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"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 unpredictab
by 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!