

Physics and Five Problems in the Philosophy of Mind - sarosh
http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.2494

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samd
I think there's more jargon in that paper than participles. My experience with
scientists trying to do philosophy is that they are either saying total
bullshit, or saying something that's already been said dressed up with fancy
science jargon.

~~~
_delirium
Yeah, this is particularly true in the rather terrible physics-meets-free-will
literature. It seems every few months a physicist "scientifically discovers"
some viewpoint on free will that has been widely known for centuries, or even
worse claims something absurd like that they've _disproven free will_ , for
some totally naive definition of "free will".

In particular, almost nobody seems to bother dealing with compatibilist
arguments, of the sort made by Daniel Dennett and many others, which make the
physicists' research mostly irrelevant for free will, unless compatibilism can
be refuted: <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/>

~~~
samd
I'm not a fan of compatibilism mostly because their strategy seems to be to
just redefine free will to be something very weak. Of course, most debates
about free will are merely debates about what free will means.

~~~
_delirium
I can see that, but the opposite approach seems even more absurd. Most of the
physicists (and neuroscientists) who claim their work refutes or could
potentially refute free will, seem to be using a definition of "free will"
that's inherently magical. Something like: free will means that The Human Mind
is an entity outside the universe, and can poke holes into the universe and
move matter in a way that cannot be accounted for by the laws of physics.

If you start from that assumption, it seems like a foregone conclusion that
free will doesn't exist.

~~~
samd
It seems to be that an event is either random or determined, and neither
option gives us what we want out of free will. I don't think there is any
middle ground, and since it doesn't seem like our decisions are random, then
they must be determined. Which also fits nicely with other things like
psychology. Psychology shows that our actions can be predicted, which wouldn't
be possible if they were random.

~~~
davatk
Why not? The Miller-Rabin primality test is both random and, for all intents
and purposes, predictable.

~~~
samd
How predictable? Do you mean that for _any_ input x you can predict y?

~~~
davatk
I should probably stress that I agree with you on pretty much everything
except that last sentence.

As for the Miller-Rabin test, it's basically a case where you can get a
correct answer with an arbitrarily low probability of error. So I guess the
tie in is that just because our decisions are predictable (or at least mostly
so), doesn't mean there isn't randomness involved.

I'm starting to suspect that I'm responding to an interpretation you didn't
intend, though.

------
mhartl
The author, Stuart Kauffman, is known not to be a crank, but when paging
through the paper I find a disturbing lack of mathematics.

~~~
sarosh
The reason I posted it was because it was Kauffman and it was (relatively)
approachable. But yeah, the lack of math is a bit...surprising.

