makes up for the addtional complexity.

/Fredrik

 

[Demystifier]

RandallB, the issue of free will is not a matter of scientific method, but a matter of logic. (If you consider logic to be a part of philosophy, that's fine.)
Namely, it is not a question whether classical mechanics or QM is correct, but whether it is COMPLETE. The claim is that IF it is complete, then there is no room for something else not covered by this theory. In particular, there is no room for free will. No experiment can confirm or reject such a conclusion. Still, it is correct by an even stronger criterion of correctness than experiments are - by the criterion of logical consistency. Once again, it is not claimed that QM is complete, nor that there is no free will. It is only claimed that completeness and free will logically cannot live together.

 

[Demystifier]

Nrqed, I completely agree with every word you say.

 

[Starbug]

Demystifier,

Quantum Mechanics is (or might be) an indeterminsitic theory, not a "random" one. In your opening argument you make the standard mistake of thinking that the randomly determined events have to constitute the free decision in of themselves, we can be more imaginative than this. (And also, it's not true that this would be inimical to free will in all situations, consider Buridan's ass type decisions for example) And the argument is silly in any case since any theory that asserts that people make decisions randomly is just empirically wrong.

Essentially as I see it a naturalistic account of free will has two quite separable problems, the determinism problem and the reductionism problem. Your argument appeals to the second of these two, which is that a process cannot be a free decision if it's composed of processes that are not themselves free decisions. This might be true (though I'm not so sure, see above), but surely it applies equally to any deterministic theory.

(The reason of course that QM might save free will is of course by solving the determinism problem, which as I say is a separate issue)

Also, as others have pointed out, the case is back to front, not becuase the free will issue is "not science", but because there is no reason why what reality is actually like has to be palatable.

The point is that the question is not open to scientific inquiry via the scientific method - that's why I said that it was a purely philosophical issue.

"Purely philosophical" here is too strong. The issue is not entirely scientific, many things aren't and most notably the question of what counts as scientific and what doesn't is itself not entirely scientific. A lot of the arguments here present good cases for why someone who, for whatever reason, is only interested in science shouldn't care about the philosophical question, but they don't establish that someone who is interested in the philosophy shouldn't care about the science.

Indeed, how do you discriminate experimentally between "entity A (say, a person) will decide by free will, X and not Y" on one hand, and "entity A has no free will, but will decide X, but will have the illusion that he decided that" ?

Like it or not this is a problem our legal systems have to deal with all the time. The question needs an answer even if it can't come out of the lab in a straightforward way.

 

[jiohdi]

If your actions are DETERMINED they are not free, if RANDOM they are not willed... so the concept of freewill is an oxymoron term from the get go... the only sense that FREEWILL has meaning is in the RELATIVE freedom of agents to act independantly of other agents, not in their internal freedom from the laws of physics.

 

[RandallB]

The point is that the question is not open to scientific inquiry via the scientific method - that's why I said that it was a purely philosophical issue.

Well that makes it clear; this is a philosophical thread, and destined for to be closed or moved from this forum.

If my science was sophisticated enough I could measure clues from the big bang to predetermine exactly when and which of the two will happen – provided I was allowed the free will to try. (Oops another free will paradox, my desire to try should be predetermined also; I’ll have to figure out how to measure for that as well.)

Logically and philosophically we disagree; I believe the question can be open to scientific inquiry; it is just not open to our current level scientific understanding.

 

[RandallB]

RandallB, the issue of free will is not a matter of scientific method, but a matter of logic. (If you consider logic to be a part of philosophy, that's fine.)
Namely, it is not a question whether classical mechanics or QM is correct, but whether it is COMPLETE. The claim is that IF it is complete, then there is no room for something else not covered by this theory. In particular, there is no room for free will. No experiment can confirm or reject such a conclusion. Still, it is correct by an even stronger criterion of correctness than experiments are - by the criterion of logical consistency. Once again, it is not claimed that QM is complete, nor that there is no free will. It is only claimed that completeness and free will logically cannot live together.

When you say " Namely, it is not a question whether classical mechanics or QM is correct, but whether it is COMPLETE. "
You imply that “classical mechanics” has claimed to be complete!
– It never has and has always known it was incomplete. That is exactly the point Niels Bohr and students were working on when they replaced Classical with the Uncertainty Principle & QM.
And QM does claim to be complete!
– and part of that completeness is the Mysterious Weird Action allowed by uncertainty.

