
From chaos to free will - jonbaer
https://aeon.co/essays/heres-why-so-many-physicists-are-wrong-about-free-will
======
jbay808
The article is very confused. Just about every paragraph is confused in a
different way, but I'll start with one simple point of confusion.

Constraints on physical systems (such as the given example of a string
constraining the motion of an apple to a circle) are simplifications that we
use to model the system. Nature doesn't notice the constraints -- the string
is just a bunch of atoms, the same as the apple, and they're all following the
same equations. But to us, it can be easier to model a system with a single
degree of freedom and some constraints, rather than 10^23 degrees of freedom
and no constraints.

The brain, and a CPU, do not generate constraints that overrule the physics of
their base particles. The appearance of constraints is just the dance of many
particles following the rules, just like everything else, but arranged in a
clever way that matches the useful, more easily modeled behaviour of a
constrained system.

~~~
acqq
Maybe the "confusion" is intentional.

In the scientific papers, at least in some areas, it is expected to disclose
potential conflicts of interest. In magazine essays one can see just an essay
without a context, which could potentially explain where the author comes
from. That's why I have searched for the author and have found:

George F. R. Ellis is, not accidentally, "a past president of the
International Society for Science and Religion", "an active Quaker", and a
winner of Templeton Prize "originally awarded to people working in the field
of religion (Mother Teresa was the first winner), but in the 1980s the scope
broadened to include people working at the intersection of science and
religion."

------
ravenide
“Quantum mechanics disproves determinism and therefore disproves free-will-
skepticism” is an asinine argument I hear parroted everywhere and it drives me
bonkers.

Ok, say quantum mechanics is at play and your cells don’t behave
deterministically. Is that randomness somehow your free will? Are you
willfully collapsing wave functions or whatever?

The real reason free will doesn’t exist is not to do with determinism, but the
fact that _you_ don’t exist. You’re a collection of cells that, regardless of
whether they behave deterministically or randomly, are out of your control.
The concept of “you” is just a high-level abstraction, a shorthand, that falls
apart as soon as you dig into the details of what’s going on (as all
abstractions do).

~~~
naasking
So by that argument, cars don't exist either. Ontologically, this is true. The
ontology of physics contains neither cars or free will.

So when someone points to a car and says, "that's a car", what are they doing
if not pointing at a car?

If you can answer this question sensibly, then it should be straightforward to
also understand what a victim means when they point to an accuser and says,
"they attacked me of their own free will".

Free will is just as real as cars. Which is to say either you reject the
existence of both, or you reject neither.

~~~
ravenide
> Free will is just as real as cars.

This is true. They're both abstractions. I think the important property we
ought to care about is how easily each abstraction breaks down, in the sense
of leading to an untrue belief.

Calling a car a car is mostly pretty safe. Although a car _is_ just a
shorthand for a bunch of atoms, no one is going to use that fact to take issue
with me saying that a car hit me at 40 mph.

Free will is ontologically like the car, but breaks down faster. It implies
one could have chosen differently than one did. That's the whole reason people
care about free will. But where the fact that cars are just a bunch of atoms
is mostly uninteresting, here the fact that 'you' are just a collection of
cells is of tremendous relevance, because your 'choices' are themselves just
cellular activity. If you try to use the free-will abstraction to claim people
'could have' acted differently, the details underlying your abstraction will
start to give you trouble.

Actually, the car abstraction has edge cases too. If you bolt something onto a
car, is it still part of the car? What if that thing was what hit me? What if
it was someone else who bolted it on? In these cases, what a car 'is' comes
under needed scrutiny as well.

~~~
naasking
> Free will is ontologically like the car, but breaks down faster. It implies
> one could have chosen differently than one did. That's the whole reason
> people care about free will.

The Frankfurt cases debunked the full principle of alternate possibilities
(PAP), so I disagree that PAP is why people care about free will. I think
people recognise that no matter what, we need some ability to assign blame
when someone is responsible for causing some harm.

When and how this responsibility is assigned is exactly the function served by
free will.

