11 ms·

The Strong Free Will Theorem (2009) [pdf]

110 points by lainon 8y ago

lainon 8y ago
I am myself skeptic of this. First of all - How does on control indeterminism? And does QM indeterminism really play a role on a neuronal level? This paper by Tegmark argues it doesn't - https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9907009 https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9907009
- mannykannot 8y ago
  This seems to be a weak free will theorem: "Our provocative ascription of free will to elementary particles is deliberate, since our theorem asserts that if experimenters have a certain freedom, then particles have exactly the same kind of freedom." To me, they seem to be saying that the freedom of free will is a limited freedom from determinism, not the freedom of being able to choose a future. The theory seems to be developed within the Copenhagen Interpretation framework of metaphysics, and I wonder if it is compatible with Many Worlds.
jatsign 8y ago
Can anyone dumb this down for me?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- all2 8y ago
  > It asserts, roughly, that if indeed we humans have free will, then elementary particles already have their own small share of this valuable commodity. More precisely, if the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus in a certain measurement, then the particle’s response (to be pedantic—the universe’s response near the particle) is not determined by the entire previous history of the universe. That about sums it up. I think (and I could be very wrong) that the last sentence refers to a particle's lack of dependence on previous state; that for a measurement, only the present state will inform the measure. That seems to infer something about the idea of 'free will', that is, 'free will' in this context seems to refer to an independence from prior states. Loosely, we can choose to step out of the path of our past's falling dominoes and change the course of our lives. Or something like that.
  - criddell 8y ago
    Is that basically saying that at some level, we should be able to see effects that have no cause? Is that what freewill boils down to?
    - all2 8y ago
      I don't know. "effects with no cause" makes me think of the 'quantum soup' at zero-point energy levels: things just appearing and disappearing in some random way. I don't know if that could be classified as 'causeless' though.
    - cryptonector 8y ago
      More like effects whose cause we can't ascribe... would have a free will component to their cause. It seems a bit silly because wherever you can ascribe a cause, there's no free will, so when is there free will?
      - criddell 8y ago
        > so when is there free will? I open to the possibility that the answer is never.
- shellac 8y ago
  Suppose you're told that somebody has halved an apple and put the two pieces in separate boxes. You are given a box, and the other is sent to a friend on the other side of the planet, who phones you when it arrives. You both open the boxes and describe what you see. "Oh my half has the stalk", "oh, mine doesn't". "I see 5 pips", "so do I". There are a bunch correlated (and anti-correlated) observations about the two halves. Nothing surprising about this. The quantum equivalent seems to work the same way at first glance. However on closer inspection there are some weird correlations that suggest that: * The apple wasn't cut in advance, but the two halves were created and put in the box just before they were opened. * Or maybe the apple was cut in advance, but somehow the person cutting knew what observations I would make ('I have the stalk'). * Or maybe the boxes were never separated but remained paired in 5-d space and only on opening did the apple split. * Or maybe I messaged the apple-cutter back-in-time to say what I would do. * Or something else. My box is so remote from the other relativity (and practicality) surely means I'm causally independent of the other box. And I got to chose my observations freely, nothing influenced me. And yet we know one - or both - of these can't be true. The mention of free-will in the paper is a bit cheeky, really. IIRC in the literature 'parameter-independence' and 'outcome-independence'have been to used to name the sort of factors that feel bad to violate (did I have a free choice about what to observe?) verses supposedly more innocuous quantum magic.
starbeast 8y ago
I been juggling the following three papers for a bit and trying to brush my maths up. I don't know why I feel a hunch between them, but I do know that the hunch is to do with this problem. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.06824.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.06824.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1306.0533.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1306.0533.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.2779.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.2779.pdf I will almost certainly be wrong about whatever it is. However I may have more updates on how wrong and what it is I am wrong about, in maybe a decade or so ;)
simonh 8y ago
I really think this, along with much philosophical musing about free will, is entirely missing the point. Pre-determination is essential to free will. You literally cannot have free will without it. Random choice, or even non-predetermined correlated outcomes of entangled objects don't lead to free will, they lead to uncertain decisions and those are not the same thing. If my decisions are not a product of my prior state, then they are not my decisions. The definition of 'me' is my prior state. If my decisions are unpredictable given complete knowledge of my prior state, and the ability to extrapolate it forward, then the decisions do not come from me. If they're not mine, then I have no responsibility for them. Any discussion of my responsibility for my actions must take into account my personal contribution to the decision as a being. Dualism does not solve this problem. It simply foists a chunk of a person's state into some non-material constituent, but if that constituent does not have a persistent (though presumably malleable) state or does not deterministically contribute to the process, again whence comes responsibility?
