Free Will - The science of.

[gaara]

Does Quantum Mechanics explain/predict/allow that there is human free will or no free will?

[Klaynos]

If quantum mechanics is deterministic there can be no free will... If it is not then there can be, whether it is or isn't is the subject of some debate.

[bascule]

If quantum mechanics is deterministic there can be no free will

 

Fallacy: false dichotomy

 

And funny, this same thread is going on over at TFN

[Rocket Man]

if it's deterministic, you're playing to a script. pretend to enjoy yourself.

[Sisyphus]

If it's not deterministic, then it's random. That's probably not what you want as far as "free will" is concerned. However, I know perfectly well the universe is deterministic/random, and yet I have will, and reason, and desire, and happiness, and morality. I just don't have the "free" part. But when I think about it more, I realize the "free" doesn't actually mean anything...

[Mokele]

I'm unconvinced QM is even relevant to 'free will'. Even if quantum events are stochastic rather than deterministic, does that actually affect things at the scale of a whole neuron, or does all that probability just 'cancel out' to give a nice average value by the time you get to the scale of a whole cell?

 

Remember, neurons don't operate on a quantum scale; they're actually fairly sizable cells, and some particular ones have axons so large they can be seen with the naked eye, such as the squid giant axon or Mauthner nerves.

 

Mokele

[gaara]

hooray. mokele said something challenging....

[Rocket Man]

i think it's more the way quantum scale events outside the brain compound to make something operate very slightly differently (to other ways it could turn out) to give us a different stimulus to process.

[[Tycho?]]

I've never understood why this question was important at all. It seems like we have free will. My will is to eat the yogurt covered raisins sitting next to me; I then do so. If I were destined to do this, I am certainly not aware of it, nor is anybody else. This would only matter if time travel to the past were possible, in which case you could actually test to see if it was deterministic or not.

[Rocket Man]

i think the closest you can get to measurable "free will" is basing decisions on thermal noise, otherwise you can predict people's actions and manipulate them accordingly. the vast and complex network that is the brain has some pretty simple reactions to stimulus.

[bombus]

I'm unconvinced QM is even relevant to 'free will'. Even if quantum events are stochastic rather than deterministic, does that actually affect things at the scale of a whole neuron, or does all that probability just 'cancel out' to give a nice average value by the time you get to the scale of a whole cell?

 

Remember, neurons don't operate on a quantum scale; they're actually fairly sizable cells, and some particular ones have axons so large they can be seen with the naked eye, such as the squid giant axon or Mauthner nerves.

 

Mokele

 

Neurons might operate at the quantum scale (or the microtubules might at any rate) - in fact that is exactly what Hammeroff and Penrose are suggesting:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_consciousness

 

IMHO Conciousness is the ability to affect the movement/states of sub-atomic particles - it's a micro form of telekenisis. It's this ability that gives us free will. Of course I cannot prove any of this!!

 

Either that or we're just in it for the ride - a horrible thought!

[Sisyphus]

 

It's this ability that gives us free will.

 

How so? Why do we affect the state of the particle in one way and not another? If there's a reason, then it's still deterministic, just immaterial determinism. If there isn't a reason, then it's random, which has nothing to do with "will" at all.

 

IMO, these attempts to hide "free will" in the last place we're unable to look are silly and misguided.

 

Either that or we're just in it for the ride - a horrible thought!

 

Why is it horrible? You have a will - that's not in dispute. Neither is the fact that we perceive them as "free." What does it matter, then, if it's ultimately deterministic?

[foodchain]

How so? Why do we affect the state of the particle in one way and not another? If there's a reason, then it's still deterministic, just immaterial determinism. If there isn't a reason, then it's random, which has nothing to do with "will" at all.

 

IMO, these attempts to hide "free will" in the last place we're unable to look are silly and misguided.

 

 

 

Why is it horrible? You have a will - that's not in dispute. Neither is the fact that we perceive them as "free." What does it matter, then, if it's ultimately deterministic?

 

Yes but you need thumbs and the ability to move and graze or consume you see. Put a person in a box, something like a prison, and they cease to exist anymore. Maybe that’s why we do such, I mean build prisons and all.

 

IN reality as I would understand it what does it say about something like geomorphology for instance. I mean something was occurring outside of human or other living things ability to influence it.

 

As in relation to the debate question, free will, well I see what people are getting at, but you cant freely start to speak just any language you want in an instant just as you are not freely simply able to grasp the reality of the universe factually in an instant, or simply free will yourself into flight. If memory serves the more human part of us or the very frontal lobe of our brains allows for introspection of some kind, though I don’t know if that ability to control or manipulate is simply akin to just us, other living things also make decisions and have variance of personality, such as not all dogs act alike for instance, or repeat in a total repetition like a loop in some robotic fashion dong the same thing at the same time in the same absolute carbon copy way. This is where science being divergent in regards to fields hurts overall understanding me thinks. Maybe some overall filed of science for such a purpose needs to be generated, that looks at these questions in an interdisciplinary frame, I mean going from this debate board you see people that have extremes in knowledge in certain areas, but are totally lacking in others. Then giant questions like this of course suffer from such. I think such tools are really what happen to be required for serious empirical observations and truths to be devised, besides that its a subjective battle of perceptions really, much like politics or most any human institution overall.

