
John Conway: Discovering free will (2011) - monort
https://plus.maths.org/content/john-conway-discovering-free-will-part-i
======
dekhn
If you're an armchair quantum theorist, I have a suggestion. Rather than
sitting around positing how the world works, build an actual quantum
experiment, and spend some time just thinking about what's going on with your
intuitive brain and comparing it to what you observe.

It's a bit pricey, but
[https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=69...](https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=6957)
is a full quantum erase experiment with a straightforward, visible path for
the photons.

I personally found that arguing with people with pop-sci level of
understanding of quantum to be pretty exhausting. If you can setup an
experiment like this and understand it, it goes a long way to reconfiguring
your brain to accept the counterintuitive implications of QM.

That said I still hold out an irrational hope for superdeterminism.

~~~
theoh
This is a teaching problem, because (like most things that are taught) there's
no way for most students to verify it.

People who seek out areas of ambiguity or contested models in later life,
after formal or professional education: good luck to them. They would surely
benefit from your suggestion. But the rest of us are going to have to just
believe what we are told, having applied certain personal heuristic filters to
the info we are getting...

------
montenegrohugo
So it seems that quantum particles do not "choose" their state until observed.
I've heard this multiple times now, including in this article (demonstrated by
the 33 sticks analogy).

I'm curious, has any research been done on HOW they "choose" their state when
observed? I imagine it is pretty difficult (if not impossible) to analyze
this, but is there any insight of the factors that make a quantum particle
choose its state? Or is the prevalent theory that it is completely random?

PD: I find this topic fascinating.

~~~
n4r9
This is basically where interpretations of quantum mechanics come into play.
The maths/experiments alone don't tell you much. There are only a few things
we can be sure of, e.g. the particle is not choosing a locally determined,
pre-existing value as in classical mechanics. What you believe after that
comes down to which "comforting illusion" you are most willing to ditch.

~~~
posterboy
> the particle is not choosing a locally determined, pre-existing value as in
> classical mechanics

Translation: The value of to entangled measurements does not allow inference
of a value back in time.

> What you believe after that comes down to which "comforting illusion" you
> are most willing to ditch.

You should drop the illusion that even 1% reading here understand enough
relativity theory to even understand the problem. I don't. I took a few crash
courses on physics and they tried to teach the double slit experiment to us in
the second semester. Of course they had to cut it short and call it "magic".
Of course even scientists parrot popular science when explaining only the
difficulties they face, not the exact physics, I guess.

All this _local hidden variable_ stuff seems like a version of Laplace's
demon. Well of course you don't have enough data. There could always be
another hidden variable. But instead QC takes a statistical approach like
thermodynamics, ignoring single states and looking at, ironically speaking,
the bigger picture.

> What you believe after that comes down to which "comforting illusion" you
> are most willing to ditch.

There's no illusion to ditch. You start with a null hypothesis, so the problem
is which null hypothesis to fall back on. To ditch a hypothesis you need to
understand the experiments in question and the math. The philosphy is an after
thought to rationalize the results, but it doesn't matter much to e.g. the
material scientists doing the field work, and vice versa, the level of
precision of these measurements is so far removed from our every day
understanding that it really has no bearing on Multiverse Theories and all
that popular nonsense.

By the way, non-local hidden variables have not been ruled out. Where's the
difference, distance (ie. locality) might just be a matter of more than 4
dimensions?! Maybe I misunderstand. Different question. Why is time always the
independent variable?

I think the problem is that people like things linear, first order, because I
have a huge problem imagining differential equations, recursion and what not,
even OEDs, not to mention PDEs.

~~~
n4r9
You don't need to understand even _special_ relativity to learn about Bell's
theorem. It's just about measurement settings and local influence.

You're correct that non-local hidden variable theories are still plausible.
Bohmian mechanics is the prominent example. In this case "locality" is the
comfortable illusion that you drop. In Copenhagen it is a kind of realism. In
Many Worlds it is the notion that an observation leads to a single result.
There's no clear way to determine which of these is more like a "null
hypothesis" than the others, so what tends to happen is that people gravitate
towards one or another based on which of the illusions they're more okay with
dropping.