- all2 8y ago
  > The definition of 'me' is my prior state. I don't think this is true. We know that thought and memory are constrained (accessed) at a physical level - at least to some extent. That is, damage to your physical brain can result in diminished or eliminated access to those things. Indeed, thought as we know it seems to be a physically mediated process (perhaps not completely defined by our physical bodies, but at least influenced to some extent). As well, emotion is a physically mediated phenomena. Even our experience of this existence is physically mediated. Without a functioning body we lack the ability to experience. So what does that leave you to be? You are, at your basest existence, the ability to choose. A choice engine with a physical layer; a physical memory, physical emotion, the ability to think. But at your foundation, you choose. You remember, but unless you choose, you are nothing but memory.
  - simonh 8y ago
    >I don't think this is true. We know that thought and memory are constrained (accessed) at a physical level - at least to some extent. That is, damage to your physical brain can result in diminished or eliminated access to those things. Sure, the damage changes you. It becomes a new part of your state prior to making a decision. >You remember, but unless you choose, you are nothing but memory. Completely agree, but we don't think really know much about the relationship between how we store memories and how we incorporate those into a decision making process. I may be wrong, I don't know much about neuroscience. My take is though that it doesn't matter. All of that is part of our self. Memories, decision making processes, neurochemistry, it's all part of our state and our decisions are only truly 'ours' to the extent that this state determines or influences them.
dooglius 8y ago
> Another customarily tacit assumption is that experimenters are free to choose between possible experiments. To be precise, we mean that the choice an experimenter makes is not a function of the past Garbage in, garbage out. It isn't clarified whether an experimenter in a nondegenerate superposition of states (will choose x, will choose y, will choose z) is considered to have "free will". If you call that free will, then the result that result that the particle can end up in a superposition of states is not novel. If you don't call that free will, then the assumption is false and the theorem vacuous.
- n4r9 8y ago
  You need this sort of axiom to eliminate superdeterminism. If an experimenter's choice of direction is fully determined by their past light-cone then a shared physical state in the overlapping past light-cones of A and B could conceivably drum up any correlations it wants. It's a conspiratorial line of thought on a par with Descartes' evil demon, but in a rigorous proof you have to rule these sorts of things out. The axiom comes into play at the top-right of p.229: > ...since by MIN the response of b cannot vary with x, y, z, θ^G_0 is a function just of w
  - dooglius 8y ago
    Right, I see how it's being used in the proof, my point is that what the theorem proves, regardless of how the notion of "is determined by" is clarified, is not at all interesting or surprising.
    - n4r9 8y ago
      It's essentially a recasting of Bell's Theorem; in that sense it's both interesting and surprising if you thought that local hidden variables might still explain quantum theory. All you need - for both this and Bell's proof - is that directions are chosen with sufficient "randomness" or "freedom" so as to be considered independent of their past light cones. At least, independent enough so that the previously quoted step is possible.
ttflee 8y ago
Is this another counter-Sokalian paper for fun?
ganzuul 8y ago
If life has meaning, will is not free. - This is the strongest statement that I think can be said about the subject. There is a great conceptual distance between the self-assertion popuparized by Descartes and the theories and observations of physics. Science, even cosmology, has a very long way to go before its methods begin to answer the questions of philosophy.
esotericn 8y ago
Free will is not well defined. What does it mean for "will" to be "free"? If you could rewind time around one of your decisions, and replay it, you'd make the same decision every time, unless there was a random element involved, because the state would be the same every time. And if there's a random element involved, it's not really your will, is it?
- ifdefdebug 8y ago
  Your decision is between black and red while looking at the spinning roulette wheel. The random element is the outcome of your bet, which can not possibly be inferred from the current state at the time of making the decision. So if I could rewind and replay, and actually make a different decision each time, it would really be my will, I think. Most, if not all, real-world decisions take a non-zero uncertainty about the outcome into account.
  - esotericn 8y ago
    In that case, you didn't "will" the different decision, it was a result of your internal RNG.
    - tylerjwilk00 8y ago
      It's not random though - it is probabilistic. And even if it was an internal 'RNG' it is is still _their's_ not someone else's.
      - esotericn 8y ago