 

A simple question, how would free will derive from organic evolution? How would you speak on that in terms of QM, actually what would be the framwork for empirical studies into such even.

[Severian]

I agree with Mokele that determinism is a red herring. It makes no difference.

 

But before you ask if free-will is compatible with science, you had better define 'free-will'. I generally find that philosophers who believe free-will is compatible with science have a somewhat odd (in my opinion) definition of free-will.

[tauridtrain*]

Does Quantum Mechanics explain/predict/allow that there is human free will or no free will?

 

not to pull it away from QM, but i thought this put an interesting fold into the original question. human free will? molecular free will? quantum free will? garden snake free will?

 

If I'm not mistaken, QM could never explain/predict/allow consciousness (interface) only the other way around...the whole "observation creates existense" thing, right?

[bascule]

Neurons might operate at the quantum scale (or the microtubules might at any rate) - in fact that is exactly what Hammeroff and Penrose are suggesting:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_consciousness

 

Did you read the criticism?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_of_the_Mind

 

Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have constructed a theory in which human consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in microtubules. But Max Tegmark, in a paper in Physical Review E, calculated that the time scale of neuron firing and excitations in microtubules is slower than the decoherence time by a factor of at least 10,000,000,000. The reception of the paper is summed up by this statement in his support: "Physicists outside the fray, such as IBM's John Smolin, say the calculations confirm what they had suspected all along. 'We're not working with a brain that's near absolute zero. It's reasonably unlikely that the brain evolved quantum behavior', he says." The Tegmark paper has been widely cited by critics of the Penrose-Hameroff proposal. It has been claimed by Hameroff to be based on a number of incorrect assumptions, but Tegmark in turn has argued that the critique is invalid.

 

IMHO Conciousness is the ability to affect the movement/states of sub-atomic particles - it's a micro form of telekenisis. It's this ability that gives us free will. Of course I cannot prove any of this!!

 

Either that or we're just in it for the ride - a horrible thought!

 

I think consciousness is information evolving with time, but the information is self-referential and exists within a first-person ontology.

[fredrik]

In a certain sense I agree with the attitude that "what is the difference".

 

But to give an opinion to the question "if the sensation of free we all have contradicts what I know about QM and reality", my personal answer is clearly No. I see no contradiction either.

 

IMO some keys is that some information by it's nature is fundamentally entangled up with other things and can't be shared - it's consumed and becomes part of a self, or observers information set. Thus some pieces of information are available to nonone but me. It's part of what defines me, and distinguishes me from everyone else. To me at least that all fits well within a modern interpretation of quantum worlds. To me there is no difference what I don't know and what I don't know so to speak. I make my own decisions based on information at my hand, which IMO is as scientific as it gets. I think an interesting things is to find the framework that unifies decision making as per a human brain with basic particle scattering phenomena. In my view they have alot in common. A scattering experiment and particle collision is in a certain way a simple example of resolving conflicting information. You can information about an incoming packet about to hit a target. We wonder, what will happen? That *something* will happen we are sure, because nature always finds a way. So what is the logic of resolving the conflict. I think this can be generalized into something what will also cope with generalized decistion and information processing, such as the human brain.

 

But that seems to currently be in the future though. So I am one of those who think that not "classical QM", but well the extension and future physics will also give insight into brain function. At least if the worlds takes the turn I think, that's what we will see coming. This is why I persoanlly advocate abstracted information theoretic models.

 

I think physicists and AI people should keep in contact.

 

/Fredrik

[tauridtrain*]

 

 

 

 

 

I think consciousness is information evolving with time, but the information is self-referential and exists within a first-person ontology.

 

consciousness = interface

[bombus]

Did you read the criticism?

 

 

Just did. I can't really comment on it as I don't know enough about it, but I'm sure Penrose and Hammeroff have answers. I think the criticism misses the point anyway. I don't actually believe that the ORCHOR theory is necessarily correct, and I don't think the microtubule idea is needed anyway. The thing is that the brain works using, among other things, electronic impulses. It would seem that by 'thinking' we are able to affect the pathways of these impulses - which is supposed to be impossible! However the double slit experiment and all that stuff suggests that conscious observation can affect reality. Well, maybe that's the point of conciousness - that's what it does!

 

 

 

I think consciousness is information evolving with time, but the information is self-referential and exists within a first-person ontology.

 

Yes, you could be right. However, I think that there is something 'wierd' about consciousness and it is fundamentally linked to the structure of the universe/reality/spacetime. It would make sense and would be an example of the pure simple beauty of nature. However, I cannot explain this in human words! Its more of a gut feeling - but don't get me into all that buddhist stuff about knowledge being available from within!