3 ms·

The offender I hear most often now a days is trying to use Quantum Mechanics to bring free-will back into play. The idea being that if any part of nature is unp

The offender I hear most often now a days is trying to use Quantum Mechanics to bring free-will back into play. The idea being that if any part of nature is unpredictable, then that could be a mechanism for where free-will might come from. Except that would be like saying your phone is conscious just because it gets bombarded by cosmic waves that sometimes cause bitflips. Just because the machine isn't 100% predictable, doesn't mean that those cosmic waves have any specific goal in mind.

ebg13 6y ago
> The idea being that if any part of nature is unpredictable, then that could be a mechanism for where free-will might come from. Trying to use QM to introduce free will is just another manifestation of the same "mistaking the model for the reality" problem. We have no reason to believe that quantum probability is the end of the road just because we can't see what causes the probabilistic results. For all anyone knows, Einstein was still correct and there is still no god playing dice, just the same old predictable billiard balls at a plane that we can't readily observe.
- hansvm 6y ago
  Perhaps. There's been some interesting work in showing that any hidden variable theories can't give any better predictions than QM probabilities. It remains to be seen whether their hypotheses are valid, but the inference seems sound.
  - ebg13 6y ago
    That's well and good, but "prediction" is an attribute of a representative model, not of reality. Reality doesn't represent or predict itself; it just occurs. The problem of comparing against "hidden variable theories" in this context is that the variables wouldn't be hidden to reality; they'd only be hidden to us. So can we predict better than QM? Maybe not. Does QM describe the truth behind experience? Probably not, and it isn't meant to.

3 ms·

The offender I hear most often now a days is trying to use Quantum Mechanics to bring free-will back into play. The idea being that if any part of nature is unp

by ggggtez 6y ago

ebg13 6y ago
> The idea being that if any part of nature is unpredictable, then that could be a mechanism for where free-will might come from. Trying to use QM to introduce free will is just another manifestation of the same "mistaking the model for the reality" problem. We have no reason to believe that quantum probability is the end of the road just because we can't see what causes the probabilistic results. For all anyone knows, Einstein was still correct and there is still no god playing dice, just the same old predictable billiard balls at a plane that we can't readily observe.
- hansvm 6y ago
  Perhaps. There's been some interesting work in showing that any hidden variable theories can't give any better predictions than QM probabilities. It remains to be seen whether their hypotheses are valid, but the inference seems sound.
  - ebg13 6y ago
    That's well and good, but "prediction" is an attribute of a representative model, not of reality. Reality doesn't represent or predict itself; it just occurs. The problem of comparing against "hidden variable theories" in this context is that the variables wouldn't be hidden to reality; they'd only be hidden to us. So can we predict better than QM? Maybe not. Does QM describe the truth behind experience? Probably not, and it isn't meant to.