It would be nice to be able to discriminate between interpretations based on
experiment, and a little work has been done on this, but we're not really
anywhere near there yet.

~~~
posterboy
I wrote under the impression that locality would rely on a notion of space-
time. wiki/Local_realism says as much. That then is one notion to knock down.
The null hypothesis here would be non-locality.

Unifying that with GR is the big problem, I hear, especially regarding
gravity.

~~~
n4r9
Without some notion of space-time you could not have a meaningful notion of
locality, therefore Bell's Theorem is a non-issue. But you don't need a
relativistic space-time for Bell's Theorem, any space-time in which physical
influences travel at a bounded speed will suffice.

Bell's Theorem does, however, create an uneasy tension between quantum theory
and special relativity. Tim Maudlin writes quite a good book about this called
"Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity".

------
dingo_bat
> "You mustn’t misread it, we’re not asserting these particles make decisions,
> we’re not saying they have any consciousness. What happens is they act, they
> indubitably act, and which action the particle does is free in this sense,
> it is not a predetermined function of the past. And that’s not the same as
> randomness, oh dear me no!"

Why not? Couldn't seem to find a reason for this assertion. If the behavior of
a particle is not predetermined, how is it not random?

~~~
popnroll
I don't know if this adds anything to your comment; The input of a program is
neither predetermined nor random.

If there is an input "out of our reality", then our reality would not be
predetermined nor would it be random. (Which makes sense for the simulation
hypothesis, which I enjoy having that conversation with my colleagues)

~~~
joe_the_user
It's easy to say X part of a system is "neither predetermined nor random"
within a system defined as open (like a computer program or even a machine
with a dial that can be set by an operator).

When a system is closed, things become harder.

Chaitin's number represents (very roughly) the structure of any complete
mathematical system and it can be shown to be random in the sense of
Kolmogorov.

------
finmin
Conway proves the existence of free will not by nebulous philosophical
arguments but by a combination of quantum mechanics and relativity.

Note the definition of 'free will' here is specific: fundamental particles
future states cannot be purely a function of the information in their past
light cones and so only 'they' can fully determine their future state, and
this is not the same thing as them having random number generators; they truly
are free

~~~
Rounin
As far a I can tell from the article, Conway doesn't prove the existence of
free will at all, not even attempt to do so. Instead he explores what the
implications of free will would be if it exists.

And despite the claim to the contrary, his definition of "free will" isn't
appreciably different from randomness, only he uses the word "randomness" to
mean pseudorandomness, so he sticks the term "free will" on true randomness.

An interesting contribution to quantum physics, presumably, but not a proof of
free will.

~~~
zornthewise
Can you define precisely what you mean by random in this context?

~~~
Rounin
How about "proceeding, made, or occurring without definite aim, reason, or
pattern". From
[https://www.dictionary.com/browse/random](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/random)
.

------
atemerev
For me, this is a bad name for the theorem. Free will is not just
indeterminism, it also includes agency.

If I understood the argument correctly, there is still one possibility of
global determinism: imagine a "God function", a random oracle that gives all
results to all measurements, unpredictable but fully deterministic. Even if it
can't be predicted from previous states of the world, it can still maintain
some sort of "determinism". It can even be tractable: imagine a pseudo-random
generator with some seed and "external" state as this God function. It should
all work.

~~~
n4r9
It "works", although it's an absurdity at the level of Descartes' evil demon.

See superdeterminism:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism)

------
nabla9
The free will as it defined in this context means the ability of an entity to
do truly __random__ choices not dependent on the surrounding environment or
their causal history.

It does not mean that they can intelligently freely choose between the
options. Any cognitive mechanism that does reasoned decisions is not free. It
can just have a random or arbitrary[1] element in it.

