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Do Subatomic Particles Have Free Will?
- Eliezer 18y agoNo.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- gaika 18y agoBecause to admit that there's free will is to admit that there's something above physical laws.
- hugh 18y agoNothing is above physical laws. That's not an assertion, that's a definition.
- jordyhoyt 18y agoThis kind of statement is just as absurd as saying "God did it" for everything we don't understand.
- kaens 18y agoNo, it is not. If we discover something that appears to disobey physical laws, then we clearly either don't understand the laws that it disobeys and need to re-examine their definitions, or are making a problem in observation of the phenomenon.
- yters 18y agoIsn't the phrase "physical laws" redundant then?
- jordyhoyt 18y agoSo your dogma here is that everything obeys physical laws that are never broken. Although things seem to always act in a certain way, we have no reason to believe that all laws will always hold. Of course, that is an assumption I must regularly make in order to be sane, but it is nothing more than that: an assumption that the experiment I carried out yesterday will (all things being equal) have the same results today.
- maxklein 18y agoYou are SO wrong. The physical laws are physical laws because we observed them that way, and we defined them that way. Gravity? Time? Small c? Matter? Mass? Those are the physical laws, but they are based on our unique observation. The truth is that we cannot know if there are things that are 'above' these laws, because we are not capable of observing outside of these laws. You are eyes are made of matter and mass, if something existed that was fundamentally different, how could you deal with it with your eyes? You can't see it or observe it.
- dcurtis 18y agoMaxklein, I have an idea for you. After you write something, read it again and add "you idiot!" to the end. If it sounds like the tone is compatible, then rewrite what you said until it is polite. Anyway, with respect to the topic: you're suggesting that there is the possibility of a higher level of knowledge beyond what we can observe with our physical eyeballs. This is a fallacy that goes against everything science stands for. Science is the platform upon which you build models that describe the physical world. For example, if we witness the effects of gravity occurring over and over in many experiments, then we can create a model of what we saw: the Law of Gravity. Then we can make the assumption that whenever there is mass, there is gravity. So far, it works. If something can be physically shown to break/violate the law, then it will be reexamined and the model will be changed to satisfy the new information. There is no evidence of anything above or beyond the physical/theoretical models of science. To suggest there is implies faith. Are you religious, maxklein?
- maxklein 18y agoI'm not religious, and I have no inclination to argue a simple and obvious point. Observation is inherently limited by our observational capabilities, and this is not a radical thought, it's a very very basic thought. So your argument is not just wrong, it's incredibly wrong, and you should not be making it. For example: Electrons. To posit that there are electrons, but viewed strictly from a 16th century perspective is a position that cannot be observed based off the technology available to them at that time. As a purist, I take offense when anybody tries to claim that observation and experimentation can be anything but assumptions. It is something we observe to be a certain way, but very restricted by our particular viewpoint. You think you are a man of science, but what you actually are is one of those people who said the earth could not be round because it looks flat. I've said something that is perfectly realisitic if one has some imagination, and you immediately shoot it down because it does not conform to how you think scientists should think. Free your mind, and learn to deal with uncertainty.
- river_styx 18y agoOnly if you arbitrarily limit your definition of "free will" to mean something non-physical.
- gaika 18y agoThere are 3 aspects of "free will": religious, ethical and scientific. In the scientific case "free will" implies that the actions of the body, including the brain and the mind, are not wholly determined by physical causality.
- river_styx 18y agoScience isn't really concerned with things that aren't wholly determined by physical causality. I'd say the scientific approach to free will would be neurological: e.g., what physical processes within the brain give rise to the emergence of free choice (be it an illusion or otherwise). UPDATE: There are cases where a patient experiences loss of brain function leading to an inability to make decisions. They require a guardian to make even the most trivial choices for them (e.g. what to wear, in what order to eat the items in their meal, etc.) What exactly have they lost? An answer to this question, scientific or otherwise, would be relevant to free will.
- hugh 18y agoEven if they did, I don't think they'd have anything interesting to make decisions about.
- dominik 18y agoIdiotic title, but interesting article.
