From: Tennessee Leeuwenburg (tennessee@tennessee.id.au)
Date: Mon May 15 2006 - 17:46:03 MDT
So, it seems like that's a definite maybe.
Seriously, I am not at all sure that such things truly play on free will
or not. I've come to look at free will in a different way -- that one
cannot predict my decisions considering my brain as a black box, and
considering only its genetic history and exposure to the world. The fact
is, the state of my mind cannot be dictated solely by those things.
The fact that my mind runs on rules doesn't really bother me. I think I
have to just shrug and get on with life. No theory of physics includes
consciousness, so whatever the mind is, its mysteries are not going to
be dissolved by scientific theories which do not explicitly address it.
The miracle of consciousness remains a miracle regardless of whether
randomness is present in the universe or not. What kind of freedom is
randomness anyway?
I think that people who use determinism and indeterminism as the sole
basis for arguments about free will fail to understand the question.
Cheers,
-T
mike99 wrote:
> London Times online
>
> "Loading the dice against free will:
> A battle is waging in physics that could strip us of all sense of personal
> responsibility"
> by Bryan Appleyard
>
>
> How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Tricky. Was it inevitable
> that I should write this and that, now, you should be reading it? Even
> trickier.
>
> The angels-pin question was originally posed as a joke. It lampooned the
> arcane and futile speculations of medieval theologians. They pondered the
> nature of the world on the basis of faith and, in our terms, profound
> ignorance. We have hard science. We have moved beyond such nonsense. Or have
> we?
>
> Gerard ’t Hooft of Utrecht University is one of the world’s great
> physicists. In 1999, along with Martin Veltman, he won the Nobel prize “for
> elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics”.
> But, like all physicists, he has a problem, a problem so huge that, daily,
> it threatens to undermine the entire fabric of his discipline.
>
> The problem is complex — some say it is beyond solution by the human mind —
> but it can be simply stated. Relativity and quantum theory are the two great
> triumphs of modern physics. The first explains the behaviour of very big
> things like planets, the second the behaviour of very small things like
> subatomic particles. They both lie, currently, beyond refutation. Planets do
> behave as relativity predicts and subatomic particles obey quantum theory —
> if they didn’t I couldn’t now be writing this on a computer and you would
> not be able to watch the World Cup on television.
>
> The problem is that they contradict each other. Relativity is a “classical
> theory”, it can be demonstrated to act through known processes of cause and
> effect. Quantum theory is not. Subatomic particles behave like
> schizophrenics on acid. They seem to be telling us that the world is
> indeterminate, unpredictable and completely lacking in anything resembling
> our common-sense understanding of cause and effect.
>
> Einstein hated this, arguing that “God does not play dice”. There must be
> something we didn’t know, some “hidden variables” that lay behind quantum
> phenomena that would, one day, return the quantum world safely to the bosom
> of classical physics. To which the quantum theorists’ response is: God does
> not play dice but only because he runs the casino. The indeterminacy of
> quantum phenomena is real and final, it is just the way the universe is
> made. Enter ’t Hooft.
>
> He has just published a paper arguing that, in effect, Einstein was right.
> There are recognisable systems of cause and effect underlying quantum
> interactions. There is a hidden reality which consists of “states” that do
> behave deterministically. We don’t see them because they are so small and
> because their actions are very brief. What we see is only an outcome that
> appears to have no cause.
>
> Meanwhile, over at Princeton University, two of the world’s great
> mathematicians, John Conway and Simon Kochen, have produced another paper —
> The Free Will Theorem — arguing exactly the opposite: that the world is
> indeed finally and absolutely indeterminate.
>
> ...read more at...
> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2179197,00.html
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Michael LaTorra
>
> mike99@lascruces.com
> mlatorra@nmsu.edu
>
>
>
>
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