I like how Einstein never mixed free will with true randomness. Used the
better metaphor: throwing the dice.

\---

[1]: What I mean with arbitrary is something that derives choices that are not
relevant to the decision decision. For example pseudorandomness.

------
dziungles
I find the topic of the free will to be the most fascinating.

The abscence of the free will ('free will' as it is defined by the pop
culture) is a revolutionary idea because the current world structures and
narratives are based on the notion that free will exists.

It is a much more revolutionary idea than Copernicus' round Earth discovery,
because the illusion of the free will influences our lives more and in
multiple ways.

I'm also a strong believer that the society without the idea of the free will
would be a much more compassionate, healthier and happy.

~~~
coldtea
There's an endless loop in this argument.

Per definition, if free will doesn't exist, then you can't say that "the
illusion of the free will influences our lives more and in multiple ways."

If free will doesn't exist, then our lives, thoughts and choices are
predetermined, and thus they can't be "influenced" by our belief in free will
(or lack thereof).

In fact if we are in such a world, the we can't even opt to believe in free
will or not -- since in such a world, our beliefs are also predetermined
themselves.

The society wont be any more "compassionate, healthier and happy" in such a
world based on any of its beliefs. It would only be compassionated, healthier
and happy if its predetermined to be so.

The only option for your argument to work, would be for free will to exist
while the society doesn't believe it does. Such a society, indeed, could be
more compassionated, healthier and happy (it remains to be proven, but it's a
possibility that non-belief in free will could change things positively, as
long as free will exists for this non-belief to make a difference).

~~~
nailuj
The experience of free will can be real, without free will being real. An
individual believing it has free will, will certainly act different to an
individual that believes all actions are predetermined. I think what your
parent commenter meant was that society might be better off if the notion of
free will was not taken for granted by its individuals, hoping this would
inspire compassion and tolerance. Of course, if free will isn't real, this
isn't something anyone would be able to influence. It would still be possible
to come to that conclusion deterministically.

Looking at this from the angle of social organisation, I think without the
notion of personal responsibility, we lose more good things than we would gain
by assuming life is deterministic, and I don't see how we can keep personal
responsibility when giving up on free will. There is a consideration of
trusting other people to be cooperative if they stand nothing to lose by being
selfish to the detriment of others hidden somewhere in there too.

~~~
tjoff
I don't see how personal responsibility wouldn't be possible without free
will.

Society decides the consequences for wrongdoing (and positive reinforcement).
Free will or not an entity is affected by the consequences of ones action (if
it is able to realize those consequences).

The desire to live in a society where people don't solely act in their own
interests is by itself a driving force (not necessarily fueled by free will).
There are other species that more or less do only act in their own interest
but humans would not have survived if we did, our strength comes from
collaboration.

Even our own, well behaved, developed software "understand" the concept of
consequences and personal responsibility - because we program in that
behavior. Just as evolution has programmed us not to be destructive (with
varying success).

~~~
coldtea
> _I don 't see how personal responsibility wouldn't be possible without free
> will._

Responsibility is not about punishment or lack thereof. That is just a
mechanism to encourage responsibility, not its manifestation.

Responsibility is about being able to do X or Y and choosing right.

A rock is not considered responsible because we don't think it has free will.
If a rock falls on one's head and kills them, that's it. We don't jail it.

In most jurisdictions we don't even hold people that are mad as responsible
for something they committed for the same reason (the US is kind of Old
Testament backwater legally so this might be different there). They don't go
to jail etc.

> _Society decides the consequences for wrongdoing (and positive
> reinforcement). Free will or not an entity is affected by the consequences
> of ones action (if it is able to realize those consequences)._

Without free will there is no "decides".

Everything is pre-decided.

