We do know for sure that some other force we have named to be the observer is responsible for this. Here's an article that might help a bit, and a quote that's relevant:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/quant-ph/papers/0011/0011086.pdf

Just read up on that one, as it's far more relevant than anything Einstein wrote on the subject. The fact is that in writing that, Einstein was attacking the only thing that didn't fit with his theories, and in doing so, he was quite simply wrong, as we would find out many years after his death. The facts as we know now state that reality is established by observers, and that without observers, the universe exists as probabilities. That's new, and that's far past Einstein's limited view of reality. We do know that the electron went through the slits, because the probability was not scattered enough to send it anywhere but certain places, but we have proven that it passed through both slits when unobserved, yet was only one particle. That in itself proves Einstein wrong, without even going any further. The uncertainty principle has held true through all experiments with it, and is not some far-fetched theory to explain other phenomena. Momentum, energy and position are absolutely uncertain until observed, and you will not be able to cite evidence to the contrary no matter how much outdated physics you pull out.

To address your question about the observer, I honestly have no idea, and in that, most physicists would agree. We know that we can only affect the outcome of the double slit experiment if we measure in such a way as to narrow the electron down to a space small enough to show us which slit it went through. You can try to brush this off as machines that test it, but the fact remains that no force is able to make a wave act as a particle in the way that what we see to be observation does. It is difficult to find out what exactly is going on, but we do know that as soon as we can find out something to a certain degree, data becomes available to that degree and to no other degree. When the data becomes enough to alter the course of an experiment, we have proof. The proof is sound and relatively irrefutable, so the only discussion should be the explanation for it. So far, many attempts have been made to show that the measuring devices have forced the electron through a single slit, but nothing has come up, and there exists no explanation short of this elusive observer entity. You're not the first person to have thought that and been proven wrong, and there's a reason we still refer to the observer in discussions on Quantum Theory. The phenomenon we have not explicitly defined is called the observer, and the only thing that is constant is that it only happens when we try to find data.

After reading this I'm starting to think you haven't really comprehended quantum theory when you thought you did. You are no better than a creationist arguing against evolution when you say things like empty buildings can't burn down if the uncertainty principle is true. While Jabok is saying that it is true because of the double slit experiment, you are saying it isn't because it sounds too crazy. Like your example with Schod.'s Cat, the mind boggling possibility that the cat could be both dead and alive does not make it any less true.
Here is a very simple(somewhat kiddie) video that explains it just to make sure we are all on the same page (and to catch anyone else reading along up that didn't have the will to read through Jabok's wall of text)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc

I understand it fine, CAFG, and I'll say again: I'm not refuting the results of the physical experiments. What I'm saying is that while the uncertainty principle is a useful tool for performing calculations and theorizing, it does not actually reflect reality. I am of the same opinion as Einstein: quantum physics is an incomplete physical model, just as classical mechanics was an incomplete physical model. I don't plan on simply reiterating what I've been saying all along however except in this post and that only to hopefully explain as clear as I can what my point is, CAFG.

The comparison to a creationist is silly. What I believe you meant to compare me to was the stereotype of a closed-minded christian who is blind and unwilling to accept the truth despite anything he/she is told because it may conflict with their faith, an that's a low blow man, that hurts. Fortunately in this respect I am not hindered by any faith or desire for things to be a certain way; I know reality will be real whether or not I want it to be, so the comparison is faulty: I'm simply calling it as I see it. Nor am I saying the model isn't true because it "sounds too crazy." I'm saying the model isn't true because it fails to conform to the principles of physics we have observed elsewhere. Take for example, the "observer" force. No one has really defined it, all we really know is that when we measure which slit the electron is going through, it acts differently. In essence, we know the effect, but not the cause, the what but not the why. This is why I doubt the theory. If some physicist comes out with precise data and a solid theory on how it works, of course I would accept it, but such is not the case right now.

Here's another quote from the EPR paper that reflects my viewpoint:

I acknowledge that I could be wrong. The theory could truly reflect the objective reality, but until more evidence is presented the case seems weak to me. Perhaps on the other hand the simple thought experiments I propose wouldn't be enough to destroy a theory, but in this "case" the burden of proof lies upon the supporters of the theory (unless of course no other theory exists), so I see my points as valid. That is to say, if they are going to establish the uncertainty principle as absolute truth, then they had better have an absolute proof (or at least reasonably close to absolute, I figure 99% would be fair, somewhere in that ballpark, you get the idea). I've never seen an apple fall up, you know? Nor have I seen an object in many states at once; though I realize the probability of seeing that is approximately zero.