        If you take an action based on determining the probabilities of an event, you would take that action every single time because the state would be identical every time. You look at the roulette board. You bet on red. We rewind time. You still bet on red. The state is identical. Did _you_ come up with that decision? Of course you did, who else could have? My claim is not that there's no "you". It's that "free will" is meaningless unless we use a weird interpretation of terminology. If you'd do the same thing every time, there's no 'freedom'. If you do different things, but it's based on some sort of tiebreaker RNG, there's no 'will'.
EamonnMR 8y ago
I've honestly had trouble understanding how one would go about defining free will in a way that it could be observed. I can explain how I made my decisions and non-decisions, I know the difference between freedom and duress, but I have yet to see a definition of what free will is meant to mean, and why I am supposed to have it, while dice, my phone, and a plant growing towards the sun are not. It probably also requires a strong definition of consciousness, right?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
pcpcpc 8y ago
Derk Pereboom posits that there is no free will but that fact is not inconsistent with moral responsibility. http://derk-pereboom.net/views/ http://derk-pereboom.net/views/
waynecochran 8y ago
Although, as we show in [1], determinism may formally be shown to be consistent, there is no longer any evidence that supports it, in view of the fact that classical physics has been superseded by quantum mechanics, a non-deterministic theory. I am surprised at the number of folks who still try to argue that science (particularly physics) has "proved" that these is no free will. This may in fact be true, but you can't argue that it follows from Physics in a post-Quantum world.
- gerbilly 8y ago
  Yeah exactly, what does quantum mechanics even have to do with it? This is just scientism if you ask me.
- lastofus 8y ago
  The followup argument is usually something along the lines of quantum mechanics is just probabilistic as far as we know. Quantum physics doesn't allow for free will in an otherwise deterministic universe, any more than hooking up a RNG to a computer allows for the computer to have free will.
  - waynecochran 8y ago
    Not in my understanding. The probabilities are only involved when a quantum superposition collapses to a classic state. Note that the paper makes it clear that probabilities are not used anywhere in their argument.
ThomPete 8y ago
Most people miss the point when they discuss free will because they focus on the idea of whether we are free to make decisions in real time. Free will is something that happens OVER TIME. In other words you have free will to the extent that your previous decisions allowed you to survive which was again based on other previous decisions and so you are constantly accumulating and changing "code to your program" so to speak because you can reflect on the results of your pre-defined behavior.
michael2l 8y ago
Quite apart from the math and science of deterministic physics and probabilistic quantum physics, there's a broader evolutionary question. Why would we evolve this hallucination that we have free will, if in fact we fundamentally don't? It seems like a lot of effort and metabolic energy on a moment-by-moment basis to maintain the illusion. I guess you could make an argument we're in some sort of simulation the maker of which required this illusion to be present for reasons of their own. But the conscious awareness of our moment-by-moment availability of choice is one of the most difficult things to deny even if you're incredibly skeptical about everything else you can observe through the senses (a la descartes).
- tasty_freeze 8y ago
  Why do you think maintaining the sense of free will is evolutionarily costly? If anything, to me, it seems like a heuristic shortcut that is imperfect but is useful most of the time, and saves resources overall. As a close analogy, we've all said something like, "My car wants to pull to the right." Nobody claims the car has free will, but "wanting to pull to the right" is a useful way to both communicate and to think about it. What is is in the car's makeup that causes it to want to pull to the right? There are plenty other examples where people have false beliefs yet still cling to them. If you ask drivers if they are better or worse than average, about 10% will say worse. My point is, having false beliefs doesn't always exert a strong evolutionary pressure.
TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
This is a subtle version of the Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy. Assumption: free will is defined by unpredictability and indeterminacy. (Actually not a given. This is hotly debated, to put it mildly.) Therefore if a physical system behaves in an intrinsically unpredictable way (quantum systems do...) it is showing evidence of free will. If you start from the premise that the universe and everything in it is sentient (etc, etc) this makes perfect sense. Of a sort. But it's not in any way a proof of that premise. In fact it doesn't even come close to being a proof. All it does is take the long way around proving that constrained unpredictable systems are in fact unpredictable but constrained - something that's proven by Kochen-Sprecker anyway. Then it pulls the free will rabbit out of the hat and says "Of course! This is just like human free will!" I'm going to go with "no" on this one. The irony is that KS is usually taken as a proof that quantum systems aren't just indeterminate, they're essentially partially unknowable. There is no possible one-to-one mapping between states and observables. If particle free will existed there would either be a tighter constraint on the possible mappings, which would disprove KS, or the free will would be indistinguishable from quantum randomness, which makes it an untestable metaphysical epiphenomenon. Either way it doesn't add anything to our understanding. Of course if someone designs an experiment where particles use observables to signal their consciousness to human experimenters, I'll change my mind about that.