Notice how there is no reference here to being able to do otherwise. That's an
assumption _you_ have carried into this debate without justification, and
Frankfurt demonstrated that this assumption is actually false.

~~~
ravenide
> The Frankfurt cases debunked the full principle of alternate possibilities
> (PAP), so I disagree that PAP is why people care about free will.

I didn’t know about Frankfurt or PAP. Thanks for telling me!

As far as why people care about free will, I dunno, almost everyone I meet
insists free will exists, and when I ask why, they insist that they have a
choice, and then I say “but you could only have made one choice,” and at this
point most of them become absolutely incandescent with disagreement.

I guess I don’t agree that because something is proven false, people will stop
caring about it and wanting it to be true.

I think one way out of the blame problem is to recognize that blame being an
abstraction (I’m becoming a broken record) doesn’t make it less useful or
meaningful. Assigning someone the blame as a killer still gives us the
knowledge to act (e.g. separating them from society). But recognizing that
ultimately everyone is a victim of fate in one way or another allows us to
simultaneously have compassion for the people we’re locking up.

~~~
vidarh
> As far as why people care about free will, I dunno, almost everyone I meet
> insists free will exists, and when I ask why, they insist that they have a
> choice, and then I say “but you could only have made one choice,” and at
> this point most of them become absolutely incandescent with disagreement.

Because the notion that they don't instinctively feels wrong. It feels like
they are choosing, and so it is emotionally difficult to even question how
that choice would have worked in a way that gives them agency.

And if they actually think about it, people tend to quickly get a strong
impulsive understanding that this would destroy a lot of their world views,
such as e.g. as you point out, assigning blame, and we're deeply emotionally
invested in believing we can blame people and assign responsibility for all
kinds of things.

A lot of people also whether they say so or not are deeply invested in
variants of the just world hypothesis, and that just falls apart if people had
no alternate possibilities, and so reasonably no blame.

So many attitudes are tied to the assumption that we can discuss fairness and
blame and responsibility on the basis of our view of how a person _chooses_ to
act. Take away responsibility for those choices, and we need to re-evaluate
everything.

I don't think free will is a reasonable belief, by the way. I keep asking
people who believe in it to _define it_ in ways that does not just boil down
to a veneer or obfuscation of determinism, and in ~30 years of asking
countless people that question I've only ever gotten exasperated attempts at
avoiding a definition, or attempts at evading the question by claiming
dualism, which then leads to exasperation when I ask the same question again,
because it remains just as relevant.

Otherwise exceedingly smart people can be reduced to going in circles with
logical flaw after logical flaw over this.

------
michaelmrose
I don't see the connection between being impossible to predict and being
actuated by will instead of the underlying physics.

Even if no being in the universe could possibly predict the behavior of a
system that includes an intelligent being and even further suppose that due to
true randomness it was in fact not predetermined. I don't see how it would
make the entity's actions determined by their own thoughts instead of the
smaller scale pieces of the system.

If its truly impossible to predict and we have the perception of having free
will and in fact if many things including our own life experience truly are
explicable in terms of thoughts, will desires, actions does it really matter
if the particles made me do it?

What is the practical differences between free will and not?

~~~
CuriouslyC
Bell's Theorem basically says that there isn't a deterministic system
underlying quantum mechanics. Therefore the universe is fundamentally
unpredictable. You could take that to mean everything is random, or that
everything has "free will" (constrained by the need to coexist with everything
else).

Personally, I find the idea that the universe is a living thing that can feel
and act all scales of complexity to be delightful, and it certainly has
massive ethical ramifications.

~~~
cjg
Bell's Theorem doesn't say that at all. It just puts constraints on what such
a deterministic system would have to be. For example a non-local deterministic
system could well be compatible with Bell's Theorem.

~~~
CuriouslyC
Thanks for mentioning this. To be fair, locality of information is a pretty
common assumption but I should definitely qualify this a bit more in the
future.

------
adjkant
> If you seriously believe that fundamental forces leave no space for free
> will, then it’s impossible for us to genuinely make choices as moral beings.

> The underlying physics would in reality be governing our behaviour, and
> responsibility wouldn’t enter into the picture.

First, this is one of the few useful things said here. Responsibility, poof. I
agree. And I think that radically changes how we should approach so many
things. As a hard determinist who is writing arguments, ethics, and moral
frameworks around said determinism, I think there is a big issue with a lot of
discussions about free will - definition.

When most humans say "free will", they don't mean randomness, not even close.
While philosophers in this argument have spent a good deal of time on
randomness, I think that focus misses the point entirely. _Even if_ there is
molecular randomness, how does that give any more meaning to humans? At the
end of the day, the human idea of control gains nothing from it.

When humans say "free will", they are referring IMO in actuality to a real
thing - a combination of many things, but basically agency + lack of
prediction powers. At the end of the day, those are not going away anytime
soon, if ever. This is where ethical, moral, and social questions are based,
not in free will formally.

The lack of formal free will is crucial for underpinning all of this, but it
in no way makes ethics and the like impossible. We still exist and experience
the world, and it is in all of our best interests to go towards a "better"
one. Whether we were always going to do that or not doesn't change that, nor
does it change the human experience.

I will say this - determinism must be approached carefully precisely because
of articles like this - it is easy for the worst effect of determinism on
humans to actually be the idea itself and how it makes people defeatist about
morality. I hope to spend my time making a good case for how to approach it
safely and in a way that makes the world better, and I wish more people were
looking at that instead of arguing about quantum randomness.