- gaika 18y agoThis question of free will only makes sense if you believe in god. If you're an atheist then the question just doesn't make sense. Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will
- river_styx 18y agoHuh? If anything, the existence of God threatens the concept of free will. It's kinda hard to feel free if there's some omniscient, omnipotent dude who knows and controls everything that will happen ahead of time...
- gaika 18y agoDefinition of "free will" is the ability to act free of the will of god. What do you mean by "free will"?
- river_styx 18y agoFree will is the capacity of an individual to make his/her own choices and either to act or not act on those decisions. It really has nothing to do with God outside of theology and philosophy of religion.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- gaika 18y agoBy this definition any control system will have a "free will".
- river_styx 18y agoYes, there are a lot of these kind of issues in and around the concept of free will, which is why there's a whole branch of philosophy dealing with it. But the point is that free will doesn't require God. You can believe in a perfectly deterministic, godless universe (or fluctuating quantum field universe) and also believe in a compatibalist form of free will. UPDATE: A brief summary of compatibalism: http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/V014SECT1 http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/V014SECT1
- sysop073 18y ago"he's content with the notion that free will exists only effectively (not theoretically)" I don't understand that; how can something exist in reality but not in theory? That implies to me that the theory is wrong
- rms 18y agoIt's a way for people to recognize that determinism is all we have while simultaneously saying that your decisions are still real.
- qqq 18y agoThe notion that determinism has something to do with free will is a common misconception. In fact, indeterminism would not help with the free will situation in any way. Indeterminism just means part of physics is random. The best way to reconcile free will with the various attacks is to say that it is an explanation -- the best one we have -- and to reject reductionism.
- Hexstream 18y agoMaybe it has something to do with emerging behavior?
- river_styx 18y agoI don't understand that; how can something exist in reality but not in theory? That's kinda the point of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which prove that there are definite limitations in formal (read theoretical) systems.
- yters 18y agoAxioms aren't part of a theory?
- whacked_new 18y agoYour set of axioms will never be complete.
- kirse 18y agoQuantum Mechanics always blows my mind and I only ever end up frustrated that I don't know the answer to how it all works. Even "basic" stuff like the Double-Slit experiment keeps me daydreaming for awhile.
- dmfdmf 18y ago"John Conway and Simon Kochen, claim to have proven that if humans have even the tiniest amount of free will, then atoms themselves must also behave unpredictably." I think there is a big equivocation here. Free-will does not mean "unpredictable" -- which as a human trait, is a consequence of free-will not its essence. More to the point, free-will is a property of human consciousness not atoms, etc. If the authors have (unwittingly) proven anything it's that QM commits the mind-projection-fallacy as specifically identified by Edwin Jaynes in "Probability Theory" or more generally a form of Ayn Rand's primacy-of-consciousness error in many of her articles.
- gregwebs 18y agoThe title of this article is stupid- and leads to the mixups you are talking about. But if you read the article, your quoted statement is not an equivocation, it is the specific paradox the scientists propose. Free will does not mean unpredictability, but if unpredictability is a consequence of free will, and there is no unpredictability, then we can say that free will does not exist.
- anamax 18y agoThere is unpredictability, but there are also things that are unpredictable that don't have free will. Consider three armed pendulum.
- dmfdmf 18y agoUnpredictability of what is the consquence of FW?
- dmfdmf 18y agoI hardly think FW needs an existence/non-existence proof because without it you can't have knowledge, concepts, language, morality, math, science nor HN discussions!
- mattmaroon 18y agoI tend to agree with Einstein. Since the moment people started thinking, they've attributed to randomness that which they don't understand. I'll certainly admit the possibility, but to say definitively that some things are simply unpredictable just seems too arrogant. On the other hand, that has nothing to do with free will. Even if true randomness exists, and we suppose that even the ability to act randomly would not fall under most's definition of "free will".
- nazgulnarsil 18y agothe question of free will is a foolish way of phrasing things that leads to circular logic. free will is what the process of optimizing a decision tree feels like when you are the one doing the optimizing.
- Ardit 18y agoIsn't the basis of science built on the proposition that everything obeys a set of rules? As such, there is no free will, there is simply responses to outside influences which are grounded on some rules. Hence, how can he say there is no algorithm to the way that the particle responds? How can he possibly know? Or is he conducting what could be called "pop science" you know like stuff that people are walking faster today than twenty years ago