It doesn't even matter if one is guilty or not -- the decision to jail them or
not is already made before they committed anything and is independent of their
actions.

~~~
tjoff
> _In most jurisdictions we don 't even hold people that are mad as
> responsible for something they committed for the same reason (the US is kind
> of Old Testament backwater legally so this might be different there). They
> don't go to jail etc._

It depends on your viewpoint, but the reason for why they don't go to jail
etc. is because it doesn't match the intent with jail. Jail is meant as a
deterrence as well as shielding the society. If it doesn't work as a
deterrence and we have better ways to shield the society from it happening
again (which is "easy" to argue in regards to a mad person) then it doesn't
make sense to force it upon people where it will do more harm than good (we
still do it do a large extent, but society also benefits from its inhabitants
believing that the system is fair and that is a difficult balance).

> _Without free will there is no "decides"._

This also depends on your viewpoint. A computer takes tons of decisions but
they are all based on a given set of inputs, as will society (regardless of
whether free will exist or not).

~~~
coldtea
A computer doesn't take any "free will" decision of its own -- everything is
determined at the time the program is written/loaded.

"Doing X if Y" is not a free will decision if it's already encoded. In a sense
it's not a decision at all. When X, the computer will do Y, period.

(And this also applies if we add some stohastic elements in the mix).

~~~
ajuc
> everything is determined at the time the program is written/loaded

Computer can measure random event and do something basing on that.

> is not a free will decision if it's already encoded

Most probably so is our "free will".

------
flabbergast
Free will does exist, only we don't have it. We live in our own little world
of illusions, thinking and dreaming. In reality every random influence can
change our path.

Reality only exists in the present moment; just try to "be" there for a few
minutes (without thinking) and you realize you don't have "free will". These
are qualities that come with a huge price that almost none of us can or want
to pay for, mainly because we love to dream we already have it.

Examples of people with free will are: Jesus Christ, Buddha, etc..

~~~
montenegrohugo
I'm curious as to what your theological beliefs are? How come you list Jesus
(which I would understand if you are christian) but also, in the same breath,
Buddha?

~~~
ardillaroja
As I understand it there's pretty firm evidence that both Jesus and Buddha
existed and arguably they both had some pretty cool ideas...

~~~
delinka
That doesn’t mean that their ideas weren’t generated by a deterministic
machine inside their skulls. GGP doesn’t explain why he thinks these
individuals had free will and the rest of us don’t. Seems to me even in
“random” yet deterministic systems, you’ll still get “anomalous” behavior that
others within the system catagorize as “somehow different” - still doesn’t
mean their will is freer than others’.

~~~
ardillaroja
Yeah absolutely. I don't agree with his 'examples', but I'll defend to the
death his right to use them in the same breath. It seems absurd to claim a
handful of humans to have free will and others not, not really sure what that
would even mean.

~~~
manfred_macx42
In Buddhism there is a notion that the human conscious experience is a largely
automatic state of "waking sleep" where the individual navigates life
reactively, subject to the karmic law of "cause and effect". (Determinism)

The metaphor of "waking up" is about practicing a present state of mind, such
that one recognizes how they are living life with about the same amount of
awareness as a dream, with the aim to cultivate the same agency of a lucid
dream in waking life. (Free Will)

A Gnostic reading of the New Testament reveals a similar allegorical
prescription to awakening in Jesus' teachings, whereby adherents strive to
attain "Christ Consciousness" and achieve liberation.

Many contemplative traditions hold that human suffering is caused by our
baseline instinctual unconscious tendencies (a feedback loop from hell), and
that it takes sustained practice to become present enough to "take the car off
autopilot" permanently.

A cursory survey of the brutishness of human history is a testament to how
rare this mental state is, and explains the high regard by those who attempt
to emulate the characters (historical or fictional) claimed to have mastered
it.

------
thefranke
The whole free will debate always falls flat on its face because the
distinction between free will and free choice is never made. You may not have
free will, but you have natural tendencies that you gravitate towards.
However, these can only be expressed if you have the choice to do so.

There is a joke that I think captures this philosophy of Compatibalism quite
well: A reporter asks a citizen in Pyongyang to comment about life in North
Korea. The citizen answers "Well, I can't complain".