~~~
root_axis
I don't see how a lack of free will changes anything with respect to moral
responsibility. Morality does not care about the the initial conditions that
would cause a methodical serial killer to enjoy torturing and murdering
innocents, knowing that they kill for pleasure is sufficient to judge them as
immoral. This isn't to say that such killers deserve "an eye for an eye", but
you don't need to invoke a lack of free will to justify humane treatment of
criminals.

~~~
adjkant
I suspect we are in agreement, but I would argue that is because the
conception of morality you are using happens to be compatible with the
resulting morals that I believe arise from determinism here.

You skipped the more relevant application in this case though - not the
treatment of criminals, but, to get a bit minority report here, the treatment
of pre-criminals. Given their lack of responsibility and control of their
being, how do you design a society that treats them fairly? What is fair? How
much effort does morality dictate we owe to their happiness?

The lack of moral responsibility doesn't change the real world effects or
causal responsibility, you're right there. However, these questions get very
different answers based on if the world has formalized free will or not.

Essentially, if you accept determinism, society becomes a configuration
optimization game. The questions of what we optimize for are also highly
impacted by free will/determinism.

> you don't need to invoke a lack of free will to justify humane treatment of
> criminals.

There are absolutely many ways to get here, I'm simply pointing out
determinism also leads to it as a data point that determinism can lead to
moralities that pass the sanity check. Many, including the author if this
piece, write off or get very worried about that issue.

~~~
root_axis
> _I would argue that is because the conception of morality you are using
> happens to be compatible with the resulting morals that I believe arise from
> determinism here._

Indeed, we are coincidentally in agreement from a values perspective since my
argument with respect to determinism could remain unchanged even if I e.g.
favored a retributive system of justice.

> _Given their lack of responsibility and control of their being, how do you
> design a society that treats them fairly_

Any possible conception of fairness exists entirely with respect to the
material circumstances of reality in the moment, the ethereal weight of
determinism is not detectable on the scales of justice.

To put it another way, if we lived in a universe capable of libertarian free
will, it would not follow logically that we should then amplify the needless
suffering of criminals.

Imagine two criminals living in such a universe, both having committed
identical crimes under identical circumstances, but only one is capable of
libertarian free will... what changes? The deterministic criminal didn't
choose _to want_ to commit the crime, but he still wanted to commit the crime
by following the same reasoning that the free criminal willed himself into, in
every observable aspect of reality their motivations are equally damning. This
is further compounded by the fact that both victims are equally harmed
regardless of which criminal committed the crime. From the victim's
perspective, two equally harmful acts should merit the same consequences, one
victim does not suffer less because the crime was committed deterministiclly.

> _The questions of what we optimize for are also highly impacted by free will
> /determinism._

How so?

~~~
GoblinSlayer
Criminal court doesn't really use the concept of responsibility, it assigns
punishment based solely on who did the crime. And the concept of crime itself
is provided by lawmaker, not by human's judgement.

~~~
root_axis
> _Criminal court doesn 't really use the concept of responsibility, it
> assigns punishment based solely on who did the crime._

Saying someone "did the crime" is just another way of saying that they are
responsible for the crime.

> _the concept of crime itself is provided by lawmaker, not by human 's
> judgement._

What? The entire point of the judicial system is to interpret the law with
respect to human judgement.

------
slfnflctd
This stuff makes my head hurt.

I can choose to have beer for breakfast, or I can restrain myself and eat some
eggs & toast instead. I have faced this choice numerous times, and I do not
choose the same way every time. I can _feel_ that choice dangling in front of
me, and know I have the ability to do either one. Sometimes I can't decide,
and I flip a coin.

