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Are you suggesting there is no room for quantum effects in the brain? Honest question because I thought determinism is out of fashion now-a-days for that reason

by clord 10y ago

Are you suggesting there is no room for quantum effects in the brain? Honest question because I thought determinism is out of fashion now-a-days for that reason.

Retra 10y ago
Determinism and non-determinism are both just models that can be converted into each other fairly easily. Either way, that has nothing to do with free will, because getting random outcomes is not 'will' at all, let alone free will -- as ill-defined as that concept is.
- gpderetta 10y ago
  I subscribe 100% to the 'free-will as an emotion' description you gave else thread, but to play the devil advocate, a non deterministic acausal process could be the gateway for for a metaphysical soul to affect the physical mind. How this can be done without violating the expected probability density function of the non deterministic process I leave it for others to explain.
roywiggins 10y ago
Quantum effects are still physical. If your behavior is determined by the collapse of a wavefunction, is that more free-willish than behavior determined by a prior state? A double-slit photon doesn't choose a slit via free will, so I'm not sure how quantum mechanics helps inject free will into the brain.
kpil 10y ago
I don't quite get why quantum effects are required, and the determinism have to be removed to explain "free will". The deterministic effects in the brain must be negligible, as you can't reasonably reproduce the internal and external state of 100 billion neurons, swimming in a incomprehensibly complex chemical soup that is altered by the brain itself, at the same time experiencing the changing reality.
mattkrause 10y ago
It's hard to prove a negative but.... No one in "mainstream" neuroscience or cell biology takes these proposals seriously. Hameroff and Penrose have proposed some possible mechanisms (e.g., dendritic lamellar bodies), but none of these have panned out experimentally; for example, the DLBs are in the wrong place. They keep revising the theory around these data, but I think a lot of experimentalists have lost interest. I gather there are other more philosophical/first principles arguments against this too. It would be neat if it were true though....

by clord 10y ago

Are you suggesting there is no room for quantum effects in the brain? Honest question because I thought determinism is out of fashion now-a-days for that reason.

Retra 10y ago

Determinism and non-determinism are both just models that can be converted into each other fairly easily. Either way, that has nothing to do with free will, because getting random outcomes is not 'will' at all, let alone free will -- as ill-defined as that concept is.

gpderetta 10y ago
I subscribe 100% to the 'free-will as an emotion' description you gave else thread, but to play the devil advocate, a non deterministic acausal process could be the gateway for for a metaphysical soul to affect the physical mind. How this can be done without violating the expected probability density function of the non deterministic process I leave it for others to explain.

roywiggins 10y ago

Quantum effects are still physical. If your behavior is determined by the collapse of a wavefunction, is that more free-willish than behavior determined by a prior state? A double-slit photon doesn't choose a slit via free will, so I'm not sure how quantum mechanics helps inject free will into the brain.

kpil 10y ago

I don't quite get why quantum effects are required, and the determinism have to be removed to explain "free will". The deterministic effects in the brain must be negligible, as you can't reasonably reproduce the internal and external state of 100 billion neurons, swimming in a incomprehensibly complex chemical soup that is altered by the brain itself, at the same time experiencing the changing reality.

mattkrause 10y ago

It's hard to prove a negative but.... No one in "mainstream" neuroscience or cell biology takes these proposals seriously. Hameroff and Penrose have proposed some possible mechanisms (e.g., dendritic lamellar bodies), but none of these have panned out experimentally; for example, the DLBs are in the wrong place. They keep revising the theory around these data, but I think a lot of experimentalists have lost interest. I gather there are other more philosophical/first principles arguments against this too. It would be neat if it were true though....