110 points by lainon 8y ago

I am myself skeptic of this. First of all - How does on control indeterminism? And does QM indeterminism really play a role on a neuronal level? This paper by Tegmark argues it doesn't - https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9907009 https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9907009

mannykannot 8y ago
This seems to be a weak free will theorem: "Our provocative ascription of free will to elementary particles is deliberate, since our theorem asserts that if experimenters have a certain freedom, then particles have exactly the same kind of freedom." To me, they seem to be saying that the freedom of free will is a limited freedom from determinism, not the freedom of being able to choose a future. The theory seems to be developed within the Copenhagen Interpretation framework of metaphysics, and I wonder if it is compatible with Many Worlds.

jatsign 8y ago

Can anyone dumb this down for me?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
all2 8y ago
> It asserts, roughly, that if indeed we humans have free will, then elementary particles already have their own small share of this valuable commodity. More precisely, if the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus in a certain measurement, then the particle’s response (to be pedantic—the universe’s response near the particle) is not determined by the entire previous history of the universe. That about sums it up. I think (and I could be very wrong) that the last sentence refers to a particle's lack of dependence on previous state; that for a measurement, only the present state will inform the measure. That seems to infer something about the idea of 'free will', that is, 'free will' in this context seems to refer to an independence from prior states. Loosely, we can choose to step out of the path of our past's falling dominoes and change the course of our lives. Or something like that.
- criddell 8y ago
  Is that basically saying that at some level, we should be able to see effects that have no cause? Is that what freewill boils down to?
  - all2 8y ago
    I don't know. "effects with no cause" makes me think of the 'quantum soup' at zero-point energy levels: things just appearing and disappearing in some random way. I don't know if that could be classified as 'causeless' though.
  - cryptonector 8y ago
    More like effects whose cause we can't ascribe... would have a free will component to their cause. It seems a bit silly because wherever you can ascribe a cause, there's no free will, so when is there free will?
    - criddell 8y ago
      > so when is there free will? I open to the possibility that the answer is never.
shellac 8y ago
Suppose you're told that somebody has halved an apple and put the two pieces in separate boxes. You are given a box, and the other is sent to a friend on the other side of the planet, who phones you when it arrives. You both open the boxes and describe what you see. "Oh my half has the stalk", "oh, mine doesn't". "I see 5 pips", "so do I". There are a bunch correlated (and anti-correlated) observations about the two halves. Nothing surprising about this. The quantum equivalent seems to work the same way at first glance. However on closer inspection there are some weird correlations that suggest that: * The apple wasn't cut in advance, but the two halves were created and put in the box just before they were opened. * Or maybe the apple was cut in advance, but somehow the person cutting knew what observations I would make ('I have the stalk'). * Or maybe the boxes were never separated but remained paired in 5-d space and only on opening did the apple split. * Or maybe I messaged the apple-cutter back-in-time to say what I would do. * Or something else. My box is so remote from the other relativity (and practicality) surely means I'm causally independent of the other box. And I got to chose my observations freely, nothing influenced me. And yet we know one - or both - of these can't be true. The mention of free-will in the paper is a bit cheeky, really. IIRC in the literature 'parameter-independence' and 'outcome-independence'have been to used to name the sort of factors that feel bad to violate (did I have a free choice about what to observe?) verses supposedly more innocuous quantum magic.