The idea that free will doesn't exist is not a concept most humans beings are
ready to even try to think about-- I like to think I possess at least average
intelligence, and despite trying for years I cannot make sense of the world
while trying to hold that thought in my mind.

There is a lot of stuff we do 'automatically', but a world where my choices
are all deterministic simply does not make sense to me and is not useful.

~~~
vidarh
For me it is the idea of what it would _mean_ to actually have free will that
makes my mind hurts, because it is such an bizarre idea. Maybe it is because
of decades of software development hammering in causality.

Because free will implies that cause and effect breaks down, but in a way that
is not random but governed by some agency that is not following the cause and
effect of the physical structure of the brain.

Where would that agency come from? How would it enable a decision that is not
then just deterministic one step removed, or randomness one step removed, or
agency one step removed?

And so we have infinite regression: For each additional step of agency you add
to sidestep the problem, the same questions arises of how the decision can be
made without being a combination of determinism and randomness or involve some
external agency...

Conversely, the idea that we do not have free will is easy to resolve for me:
Consider yourself a character in a movie. Conceptually your character has free
will within the movie universe. Your character could have chosen differently
if it had been written differently. But in the movie they will always make the
same choice, no matter how many times you rewind, because the choice is
already locked in.

~~~
apta
If there's no free will as you're positing, what logically follows is that we
should not have a legal system. Why punish someone because they stole for
example? It was all pre-determined. This is where this line of reasoning
breaks apart quickly. Just because our minds can't rationalize the vast
unknowns of the universe, doesn't mean that we should jump to simplistic
conclusions based on our experiences.

~~~
vidarh
No, it follows that we should model the legal system on the basis of what
protects society with the least damage to the people we lock up, on the basis
that they had no choice. We still have a reason to protect others.

And arguing that it 'breaks' apart because you don't like the consequences is
ludicrous.

Give me a definition of free will that doesn't suffer the problems I
described, and we can talk.

~~~
apta
You seem to be arguing from an agnostic or atheist point of view (correct me
if I'm wrong). If that's the case, then there is no incentive whatsoever to
limit the "damage" to the people who do get locked up, because it's
meaningless. Whether they get locked up for 1 year, 10, or just straight out
executed, it's all the same. Rape isn't inherently bad anymore, it just is.
Same with murder, theft, etc.

~~~
vidarh
A religious view makes no difference - it just pushes the question back one
step.

And yes there is every incentive to limit damage, to protect people even if
there was no decision. But that also then extends to the perpetrators.

There is no logic at all to your assertions here.

~~~
apta
> A religious view makes no difference - it just pushes the question back one
> step.

I disagree. You have well-known atheist figures that have expressed views
similar to what I was describing. That rape isn't inherently bad, it's just
something that exists in the world. That incest is ok if it's between
"consenting adults". Or Dawkins defending pedophilia. There literally isn't a
gauge to determine whether something is moral or not anymore. It may sound
absurd or over-exaggerating, but that is the logical conclusion of a purely
materialistic view. We've seen its effects throughout history.

------
clawedjird
I’m probably missing something (and would gladly welcome correction), but this
only seems to address a limited form of determinism. I’m not sure how the
existence of randomness at the molecular level or the fact that psychological
experience can influence human biology challenges determinism at large, much
less proves the existence of free will.

~~~
ReactiveJelly
I sure don't feel convinced that free will exists.

What do non-determinists think would be the testable or observable difference
between a universe with and without free will?

~~~
jes5199
I don’t think it is possible to test the difference. Any situation that looks
like free will can also be explained by determinism. The only evidence is the
subjective experience of choice, which is invisible to science

------
dandanua
Nowadays many people are referencing quantum mechanics when they try to
explain some elusive and fuzzy notions like free will, consciousness,
afterlife, mysticism, religious beliefs etc.

This is such a bullshit.

In fact, quantum mechanics is so bizarre, it can't even explain what is
objective reality from the macroscopic point of view. The only thing it
explains for us, classical creatures, is that our world is much more "complex"
than we could imagine. Pun intended.

~~~
WalterSear
They also, uniformly, think that a quantum observer is someone in a lab coat
with a clipboard, and that Schrodinger's mind experiment was intended as a
demonstration rather than the objection that it was.

~~~
GoblinSlayer
And they think EPR paradox exists to prove and praise quantum weirdness.

