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Bruce Gordon: In quantum physics, “reality” really IS what we choose to observe

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Philosopher and physicist Bruce Gordon, co-editor with William Dembski on The Nature of Nature, argues that idealist philosophy is the best way to make sense of the puzzling world of quantum physics:

Bruce Gordon: So what does the “delayed choice“ quantum eraser experiment do? Well, it tries to measure which path a particle would have taken after interference in the wave function has been created that is inconsistent with that particle’s behavior. So you’ve got a splitter of some sort. It’s going to divide the quantum wave function and send it along two different paths. Then you’re going to make a measurement along one of the paths to see what’s happening.

That interference can be turned off or on by choosing whether or not to look at which path the particle has taken after the interference already exists.

Now if you don’t look, you get an interference phenomenon at the end. If you do look, the wave function instantaneously collapses and you detect the particle along that pathway. So choosing to look erases the wave function and gives the system a particle history.

This experiment has been performed under what would be called Einstein Locality Conditions. In other words, no signal could have passed — subject to the limiting velocity of the speed of light — between the components of the system to cause the effect that you’re observing.

The very fact that we can make a causally disconnected choice of whether wave or particle phenomena are manifested in a quantum system essentially shows that there is no measurement-independent and causally connected, substantial material reality at the micro physical level. It is created by the measurement itself.

News, “In quantum physics, “reality” really is what we choose to observe” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Gordon explains that the quantum eraser experiment shows that there is no reality independent of measurement at the microphysical level. It is created by the measurement itself.


Here are stories from Bruce Gordon’s previous podcast with host Michael Egnor, where he defends idealism as a way of making sense of nature:

Why idealism is actually a practical philosophy. Not what you heard? Philosopher of science — and pianist — Bruce Gordon says, think again. Is reality fundamentally more like a mind than a physical object? Many are sure of the answer without understanding the question.

and

A physicist and philosopher examines panpsychism. Idealism says everything is an idea in the mind of God. Panpsychism says everything participates in consciousness (thus is not just an idea). Bruce Gordon thinks that, for a thing to be conscious, there must be something that it “is like” to be that thing. Can panpsychism demonstrate that?