starbeast 8y ago

I been juggling the following three papers for a bit and trying to brush my maths up. I don't know why I feel a hunch between them, but I do know that the hunch is to do with this problem. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.06824.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.06824.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1306.0533.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1306.0533.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.2779.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.2779.pdf I will almost certainly be wrong about whatever it is. However I may have more updates on how wrong and what it is I am wrong about, in maybe a decade or so ;)

simonh 8y ago

I really think this, along with much philosophical musing about free will, is entirely missing the point. Pre-determination is essential to free will. You literally cannot have free will without it. Random choice, or even non-predetermined correlated outcomes of entangled objects don't lead to free will, they lead to uncertain decisions and those are not the same thing. If my decisions are not a product of my prior state, then they are not my decisions. The definition of 'me' is my prior state. If my decisions are unpredictable given complete knowledge of my prior state, and the ability to extrapolate it forward, then the decisions do not come from me. If they're not mine, then I have no responsibility for them. Any discussion of my responsibility for my actions must take into account my personal contribution to the decision as a being. Dualism does not solve this problem. It simply foists a chunk of a person's state into some non-material constituent, but if that constituent does not have a persistent (though presumably malleable) state or does not deterministically contribute to the process, again whence comes responsibility?

all2 8y ago
> The definition of 'me' is my prior state. I don't think this is true. We know that thought and memory are constrained (accessed) at a physical level - at least to some extent. That is, damage to your physical brain can result in diminished or eliminated access to those things. Indeed, thought as we know it seems to be a physically mediated process (perhaps not completely defined by our physical bodies, but at least influenced to some extent). As well, emotion is a physically mediated phenomena. Even our experience of this existence is physically mediated. Without a functioning body we lack the ability to experience. So what does that leave you to be? You are, at your basest existence, the ability to choose. A choice engine with a physical layer; a physical memory, physical emotion, the ability to think. But at your foundation, you choose. You remember, but unless you choose, you are nothing but memory.
- simonh 8y ago
  >I don't think this is true. We know that thought and memory are constrained (accessed) at a physical level - at least to some extent. That is, damage to your physical brain can result in diminished or eliminated access to those things. Sure, the damage changes you. It becomes a new part of your state prior to making a decision. >You remember, but unless you choose, you are nothing but memory. Completely agree, but we don't think really know much about the relationship between how we store memories and how we incorporate those into a decision making process. I may be wrong, I don't know much about neuroscience. My take is though that it doesn't matter. All of that is part of our self. Memories, decision making processes, neurochemistry, it's all part of our state and our decisions are only truly 'ours' to the extent that this state determines or influences them.