------
posterboy
Ensembles can disentangle, right? Then, if measuring only one side, how do you
know the other side is entangled? How did experiments establish entanglement
anyway? If you measure hundred runs and all correlate, sure you can say the
next one will too, but that's literally a predetermined outcome.

------
tomhoward
Archive version:

[http://archive.is/NlB7R](http://archive.is/NlB7R)

~~~
akavel
Part 2:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20180726093121/https://plus.maths...](http://web.archive.org/web/20180726093121/https://plus.maths.org/content/john-
conway-discovering-free-will-part-ii)

------
stultifying
Okay, but it still doesn't mean the particle passes through both slits.

------
darekkay
If you find this topic interesting, I highly recommend watching this talk by
Sam Harris [0].

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCofmZlC72g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCofmZlC72g)

------
bloak
"Conway thinks the free decisions of the particles inside us might account for
our own free will."

Another mathematician, Roger Penrose, made a similar claim, but with
"consciousness" instead of "free will".

I find this very implausible. So does Douglas Hofstadter, probably, though
I've not yet read his main book on the subject.

Thought experiment: You make a mathematical model of how neurons work, you cut
up a human's brain, and you build a machine that simulates it. Wherever the
model required randomness, you use pseudorandom numbers, generated
cryptographically, so the entire system is deterministic. You connect it up to
some kind of humanoid robot. Does the resulting system behave roughly like a
human, and, if so, does it have free will, and is it conscious?

People who believe that consciousness or free will depends on fundamental
physics have to believe:

* Either that the simulated human won't work like a human: it will mysteriously fail to function, but how exactly?

* Or that the simulated human will seem to work like a real human, but nevertheless it won't be conscious; it will be a mere "zombie".

The first option seems intuitively implausible to me, and the second option
sounds like silly sophistry.

~~~
foldr
In the case of free will I don't see any intuitive implausibility. It's
intuitively plausible that someone/something could exhibit human-like behavior
without actually having free will. After all, some people think that regular
humans fall into this category!

~~~
bloak
The difficultly in deciding whether humans have "free will" suggests that the
concept of "free will" might be silly sophistry.

~~~
foldr
Similarly, the difficulty in deciding whether or not Goldbach's conjecture
holds shows that the concept of "prime number" might be silly sophistry.

~~~
bloak
Hardly worth replying, but I don't see the similarity. A 6-year-old
understands perfectly well what a prime number is, and you can write a program
to test for primality in half a line of Haskell (though the performance will
not be good). Now what's a "free will"?

~~~
foldr
I was responding to your original claim, which appeared to rest on the
assumption that problems which are difficult to solve are likely to be
psuedoproblems. I deliberately chose a difficult problem based on a concept
that has a clear definition (prime number) in order to show how silly this
line of argument is.

If you are just saying that it's difficult to come up with a generally agreed
upon definition of "free will", then that's of course true. But that doesn't
mean that there aren't any genuine philosophical problems relating to free
will. By way of analogy, it's also difficult to define terms like "property",
"freedom" and "constitution", but that doesn't mean that all of political
philosophy is sophistry.

------
popnroll
Oh boy, I know this is arrogant; It's pretty easy to show evidence of
determinism. 1) Read my brain, check if in ten seconds I will say yes or
nothing. 2) Don't tell me. 3) Wait ten seconds. 4) Compare results. I'm aware
of the experiments of reading brain decisions faster than our consiousness
(machines telling which button we will play "before we realized"). No, no
psychomotor tricks. Just read my brain, don't tell me until I made my choice.
If you get 100% I believe you, meanwhile, no evidence.

~~~
ppod
>no evidence

Why do you assume that the null hypothesis is free will?

~~~
popnroll
I'm not assuming free will exists. To be honest, I'm personally a
compatibilist. I'm determinism and free will agnostic. No evidence for free
will doesn't mean determinsm is true. No evidence for determinism doesn't mean
free will is true. Is an unpopular opinion. But I see no gap in the logic.