------
abellerose
I’ve given up on the idea of free will. I think the illusion does more harm
than good to society but everyone deeply has been conditioned to think it’s
true and things will never change in my lifetime.

The article doesn’t do the necessary job of convincing me that quantum physics
has any real impact on people having responsibility over their thoughts &
actions. I’ve always wanted to see how a person could somehow not be effected
by the system being the universe and where the person is a subsystem. I think
that would be the most interesting thing for me. Sadly the belief that a God
just made it so isn’t logical and not something I can even begin to see how it
would work. Determinism being partially untrue by some outside force making
the universe truly random doesn’t allow a person making personal choices they
should be responsible over. In fact such an existence would be terrifying.
Performing thoughts & actions that just randomly happen with no valid reason.
I’m predicting society will eventually throw away the free will illusion when
science destroys inequality.

~~~
naasking
Free will is inescapable. Without it, you have no ability to assign moral
blame, which means law and order become impossible. If someone punches you in
the face unprovoked, you are just as responsible for putting your face where
his fist was going to be. Thus, there's no justification for your attacker to
be rehabilitated rather than you, an innocent victim.

Your issue is not with free will, but with retributive justice, ie. the
argument that moral blame deserves punishment.

~~~
__m
Imposing the false concept of free will just to be able to morally put someone
in jail seems immoral. Imposing laws that most of society agrees with is a
pragmatic necessity.

~~~
naasking
> Imposing the false concept of free will just to be able to morally put
> someone in jail seems immoral

Who said that? In fact, I said that this exact argument is a mistake,
conflating free will with retributive justice.

------
yters
The author has a couple arguments, some stronger than others.

The argument that changing constraints dramatically change system function,
and thus enable top down control, is good. It is why we can program computers
without being quantum physicists. Additionally, the point that if determinism
is true then all texts were encoded in the initial conditions is also good.
And finally, his point that determinism undermines the rationality of morality
is also good. The book "Life at the Bottom" maked this point vividly, where
criminals seem to be unanimous that their actions are out of their control.

Where his argument falls apart is explaining the source of top down causation.
The author makes the supervenience fallacy, conclusively demonstrated by
Jaegwon Kim. There is no logical possibility of top down causation within
materialism.

~~~
jbay808
Thanks for the summary, this makes it easier to address his other points.

You already see the issue with constraints -- which is why our reality is a
bottom-up one, but with the appearance of top-down rules.

The point that if determinism is true all texts are encoded, also applies to
any other organized information, e.g. human DNA. If books can only be thought
of as the product of human free will, and not just natural law, then equally,
DNA must be credited to something's free will. But what? Does evolution have
free will?

No, I think they're both the outcomes of natural processes. We can still build
legal systems of copyright on top of that though, and claim credit for those
works.

(As for where the data comes from if not the Schrodinger equation -- that
problem also has a simple solution, which is that we're on the leaf of a
widely branching tree, and the data is seeded by the index of our branching
history).

~~~
yters
If books can only be created by human free will, and evolution does not have
free will, then that implies DNA must have been generated by something like a
human. Aliens?

~~~
jbay808
That's where the original article author's argument would logically lead, yes.
And of course those aliens might have some DNA equivalent...

So I think it's clear that the author's argument here is pretty weak.

~~~
yters
could maybe bootstrap, each subsequent race gets more complex dna and
capability

------
titzer
FTA: "So what determines which messages are conveyed to your synapses by
signalling molecules? They are signals determined by thinking processes that
can’t be described at any lower level because they involve concepts, cognition
and emotions in an essential way. Psychological experiences drive what
happens. Your thoughts and feelings reach ‘down’ to shape lower-level
processes in the brain by altering the constraints on ion and electron flows
in a way that changes with time."

I think what the author is trying to say is that our psychological experience
is influencing the molecular forces. But the psychological experience is just
an abstraction, a collection of patterns that exist in the 'data' of the
brain's connectivity and charge states. The brain's circuitry "runs" the
software and its rules. Just because those rules flip a few electrical
switches here and there doesn't mean those switches don't follow logic.

This is a hopelessly confused mess of an article by someone who clearly
doesn't understand computation.

~~~
GoblinSlayer
Yeah, mind philosophers should learn to code. Lots of mistakes can be
prevented with just that.