dooglius 8y ago

> Another customarily tacit assumption is that experimenters are free to choose between possible experiments. To be precise, we mean that the choice an experimenter makes is not a function of the past Garbage in, garbage out. It isn't clarified whether an experimenter in a nondegenerate superposition of states (will choose x, will choose y, will choose z) is considered to have "free will". If you call that free will, then the result that result that the particle can end up in a superposition of states is not novel. If you don't call that free will, then the assumption is false and the theorem vacuous.

n4r9 8y ago
You need this sort of axiom to eliminate superdeterminism. If an experimenter's choice of direction is fully determined by their past light-cone then a shared physical state in the overlapping past light-cones of A and B could conceivably drum up any correlations it wants. It's a conspiratorial line of thought on a par with Descartes' evil demon, but in a rigorous proof you have to rule these sorts of things out. The axiom comes into play at the top-right of p.229: > ...since by MIN the response of b cannot vary with x, y, z, θ^G_0 is a function just of w
- dooglius 8y ago
  Right, I see how it's being used in the proof, my point is that what the theorem proves, regardless of how the notion of "is determined by" is clarified, is not at all interesting or surprising.
  - n4r9 8y ago
    It's essentially a recasting of Bell's Theorem; in that sense it's both interesting and surprising if you thought that local hidden variables might still explain quantum theory. All you need - for both this and Bell's proof - is that directions are chosen with sufficient "randomness" or "freedom" so as to be considered independent of their past light cones. At least, independent enough so that the previously quoted step is possible.

ttflee 8y ago

Is this another counter-Sokalian paper for fun?

ganzuul 8y ago

If life has meaning, will is not free. - This is the strongest statement that I think can be said about the subject. There is a great conceptual distance between the self-assertion popuparized by Descartes and the theories and observations of physics. Science, even cosmology, has a very long way to go before its methods begin to answer the questions of philosophy.

esotericn 8y ago

Free will is not well defined. What does it mean for "will" to be "free"? If you could rewind time around one of your decisions, and replay it, you'd make the same decision every time, unless there was a random element involved, because the state would be the same every time. And if there's a random element involved, it's not really your will, is it?

ifdefdebug 8y ago
Your decision is between black and red while looking at the spinning roulette wheel. The random element is the outcome of your bet, which can not possibly be inferred from the current state at the time of making the decision. So if I could rewind and replay, and actually make a different decision each time, it would really be my will, I think. Most, if not all, real-world decisions take a non-zero uncertainty about the outcome into account.
- esotericn 8y ago
  In that case, you didn't "will" the different decision, it was a result of your internal RNG.
  - tylerjwilk00 8y ago
    It's not random though - it is probabilistic. And even if it was an internal 'RNG' it is is still _their's_ not someone else's.
    - esotericn 8y ago
      If you take an action based on determining the probabilities of an event, you would take that action every single time because the state would be identical every time. You look at the roulette board. You bet on red. We rewind time. You still bet on red. The state is identical. Did _you_ come up with that decision? Of course you did, who else could have? My claim is not that there's no "you". It's that "free will" is meaningless unless we use a weird interpretation of terminology. If you'd do the same thing every time, there's no 'freedom'. If you do different things, but it's based on some sort of tiebreaker RNG, there's no 'will'.