Relating back to the topic at hand however, if these probabilities of affecting real-life actions are truly insignifigant, then how does quantum theory have any affect on determinism and free will? It was mentioned that the electrons in the brain would all fire off in different positions, but if the probability of them firing a different way in the same scenario is so small that it essentially won't happen, then things pretty much remain determined. Granted, it wouldn't be true determinism, but such infinitesimally small probabilities of things occurring a separate way really isn't much different from things being exactly determined, and the majority of folks wouldn't have free will anyway. With a simple example, let's say bob likes apples and oranges according to Apple(50.1), Orange(49.9). By some magic power we have the ability to perfectly replicate a situation where we have the same exact bob choosing to eat an apple or an orange. Now, the first time bob picks the apple, based on the firing of electrons in his brain making a decision in a certain manner. However, the second time, if the effect that the uncertainty principle when taken at the macro level is less than .1% of the decision, (and many of these probabilities are ridiculously small I'd imagine at the quantum level of affecting a large object), bob will still choose the apple every time, and as such the same outcome will occur every time, with possible, but probably negligible, exception. In this way, he really wouldn't have "free will" anyway.

Firstly, you say that the uncertainty principle is a calculation tool, which is not by any means true. The whole point of the double slit experiment was that it showed that while something is under the effects of the uncertainty principle, it is able to exist in two places at once, in case you missed that part. This means that the uncertainty principle is more than just a convenient uncertainty measurment tool, and that it is, instead, a description of absolute universal uncertainty in unobserved particles. Concerning your argument that the uncertainty principle does not conform to other physical theories, I would like to see evidence of that, as well as the experiments that have shown the uncertainty principle to be false.

Again, I must note that quoting Einstein at this point is close to laughable, considering he was dead wrong about alot of things, despite being a genius. When quantum theory and relativity came at odds, he did a thought experiment to prove that they could not work together, with the intent of disproving some elements of quantum mechanics. When we later found that the problem was on his end, much of the concepts behind special relativity collapsed, despite leaving the calculational aspects largely the same.

Moving on, we have observed particles in two places at once. That's why the uncertainty principle exists and you're going to need to accept that. That's the entire point of the double slit experiment, and you need to come to terms with that before arguing against its results while claiming to accept them. The reason quantum theory and free will are related is because of the observer problem, which still remains as one of physics' unexplained phenomena (of which there are few so inexplicable as this)

That being said, your analysis of probability and brain function is dubious at best. In reality, thoughts are comprised of electrical impulese that, by the uncertainty principle, cannot be quantified at any given time. The issue is that we know we are somehow observers, so by that regard said impulses have to be determined as they are in our brains. But, by the logical requirement of the observer, we need to change these particles in some way as we observe them and force data to be created for their position. By that regard, since we must be observers, and since we observe our own thoughts, we change our own thoughts. It seems like circular logic, but it's a rationalization on how an entity of free will would be able to extend said free will to the material world, simply by acting as this elusive observer entity that we have yet to define. I am not saying I'm right, I am simply stating that this is a possibility that has rational backing and that can't be proven false. By that regard, your assertion that quantum mechanics does not affect free will must be false. In order to make a claim for no free will, you're making quite a few leaps in logic, including a serious simplification of the human mind.

It's the theory behind the reality that is used to take the linear combinations of the states of an electron.

Concerning the rest of your post in relation to the truth of the uncertainty principle, you're technically right: I have no physical argument to present to you, and if we accept the theory because it explains the experimental results as the truth, I have no argument at all. If this is to be the extent of our argument than I am forced to conclude that I am wrong. I say again: I recognize this. I've read about Copenhagen and J. Bell, the EPR paradox, "hidden variables" and the Bell inequality, I've seen first hand the diffraction pattern through the double slits. I'm not lying to you, you don't need to keep telling me about the double slit experiment. As such, and since no one wants to hear about my metaphysical thoughts, I will discontinue arguing about it here, and grant you the truth of the issue.

The uncertainty principle does not conform to other physical theories in that the act of measurement actually reduces the amount of information we can gain from the object of measurment, since it forces the wave function to collapse.

I quoted him because he said what I wanted to say, first. I could have said it myself, though probably less elegantly.

As for the dubiosity (if that's the noun form) of my brain function analysis, I refer you back to the dubiously defined force of "the observer" which does not define at all how it collapses a wave function, only that it does collapse.
Not true. The double slit experiment did not collapse to particles simply when we looked at it, rather we had to set up an apparatus. More likely, is that the neural transmitters in our brain require other neural transmitters to collapse from the wave function since they require some signal (a signal being a definite energy/position ect) to fire off.