------
codeulike
Determinism is meaningless if there is no way to exploit that determinism. So
it is with the universe: It may well be deterministic, but there is no way to
build a computer that could 'look ahead' and make predictions (because of
chaos theory, sensistive dependence on initial conditions etc, and because any
computer that could model the universe would be bigger than - or become part
of - that universe). So determinism is kindof irrelevant. And hence free will
is also irrelevant. Its just an incoherent concept. If a given scene was re-
run twice with everything exactly the same, then you _might_ choose
differently? But in a way that is somehow different from randomness? Its just
meaningless.

What people mean by free will is more like 'what happens next is influenced by
things inside my skull, rather than solely from outside of it'. Which is fine.

Think of the universe as a determinstic computer that is calculating its own
future microsecond by microsecond. There is no way to jump ahead in the
calculations, even though it may be determistic.

~~~
adjkant
I've replied to a good deal of posts you can find in this thread so to keep
this short - I would argue that you can derive conclusions from the
idea/existence of determinism alone, even without exploiting its "predictive"
power since that is basically impossible for us.

~~~
tsegratis
Nice ideas @codeulike

What about a (very) small deterministic part of the universe, and a very large
machine to compute its outcomes? At some scale differential the machine could
compute faster, or that small part of the universe could be frozen at zero
kelvin, to give the machine a head start

That could be a useful exploit of determinism. Even if the machine never
computes faster, it could be used as a test to see if it always gave the same
result as that part of the universe

\----

But I agree your suggestion is enough to give value to a deterministic
universe -- if there's no other way to get an outcome from the universe, than
to run it. Then enough complexity by itself gives value to our lives, even
within a deterministic system

I don't think this is enough for free will though, or giving us intrinsic
value, beyond being part of a computation. Especially since the computation
result is unknowable at this present time -- let us hope it is useful

A non-deterministic system however gives us free will; our decisions have an
effect beyond initial conditions; our lives can then have a value more
commensurate to the extent we feel for them. We are worthwhile, valuable. It
also makes interesting conclusions about God

Quantum mechanics argues strongly for non-determinism, and I don't have a
reason to argue otherwise

I suppose a good/bad value system though would require more... I don't know
where @adjkant gets his/hers from? For any decision to be more than hitting a
target with a blindfold on... We need some information surely. Some kind of
source that indicates good/bad. This could be the outcome of your computation,
or something else...

I suppose without that source, from our perspective, there is no real value
difference between determinism, and free will -- our personal input would be
zero, or random

For that source... there is an easy 5 letter answer accepted by about 33%

------
hliyan
The article had a lot of great individual points, but it doesn't seem to make
one coherent point.

Personally, I've begun to cautiously subscribe to a form of panpsychism, where
what we call free will (and perhaps even consciousness), is the same thing as
quantum fluctuations, but at scale.

~~~
jbay808
I unfortunately don't think it makes any good points -- just about every one
of its arguments is fatally flawed, sadly.

With respect to consciousness being tied to quantum physics --

There doesn't appear to be any shape that matter can be sculpted into that
allows that matter to "freely choose" the outcome of a quantum experiment.
(Change the distribution yes, but not select particular outcomes from a wide
distribution). Free will doesn't emerge from quantum randomness -- if it did,
it would be analogous to setting up a two-slit experiment where the photon is
capable of freely choosing to go through the left slit every time, under the
power of a conscious spirit and in defiance of the predictions of quantum
probabilities. Our brains do not have this power either. Whatever the quantum
field fluctuations are occurring inside our brains, our rational thought is at
best recording it, most likely is robust to it, most likely not formed by it,
and certainly not consciously selecting particular favoured quantum outcomes.

~~~
hliyan
> it would be analogous to setting up a two-slit experiment where the photon
> is capable of freely choosing to go through the left slit every time

Not what I meant though. What I meant was that free will / consciousness (not
sure if they're two separate things or aspects of the same thing) is an
_emergent_ property of quantum fluctuations, similar to wetness being an
emergent property of the H2O molecule. It's a bit hand-wavy yes (if it
weren't, I'd be publishing a paper right now).

The hypothesis (and it's just a hypothesis) is that if quantum fluctuations
are all entirely independent, then there is no chance of any emergent
properties. But if fluctuations do interact (i.e. proximity in space and/or
time affects each other's probabilities), then properties can emerge. Perhaps
what we perceive as consciousness / free will is just one such property.

~~~
jbay808
Hmm... If consciousness is caused by interacting quantum fluctuations, I'd
think a watermelon has just as much chance of being conscious as a human brain
does. The level of complexity and interaction across many scales is no
different in a brain than in a watermelon.

But if you think a brain is more likely to be conscious than a watermelon,
then it's most likely the consciousness comes from one of the properties
specific to the brain -- like its computational structure that couples sensory
inputs, prediction, world modeling, hypotheticals, and modeling itself and
other agents. These are probably software-like things that are classical in
nature.

