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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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