EamonnMR 8y ago

I've honestly had trouble understanding how one would go about defining free will in a way that it could be observed. I can explain how I made my decisions and non-decisions, I know the difference between freedom and duress, but I have yet to see a definition of what free will is meant to mean, and why I am supposed to have it, while dice, my phone, and a plant growing towards the sun are not. It probably also requires a strong definition of consciousness, right?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

pcpcpc 8y ago

Derk Pereboom posits that there is no free will but that fact is not inconsistent with moral responsibility. http://derk-pereboom.net/views/ http://derk-pereboom.net/views/

waynecochran 8y ago

Although, as we show in [1], determinism may formally be shown to be consistent, there is no longer any evidence that supports it, in view of the fact that classical physics has been superseded by quantum mechanics, a non-deterministic theory. I am surprised at the number of folks who still try to argue that science (particularly physics) has "proved" that these is no free will. This may in fact be true, but you can't argue that it follows from Physics in a post-Quantum world.

gerbilly 8y ago
Yeah exactly, what does quantum mechanics even have to do with it? This is just scientism if you ask me.
lastofus 8y ago
The followup argument is usually something along the lines of quantum mechanics is just probabilistic as far as we know. Quantum physics doesn't allow for free will in an otherwise deterministic universe, any more than hooking up a RNG to a computer allows for the computer to have free will.
- waynecochran 8y ago
  Not in my understanding. The probabilities are only involved when a quantum superposition collapses to a classic state. Note that the paper makes it clear that probabilities are not used anywhere in their argument.

ThomPete 8y ago

Most people miss the point when they discuss free will because they focus on the idea of whether we are free to make decisions in real time. Free will is something that happens OVER TIME. In other words you have free will to the extent that your previous decisions allowed you to survive which was again based on other previous decisions and so you are constantly accumulating and changing "code to your program" so to speak because you can reflect on the results of your pre-defined behavior.

michael2l 8y ago

Quite apart from the math and science of deterministic physics and probabilistic quantum physics, there's a broader evolutionary question. Why would we evolve this hallucination that we have free will, if in fact we fundamentally don't? It seems like a lot of effort and metabolic energy on a moment-by-moment basis to maintain the illusion. I guess you could make an argument we're in some sort of simulation the maker of which required this illusion to be present for reasons of their own. But the conscious awareness of our moment-by-moment availability of choice is one of the most difficult things to deny even if you're incredibly skeptical about everything else you can observe through the senses (a la descartes).

tasty_freeze 8y ago
Why do you think maintaining the sense of free will is evolutionarily costly? If anything, to me, it seems like a heuristic shortcut that is imperfect but is useful most of the time, and saves resources overall. As a close analogy, we've all said something like, "My car wants to pull to the right." Nobody claims the car has free will, but "wanting to pull to the right" is a useful way to both communicate and to think about it. What is is in the car's makeup that causes it to want to pull to the right? There are plenty other examples where people have false beliefs yet still cling to them. If you ask drivers if they are better or worse than average, about 10% will say worse. My point is, having false beliefs doesn't always exert a strong evolutionary pressure.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago

This is a subtle version of the Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy. Assumption: free will is defined by unpredictability and indeterminacy. (Actually not a given. This is hotly debated, to put it mildly.) Therefore if a physical system behaves in an intrinsically unpredictable way (quantum systems do...) it is showing evidence of free will. If you start from the premise that the universe and everything in it is sentient (etc, etc) this makes perfect sense. Of a sort. But it's not in any way a proof of that premise. In fact it doesn't even come close to being a proof. All it does is take the long way around proving that constrained unpredictable systems are in fact unpredictable but constrained - something that's proven by Kochen-Sprecker anyway. Then it pulls the free will rabbit out of the hat and says "Of course! This is just like human free will!" I'm going to go with "no" on this one. The irony is that KS is usually taken as a proof that quantum systems aren't just indeterminate, they're essentially partially unknowable. There is no possible one-to-one mapping between states and observables. If particle free will existed there would either be a tighter constraint on the possible mappings, which would disprove KS, or the free will would be indistinguishable from quantum randomness, which makes it an untestable metaphysical epiphenomenon. Either way it doesn't add anything to our understanding. Of course if someone designs an experiment where particles use observables to signal their consciousness to human experimenters, I'll change my mind about that.