~~~
tsegratis
I would suggest both -- simplify quantum fluctuations to a random num
generator -- if that just sits by itself spewing out numbers (like a
watermelon), I agree with you

But add his suggestion to yours -- a random source + the ability to reason --
think of a robot you give a gun + reasoning partially based on a source
outside your control -- here randomness

Does that robot careen through NY, or hold reasoned debate on human rights &
free will. Such a robot, I think, would be considered a free agent, and have
free will (for most definitions of free will). I suppose we'd maybe want to
add the rule the robot is consistent -- it doesn't flip randomly through
extremes, even though its total path is fully random -- reasoning+randomness

Personally I would apply that to humanity -- some source gives us agency
(decision making separate to the source that originated us). Quantum mechanics
is interesting, because it suggests maybe this separation is randomness due to
lack of definition -- i.e. our source can fully define everything, and yet our
separation of independent decision making makes our interactions meaningful.
Which has some really beautiful conclusions -- notably life and decisions have
worth, etc, etc

\------

Loads more to say. But this is not the place

------
lihaciudaniel
Gladly would take the school of Stoicism position on free-will: we are like a
dog tied to a running cart, we have some sort of freedom where to run but we
all have one destiny.

------
xycombinator
So do you critics of the article adhere to the belief that the current state
of the universe is predictable from the initial state and the laws of physics?

Does that prediction take time? If it doesn't, if it is instantaneous, it's
just a hand-waving god. If the prediction for any given instant takes
trillions of years, it's meaningless.

How am I supposed to see it as anything other than an obstinate adherence to a
principle, an unfalsifiable dogma?

~~~
analog31
In my view, that's a straw man. I don't think physicists believe that. I think
that most physicists are comfortable treating some phenomena such as nuclear
decay and shot noise as truly random. Whether that's a useful model or a
fundamental truth is actually something that's not of practical interest
outside of perhaps a very small cadre of theoreticians.

But one of my physics professors had an amusing comment: We can't calculate
the energy levels of the hydrogen atom in years of CPU time, but the hydrogen
atom can compute its own wavefunction in a femtosecond. Aside from microscopic
phenomena, at least macroscopic systems can compute their own future just
fine.

My own view is that free will is a theological / philosophical solution in
search of a scientific problem.

~~~
jbay808
I agree that nuclear decay is random, but I wouldn't say it's _necessarily_ an
example of non-determinism in the universe. As a subscriber to multiverse
theory, I'd say that the appearance of random outcomes is just the way it
feels to be a human in a quantum superposition.

------
bondarchuk
It's always the same. A lengthy verbose article arguing about free will, and
(at this time) 53 comments about free will. But was ever a rigorous definition
of "free will" given? Not at all.

~~~
GoblinSlayer
A will free from external influence.

~~~
dghf
>A will free from external influence.

But what do you class as an external influence? Do social norms, including
widely held moral codes, count? What about laws, and the threat of punishment
for breaking them? What about environmental conditions that provoke emotional
states (fear, anger, joy)?

~~~
GoblinSlayer
The first introductory lecture on politics starts with "laws are written by
current political elite to enforce their interests". There are many social
norms many people don't share like smoking, snobism, virtue signaling, fake
smiles, it's even difficult to share the norms, because they don't make any
coherent system.

~~~
dghf
>The first introductory lecture on politics starts with "laws are written by
current political elite to enforce their interests".

That doesn't make them any less real in their potential effects. Say I want to
steal a stockbrocker's Bentley, but I don't because I fear the legal
consequences. Is my will free from external influences?

> There are many social norms many people don't share

But there are few people who don't share any social norms.

> it's even difficult to share the norms, because they don't make any coherent
> system

I don't see that they have to. Hypocrisy has never been a bar to such norms:
for example, not that long ago (and to some extent still today), men with
illegitimate children were commonly excused or even lionised, while women with
illegitimate children were stigmatised.

------
air7
def free_will:

    
    
      return QuantumRNG.random() > 0.5
    

Unpredictability doesn't infer free will.

