Warp wrote:
>   In the physical world as we know it, at macroscopic levels, every action
> is deterministic: 

Not really. For example, you cannot play billiards without feedback. Because 
of the roundness of the balls, every tiny mistake is going to get amplified 
and magnified. By the time you've taken 15 shots, the accumulated 
uncertainty would be larger than the diameter of the cue ball. So if you 
tried to program a robot to play pool by dead reckoning, you're doomed to fail.

> but the events
> are nevertheless deterministic and predetermined. In theory every single
> event can be perfectly predicted from earlier events all the way to infinity.

Nope. That's flaw #1. :-)

>   This changes at atomic scales, where quantum effects can be truely
> non-deterministic and unpredictable, in other words, random. This is the
> exact opposite of determinism and predetermination: Here the outcome is
> purely random (in the absolute and ultimate sense) and there is no physical
> way of predicting it (as far as we know).

It can be predicted statistically with great precision, and differences, as 
they add up, tend to cancel out instead of reinforce for arbitrarily chosen 
starting conditions. Hence, things *look* deterministic on a large scale 
because there's so many ways the same final situation could have come about 
that it swamps the ways in which it could have happened exceptionally.

>   Sometimes quantum effects can escalate to macroscopic scales, and thus
> affect macroscopic events. 

Often. Perhaps even usually. Polarized sunglasses. Semiconductors. Glare 
reflecting off a window. Lasers.

> (How often this happens, I have no idea, as I am no physicist.)

I think the question is unclear enough that it would be hard to give an 
answer. Recalling that QED is statistically very reliable, would the result 
of an atomic bomb going off be considered "completely random"? One certainly 
cannot affect when a nucleus will decay, but neither do people overly worry 
about a disarmed bomb randomly exploding.

Look at it like shuffling cards. Take a deck and shuffle it well, then 
examine the order. What's the likelihood you got exactly that order of 
cards? (1/52!)  A terribly remote possibility. The same probability, indeed, 
that you'd shuffle them right back into standard unshuffled order. The 
difference is that there's so many "random" shufflings of the deck and very 
few "exceptional" shufflings of the deck that one doesn't distinguish 
different random situations.

If you look at the details of exactly where a pool ball comes to rest, there 
are huge numbers of ways in which it could come to rest that are essentially 
equivalent to our course senses. If the center is 0.01 degree hotter than 
the edge, we'd not notice that, for example, even tho that would be a random 
fluctuation as "important" as being 0.01% further to the left.

>   Now we come to the philosophical concept of human free choice. By its
> very definition free choice is necessarily something which transcends both
> deterministic and random behavior. In other words, free choice can change
> a deterministic chain of events non-randomly. Thus it overrides both
> determinism at macroscopic levels and randomness at quantum levels.

If that's how you define it, yes.  I think you've defined yourself into a 
corner, tho.

>   Thus if human free choice exists, it means that the human mind which is
> making this choice transcends both the deterministic macroscopic and the
> random quantum physics.
> 
>   There are only two possible conclusions we can make from this:
> 
> 1) The human mind does not transcend beyond the physical world, which means
> that free choice does not exist. Everything the human mind comes up with is
> predetermined by deterministic events, sometimes garbled by random quantum
> effects. This is not free choice.

There's huge amounts of evidence that wanting to have an event happen has no 
affect on whether the event happens, either at the quantum level or the 
everyday level.

> 2) The human mind does transcend beyond the physical world as we know it,
> and is able to perform true choices which change deterministic chains of
> events in non-random ways. In other words, the human consciousness is more
> than just the electric impulses in our brain.
> 
>   The religious (and possibly agnostic) point of view chooses option number 2.
> The atheist point of view must therefore choose option number 1, unless an
> explanation of how the human mind can affect deterministic events in a
> non-random way is given. Free choice is just an illusion.

FWIW, I don't think this has anything to do with religion or atheism. It's a 
question of (1) philosophy, namely "what do we mean by 'free will' or 
'making a choice'" and (2) science, answering "does this actually happen?"

You don't need a deity to have free will, and you don't need to be an 
atheist to think free choice isn't what you defined it to be. (I'm reluctant 
to say "it's an illusion", because I think you've defined "free will" as 
something other than what it is.)