And Logically the Mystery of uncertain results taken as a principle of a complete theory cannot support a deterministic reality. So as long as QM claims to be complete by using Uncertainty it must allow room for philosophical free will. That is if you are willing to be logical about it.

 

[Demystifier]

You imply that “classical mechanics” has claimed to be complete –

Please, show me how do I imply that? I don't.

 

[Demystifier]

So as long as QM claims to be complete by using Uncertainty it must allow room for philosophical free will. That is if you are willing to be logical about it.

That is logically true.

However, QM claims much more than that. It claims that the probabilities are not uncertain, but deterministic. So as long as QM claims to be complete by using deterministic probabilities, it cannot allow for philosophical free will. That is if you are willing to be logical about it.

 

[out of whack]

If your actions are DETERMINED they are not free, if RANDOM they are not willed... so the concept of freewill is an oxymoron term from the get go...

Absolutely. This should be the start and the end of the cogitation, regardless of QM or other considerations. A lucid examination of free will should include the realization that both terms are mutually exclusive: decisions are either free or willed, they cannot be both. The end.

 

[K.J.Healey]

That is logically true.

However, QM claims much more than that. It claims that the probabilities are not uncertain, but deterministic. So as long as QM claims to be complete by using deterministic probabilities, it cannot allow for philosophical free will. That is if you are willing to be logical about it.

So you're saying that since the probabilities of a state of an event is deterministic(though the result cannot be determined without observation), there's no free will? I don't get it? Why couldn't the "freedom of choice" comes in how you measure said event, or whether or not you choose to measure it.

 

[jiohdi]

So you're saying that since the probabilities of a state of an event is deterministic(though the result cannot be determined without observation), there's no free will? I don't get it? Why couldn't the "freedom of choice" comes in how you measure said event, or whether or not you choose to measure it.

the question becomes, what CAUSED you to make the measurement? some DETERMINED force, or some RANDOM one...what else?

 

[Jonny_trigonometry]

Some people argue that QM is complete because if there were deterministic hidden variables behind QM, then the determinism would not allow free will.
However, such an argument for completeness of QM is completely meaningless for the following reason: If QM is complete, then fundamental laws of nature are purely probabilistic and physical events are fundamentally random. Fundamental randomness does NOT allow free will. For example, if there are 50:50 chances for two different behaviors of a human, then the human cannot decide to behave allways in the same way.

Thus, everyone who believes in free will should reject completeness of QM!

But what if the hidden variable is consciousness?

 

[Demystifier]

But what if the hidden variable is consciousness?

In that case, QM is not complete.

 

[Demystifier]

So you're saying that since the probabilities of a state of an event is deterministic(though the result cannot be determined without observation), there's no free will? I don't get it? Why couldn't the "freedom of choice" comes in how you measure said event, or whether or not you choose to measure it.

If you can freely chose to measure something, then this freedom is not described by QM. If there is something not described by QM, then QM is not complete. Period.

 

[musicheck]

I think this question has already been answered by the mathematician John Conway's "Free Will Theorem." It states, in his provocative wording, "If experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles." Given that I personally find it rather odd to give elementary particles such regard, I think the natural thing to do is throw out free will, not QM.

 

[Demystifier]

I agree with you.

 

[ZapperZ]

I think this question has already been answered by the mathematician John Conway's "Free Will Theorem." It states, in his provocative wording, "If experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles."

But this isn't supported by our physical evidence. Elementary particles can exhibit entanglement and superpositions. Experimenters do not. I know that I can't be in 2 places at once even though I wish many times that I could. So extrapolating the properties of one into the realm of another isn't necessary valid.

That assumption also ignores an important effect - emergent phenomena.

Zz.

 

[Burnsys]

I don't think we have to go to the Quantum level to discuss free will, there are several classic experiments that says we don't have free will, at least we don't have "Conscious free well", if free will exist at the unconscious level, then how much of it is Free?

 

[Demystifier]

But this isn't supported by our physical evidence. Elementary particles can exhibit entanglement and superpositions. Experimenters do not. I know that I can't be in 2 places at once even though I wish many times that I could. So extrapolating the properties of one into the realm of another isn't necessary valid.