My assertion wasn't quite that quantum mechanics doesn't affect free will. What I was saying was that it negligibly affects free will. There is a technical difference; namely that free will becomes technically possible, but not practically possible. Kinda like getting struck by a meteor: yeah it's possible, but its so infrequent that it shouldn't be a worry.

Please explain further so that I can rectify my arguments, or provide additional explaination where necessary. Being the one who made the argument, it seems clear to me, but what you said made it clear that it clearly isn't clear, if I may use clear so often in one sentence. Or I made a mistake somewhere.

I have come to believe this concept, free will, does not exist. It is a man-made construct of something that doesn't exist in reality. We all are just deterministic machines, our every action the inevitable result of a series of prior causes.

Sam Harris' arguments on this topic combined with mindfulness meditation is what made this crystal clear for me, and I hope I can explain it all to you.

Basically, when you do mindfulness meditation, you can realise, experientially, that this is true. There is no 'self'. Thoughts just come into your head, and then thoughts leave again. Some thoughts will be linked to other thoughts, and thus make them more likely to occur. If you pay attention to the randomness of this process, it can even be somewhat scary just how little control we have over our own mind. A song popped into my head the other day, or a memory, and it was completely disconnected to what I was doing in the physical world, and not tangent to any other thought or memory I was having. It was literally like the neuron cluster just randomly fired off in my brain.

The best way to explain this to someone doing no meditation is just say an animal out loud now. Make a choice.

Now you may have picked an animal that first popped into your head. Or maybe you mulled it over between multiple options. Or maybe there was some experience recently that made you pick an animal because of that.

But did you think of penguin? Elephant? Gazelle? Of all the animals you know, they didn't all surface in your consciousness, did they? The ones that surfaced - you have no control over that. You only picked the one that 'came to mind'. ANd of course, to further prove that it's all from prior experience, you didn't pick Agouti, did you? Because chances are you don't even know that's the name of a rodent that lives in Africa. You couldn't possibly pick something you had no knowledge of.

Now, that is what all thought is, subconscious directing conscious thought. Whatever choice you ultimately made, you made it not because of some mythical force called free will, but because of your subconscious being primed by a series of prior experiences that shaped who you are today.

Schopenhauer summed this up thusly: Man can do what he wants, but man can't want what he wants.

If you want to experience this realisation for yourself I strongly recommend mindfulness meditation. It can be hard to find a solid reason-based meditation because there's so much woo-woo out there but I recommend Waking Up by Sam Harris to begin with.

FREE WILL DOESN'T EXIST - NOW WHAT?
Now, of course, there are all sorts of moral issues that spiral off from these, but let's stay on task here. Those are separate questions and issues to the question of is there free will, which I hope I have demonstrated the answer is no.

Now, once you accept that, then you have to start asking yourself other questions. Like just how important is vengeance? What does the concept of responsibility mean now? It can be extremely difficult to be dispassionate when you are wronged and seek to punish the offender when you know that both you and they are just the inevitable result of a causal chain of events, but we are so biologically hardwired to think otherwise. But if you accept the fact that we're all just causal processes, then punishing the person would be as nonsensical as King Xerxes ordering his soldiers to lash the Hellespont for flooding and blocking his army's advance.

Instead, retribution should serve only as a personal and general deterrence, and imprisonment is merely the appropriate response from a purely practical point of view for violent criminals. Asking what to do with a violent criminal is like asking what to do about a incoming tornado. You do things to minimise the danger such as imprisonment for the criminal and getting into your storm shelter for the tornado.

In what is perhaps going to be my most controversial point thus far, I think one could make an argument in this paradigm for death penalty to be back on the table. If the violent criminal is a danger to inmates and there is no hope for rehabilitation, then where is the logic in keeping them alive and imprisoned indefinitely, draining society's resources and, of course, condemning the offender to a lifetime of imprisonment.

Anyway, of course, these are all separate questions to the main issue, but once we have accepted that there is no free will - then these are the questions we need to answer in order to build a society based on the actuality of our reality.

That's plain wrong. Read up on quantum physics.

Quantum physics does not escape the fact that our actions are governed by cause and effect ie deterministic causes. Whatever degree of randomness it posits at the level of the string obviously does not equate to anything meaningful in our "Middle World" to quote a phrase from Richard Dawkins.

Additionally, randomness does not help you get free will, so it's entirely irrelevant to the discussion anyway.

Oh, I would say if by random chance I develop cancer and die to it or not has a profound effect on the determinism of my organism. Think about it and you'll find many many examples. There's always some noise influencing things and I believe that's what's the deciding factor if presented with a choice where the options are exactly equally likely.

Of course the effect is tiny and won't stop things from happening that are "supposed" to happen which is why we can predict things, but as our measurements become more and more exact we realize we never can achieve perfect accuracy.