(As an aside, I think the only reason this question is even involved in 
religion at all is the "if god is good, why is there evil?"  I don't think 
those worshiping the Roman gods, for example, ever asked if they really had 
free will, because the Roman gods weren't omnipotent and were far from being 
omnibenevolent.)



I think the first problem comes from defining "free will" as being able to 
make a choice that's neither deterministic nor random. (I'd say "not 
deterministic but controllable" or something, perhaps.) This is a "mu" kind 
of question, because you haven't said what it means to make a choice.

You obviously can't choose to breathe underwater or jump out of a window 
without falling. So what does "making a choice" mean? There are several 
possible ways you could behave, and you "decide" on one of them. What is the 
process of the "decision"? Could you have decided on the other one? You 
*think* you could have, but you can't really know. As far as we know, 
there's no way to find out if you could have made the other decision. So, if 
you like, by definition it's an illusion: the only place you're making the 
decision is in your mind, and the only place the other decision ever played 
out is in your imagination, as a hallucination of what would happen if you 
made the other choice. (Rather a different definition of "free will", and 
not what you meant, granted. Just pointing out there what the importance of 
the definition of what you mean is.)


Penrose has hypothesized that since there are structures in the brain that 
have quantum effects in them (as in, they appear to have evolved such that 
their *purpose* is to have quantum effects affect them strongly), 
deterministic computers can't "think" or "be aware". (At least, that's my 
understanding. I never read "The Emperor's New Mind".) Unfortunately, he has 
zero evidence and nobody who is actually a neurologist or anything actually 
agrees with him.

On the other hand, there's a great deal of scientific experimentation that 
shows you actually make most "decisions" quite a long time after you've 
acted on them. Stuff like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet (which 
is admittedly open to dispute et al) and other more modern stuff which I've 
read but which I can't track down online right now. This unauthoritative 
blog post does give an idea of the level of detail that we already know, tho.
http://shamelesslyatheist.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/the-science-of-free-will-part-i/







My take is that the concept of free will applies only to those who are 
self-aware. If you have a model in your mind of how you yourself think and 
behave, then "free will" consists of running that model, seeing the 
predicted results of behavior, and comparing the different sets of results 
to "decide" which behavior to follow. And by "decide", of course, I mean 
running the results thru some part of your brain that does that stuff, and 
redirecting the results to cause the behavior to happen.  In this case, free 
will is *literally* the illusion that you tried out those different choices 
and picked on. "Free will" in this definition is the ability to simulate the 
future with you in it (while *not* carrying out that behavior, mind), and it 
is thus quite literally an illusion or hallucination (except that we know it 
is, so we're not disturbed by it).  (This assumes, of course, that you're 
talking about something long term, like which food store you'll drive to 
this afternoon, rather than something like which hand to pick up the fork 
with for the next bite of food.)

Hence, in my take, if everything *were* deterministic, but still to 
complicated to predict what someone else might do, then that person has free 
will. It's even possible that free will is an attribute of an association 
between two beings, and not an attribute of a particular person. (Of course, 
for the most part this is always true - the grass isn't green, but rather 
you see green grass instead of some other color grass. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics )

Also, in my take, it's not a binary question of "do I have free will?" It's 
"how much free will do I have?"  I'm not one to think that I can alter the 
laws of physics just by wanting to really hard, so I don't go with the 
supernatural explanation for free will myself. But I expect you could have 
guessed that already. :-)


Here's a question to ponder: is what you do voluntarily and intentionally 
but not consciously "free will"?  If you wake up to find your house is on 
fire, and you panic, and the next thing you know you're standing in the 
front yard with the alarm clock in your hand, did you pick up the alarm 
clock out of "free will"?  Was it a "choice" to pick it up?  If you were 
once frightened by a snake as a child, is it "free will" to shy away from 
snakes as an adult, even if your intelligence knows they're harmless? Do you 
"choose" to behave according to that phobia?  What if you're driving, and 
something happens in front of you, and you stomp on the brakes to avoid an 
accident. Was this "free will" if it happened so fast you relied on 
practice/reflex/etc? You *could* have decided not to slow down, perhaps turn 
instead, or perhaps get into the accident, if you had time, but your 
experience and preparedness allowed you to react quickly and "without 
thinking" about what the right decision would be. So was your decision to 
hit the brakes a "free choice"?

I'm throwing out those ideas to think about, without trying to imply that 
any particular answer is "right".


-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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