That assumption also ignores an important effect - emergent phenomena.

If the theory called QM is correct, than, in principle, you CAN be in a superposition and/or entangled with something else. The problem is that it is difficult to achieve this in practice, due to decoherence (caused by the interaction with the environment).

Emergent phenomena are only apparent (not true) phenomena. For example, classical deterministic chaos appears random, but the true dynamics is deterministic. Similarly, emergent free will would not be true free will.

 

[ZapperZ]

If the theory called QM is correct, than, in principle, you CAN be in a superposition and/or entangled with something else. The problem is that it is difficult to achieve this in practice, due to decoherence (caused by the interaction with the environment).

But we still do not have the evidence that the decoherence causes a smooth "crossover" or a "phase transition" between two very distinct and different worlds - classical and quantum. You go from some system that is classically deterministic to something in which such a thing is not available.

So no, I would put those as two separate system. My point here is that because of such distinct differences, and the fact that we do not have any mechanism and evidence yet that shows a clear connection between the two, then simply extrapolating one into the other isn't a valid exercise.

Emergent phenomena are only apparent (not true) phenomena. For example, classical deterministic chaos appears random, but the true dynamics is deterministic. Similarly, emergent free will would not be true free will.

Whether it is "true" or not, it is still there. Superconductivity is an emergent phenomena, and it is as "true" (Carver Mead would argue it is the "truest" of any physical phenomena) as any. And it certainly would not appear if you simply look at the individual constituents. Again, the point here being that if you simply look at the reductionist viewpoint and think that one can simply extrapolate such a thing via adding level of complexities, then one would still miss phenomena such as superconductivity, because there is no evidence to show that one can derive such a thing based on looking at the individual interactions - just ask the poor students of Bob Laughlin.

Zz.

 

[Demystifier]

B Again, the point here being that if you simply look at the reductionist viewpoint and think that one can simply extrapolate such a thing via adding level of complexities, then one would still miss phenomena such as superconductivity, because there is no evidence to show that one can derive such a thing based on looking at the individual interactions - just ask the poor students of Bob Laughlin.

I think that the example of superconductivity is misleading because it involves unnecessary mystification. To avoid it, let me use a common sense example: a house. You can miss the phenomenon of house if you think only about its constituents - the bricks - as individual objects.
After all, a microscopic theory of superconductivity also exists, doesn't it?

 

[ZapperZ]

I think that the example of superconductivity is misleading because it involves unnecessary mystification. To avoid it, let me use a common sense example: a house. You can miss the phenomenon of house if you think only about its constituents - the bricks - as individual objects.
After all, a microscopic theory of superconductivity also exists, doesn't it?

No. The BCS theory starts with the many-body ground state. That is what Bob Laughlin tried to do (read his Nobel Prize speech) with his graduate student - make them derive superconductivity by looking at it one particle at a time and adding more and more of them. It is just isn't there.

Furthermore, to counter your argument on the "fundamentality" of such a thing, there have been plenty of arguments (certainly from Laughlin, Phil Anderson, and David Pines) that our measurements themselves are emergent. We have to couple things that we are measuring with classical systems involving a gazillion interactions and degrees of freedom. So the world that we know of today is verified via such a process, and thereby, inherently emergent. In fact, if the Higgs is ever discovered, that clearly indicates that mass is an emergent phenomenon!

Similar arguments can be made connecting fractional charges/quantum hall effect in condensed matter with the fractional charges of quarks.

But again, the point I'm trying to make is that just because one set of "rules" work in one scale or one regime, this does not automatically means that it is valid to extrapolate or apply such a rule in another regime. Quantum rules simply makes no sense to be applied at the classical scale, not because of the "size", but because of decoherence and a number of other yet-undiscovered factors. Such non-extrapolation observation can be clearly seen across phase transitions as well, so this isn't just restricted to quantum-classical regimes. One simply can't put on blinders and assumes automatically that one set of rules and behavior is valid everywhere.

It is why when postmodernists tried to apply quantum and relativistic laws into political, economic, and social systems, they all resulted in absurdity.

Zz.

 

[Demystifier]

Well, I must admit that I do not know much about solid state physics, so I cannot respond appropriately. Still, it is hard to me to believe that it is not known how to derive superconductivity by starting from first microscopic principles. Maybe I should ask a question on the solid-state subforum.