The question of determinism has profound implications on your question about free will.

There are no profound implications.

Even if you demonstrably prove that quantum fluctuations cause 5, 10, 15, 20% of our neuronal processes to be entirely random, that doesn't change the fact that for the other ~80% we are machined governed by deterministic causes.

And even at 100% determinism 0% randomness, or 100% randomness 0% determinism, there is no space for free will in either reality. It's ultimately a fictional concept that is not present in reality.

I tend to agree with your base supposition Oh_Man, that humans are basically automatons shaped by our experiences and predilections. I've thought about this some over the years, and even started reading a book that talks about the idea: In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky. I haven't quite finished it yet, as it's pretty heavy reading and my attention has been called in a bunch of other directions (perhaps part of my own automation sequence ). The part I haven't quite settled on is whether we have the capacity to break out of these automated cycles as somewhat self-aware machines. I'd like to think that we can, and I believe the book argues that we can, but only through profound levels of intention and conscious effort. I'm fairly certain I haven't reached that level yet, if it even exists. And the question remains: what would breaking free of that cycle look like, what sort of impact would it have on one's own life? If we did manage to break free, would that not be a deterministic outcome in and of itself? Whether it's possible or not, I've mostly come to terms with the fact that my life is somewhat automated, and within that I try to maintain discipline, choosing healthy habits and choices that are positive for my future well-being. In some ways, that feels like an escape from the cycle, but it could also be argued that me arriving to this place was a determined outcome as well. It seems impossible to truly figure out from our limited level of awareness.

C'mon, if you could prove we're deterministic automatons you automatically proved there's no free will.

Free will is choice. Writing here is living proof of free will. Nobody forced me to. I could be sleeping instead. Show me the invisible force that made me do this post instead.

Ya those are habits. Our smart brain automates things we do regularly, so they happen without us having to consciously make the decision. And yes, breaking habits is hard.

If all the events in your life led up to you making this choice, is it truly free will? You were born with certain predispositions, and raised by people with their own predispositions leading you to become the person you are today who makes the choices you do. Just because things could theoretically happen differently, what evidence do we have that anything other than the selected outcome would ever have occurred?

Having things that influence your life doesn't mean you haven't some measure of control.

If things are theoretically possible, but for some reason aren't actually, there must be something preventing that reality. So again:

Our decisions will always be influenced by something. So, if your definition of free will is "the ability to make decisions independent of literally anything and everything" then no, it doesn't exist.

So the right question is "Are our decisions 100% determined by some set of outside influences?" And then you can ask "Are they always? If not, are they ever? Are they never?"

This also requires some explanation of "what do you mean by 'outside influences?'"

Imo, the question (and the secondary "what do you mean by outside influences") isn't one that you should directly try to come up with a reasoning for - it's more natural for your answer to this question to be a by-product of some more fundamental sets of beliefs.

For instance there're some very concrete answers to these questions you can deduce from some beliefs in God.

My personal conversation with myself regarding determination theory went like this:

"Would it be possible for an omniscient being to predict your every action?"

- Yes, it seems so, based on the very definition of omniscience.

"If this being could predict your every action, does that not mean your actions are predetermined, given sufficient knowledge?"

- I suppose so. I can't predict my every action nor could any other human being, but given sufficient knowledge, it seems any and all of my actions could be predicted by this being.

"So, if all your actions are predictable, wouldn't that mean that free will is an illusion and you are simply enacting the programming that has been built throughout your life?"

- Yeah, I guess so.


Despite believing in a deterministic fate of sorts, I also believe that I have control in my life. It's just a strange form of control that is predetermined by my disposition and experiences. I think I'm capable of manifesting things I desire in my life, and at the same time I think it is inevitable that I would do so and it wouldn't have happened any other way because of who I am. I try not to think about it too much these days

This isn't a refutation. This is a baseless assertion. You realise we're in Serious Discussion, right? You should be forming actual arguments. Look, I can do baseless assertions too:

Free will is not choice. Writing here is not living proof of free will.

Oh wow, what a riveting conversation we're having!

How about you start by defining what you think free will is and how determinism and the illusion of self does not, in fact, nullify it?



I want to narrow down on that word influences. I think this where the issue lies.

Our decisions are not influenced by deterministic factors, they are caused by these factors. There is no 'self' that is independent of causality being influenced by deterministic factors. Everything in your cognition is being caused by it whether external or internal biology causing factors. The 'self' making choices is only making those choices because of deterministic factors. If you could 'rewind the clock' and play out the scenario again, you would make the exact same choice.

How would anything else change that fact?

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Sep 11 2024, 9:25 am by Oh_Man.