Comments
If I choose to observe a chair in front of me I can sit down. If I choose to observe no chair I can walk straight ahead and - Ouch! where did that chair come from?aarceng
April 21, 2021
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Besides the empirical verification of ‘free will’ and/or Agent causality within quantum theory bringing that rather startling solution to the much sought after ‘theory of everything’, there is, to put it mildly, also another fairly drastic implication for individual people being “brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level” as well. Although free will is often thought of as allowing someone to choose between a veritable infinity of options,,,
Scientists build a machine to generate quantum superposition of possible futures - APRIL 9, 2019 Excerpt: "When we think about the future, we are confronted by a vast array of possibilities," explains Assistant Professor Mile Gu of NTU Singapore, who led development of the quantum algorithm that underpins the prototype "These possibilities grow exponentially as we go deeper into the future. For instance, even if we have only two possibilities to choose from each minute, in less than half an hour there are 14 million possible futures. In less than a day, the number exceeds the number of atoms in the universe." What he and his research group realised, however, was that a quantum computer can examine all possible futures by placing them in a quantum superposition – similar to Schrödinger's famous cat, which is simultaneously alive and dead. To realise this scheme, they joined forces with the experimental group led by Professor Geoff Pryde at Griffith University. Together, the team implemented a specially devised photonic quantum information processor in which the potential future outcomes of a decision process are represented by the locations of photons – quantum particles of light. They then demonstrated that the state of the quantum device was a superposition of multiple potential futures, weighted by their probability of occurrence. "The functioning of this device is inspired by the Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman," says Dr. Jayne Thompson, a member of the Singapore team. "When Feynman started studying quantum physics, he realized that when a particle travels from point A to point B, it does not necessarily follow a single path. Instead, it simultaneously transverses all possible paths connecting the points. Our work extends this phenomenon and harnesses it for modelling statistical futures." https://phys.org/news/2019-04-scientists-machine-quantum-superposition-futures.html
Although free will is often thought of as allowing someone to choose between a veritable infinity of options, in a theistic view of reality that veritable infinity of options all boils down to just two options in the end. i.e. Eternal life with God, or Eternal life without God. As C.S. Lewis himself stated,: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.”
“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.” – C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
Moreover, in order to support the physical reality of heaven and hell, and to dispel the notion from Atheists that heaven and hell are merely works of man's imagination, I can appeal directly to two of our most powerful and precisely tested theories ever in the history of science. i.e. Special Relativity and General Relativity respectfully.
January 2021 Whereas atheists have no observational evidence that the Multiverses that they postulated to ‘explain. away’ the fine tuning of the universe are real, nor do Atheists have any evidence that the ‘parallel universes’ that they postulated to ‘explain away’ quantum wave collapse are real, Christians, on the other hand, can appeal directly to Special Relativity, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics, (i.e. our most precisely tested theories ever in the history of science), to support their belief that God really does uphold this universe in its continual existence, as well as to support their belief in the reality of a heavenly dimension and in a hellish dimension.” https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/closer-to-truth-are-there-really-extra-dimensions/#comment-722947
Again, the implications for individual humans, to put it mildly, are fairly drastic. To get the seriousness of this point across, I offer the following testimonies from people who have had 'unpleasant' Near Death Experiences, (unlike the heavenly Near Death Experiences that are usually talked about)
Bill Wiese (Man Who Went To Hell) – 23 Minutes in Hell (8 Minute Version) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqufixPt2w0 Imagine Heaven – What About Hell? – John Burke – video (33:00 minute mark) https://youtu.be/1NWosBNDtgw?t=1983
To put the drastic implications for us even more clearly, we, with either our acceptance or rejection of God, and more specifically, our acceptance or rejection Jesus Christ, are choosing between eternal life with God or eternal death separated from God: Verse:
Deuteronomy 30:19-20 This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Because of such dire consequences for our eternal souls, I can only plead with any atheists who may be reading this to seriously reconsider their stubborn refusal to accept God, and to now choose God, even choose eternal life with God through Jesus Christ, instead of choosing eternal death separated from God. Not to sound cliche, but that decision is, by far, the single most important decision that you will ever make in your entire life! Verses and video:
John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Matthew 10:28 Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Instead, fear the one who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. Revelation 3:20 Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me. Turin Shroud Hologram Reveals The Words “The Lamb” – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tmka1l8GAQ
bornagain77
April 21, 2021
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Of humorous note to Darwinian heads literally exploding because "humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level."
Kingsman: Exploding Heads Scene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD24VY0YWdQ
Of note, no Darwinists, i.e. meat robots, were actually harmed in the production of this video. :)bornagain77
April 21, 2021
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And while our ability, via our free will, to bring about effects, (i.e. miracles), in the physical world is problematic enough for Darwinian materialists, recent findings from quantum mechanics exponentially exasperate this 'miraculous' problem that Darwinian materialists find themselves in. According to recent findings in quantum mechanics, not only do we bring about effects in the physical world that are completely inexplicable to Darwinian materialists, (and as News highlighted in the OP), but quantum mechanics also now shows us that “Reality” Really IS What We Choose To Observe". That is to say, not only do we bring about effects in the physical world that are completely inexplicable, i.e. miraculous, to Darwinian materialists, but we also have a choice in what type of physical reality gets presented to us in the first place. This finding should literally make a Darwinist's head explode. As Anton Zeilinger states, “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”
“The Kochen-Speckter Theorem talks about properties of one system only. So we know that we cannot assume – to put it precisely, we know that it is wrong to assume that the features of a system, which we observe in a measurement exist prior to measurement. Not always. I mean in certain cases. So in a sense, what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.” Anton Zeilinger – Quantum Physics Debunks Materialism – video (7:17 minute mark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=4C5pq7W5yRM#t=437
Steven Weinberg, who is an atheist himself, states the situation in quantum mechanics as such, "In the instrumentalist approach (in quantum mechanics) humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level.,,, the instrumentalist approach turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.,,, In quantum mechanics these probabilities do not exist until people choose what to measure,,, Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,,"
The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics – Steven Weinberg – January 19, 2017 Excerpt: The instrumentalist approach,, (the) wave function,, is merely an instrument that provides predictions of the probabilities of various outcomes when measurements are made.,, In the instrumentalist approach,,, humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level. According to Eugene Wigner, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.”11 Thus the instrumentalist approach turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else. It is not that we object to thinking about humans. Rather, we want to understand the relation of humans to nature, not just assuming the character of this relation by incorporating it in what we suppose are nature’s fundamental laws, but rather by deduction from laws that make no explicit reference to humans. We may in the end have to give up this goal,,, Some physicists who adopt an instrumentalist approach argue that the probabilities we infer from the wave function are objective probabilities, independent of whether humans are making a measurement. I don’t find this tenable. In quantum mechanics these probabilities do not exist until people choose what to measure, such as the spin in one or another direction. Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,, http://quantum.phys.unm.edu/466-17/QuantumMechanicsWeinberg.pdf
In fact Weinberg, again an atheist, rejected the instrumentalist approach precisely because “humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level” and because it undermined the Darwinian worldview from within. Yet, regardless of how he and other atheists may prefer the world to behave, quantum mechanics itself could care less how atheists prefer the world to behave. For instance, this recent 2019 experimental confirmation of the “Wigner’s Friend” thought experiment established that “measurement results,, must be understood relative to the observer who performed the measurement”.
More Than One Reality Exists (in Quantum Physics) By Mindy Weisberger – March 20, 2019 Excerpt: “measurement results,, must be understood relative to the observer who performed the measurement”. https://www.livescience.com/65029-dueling-reality-photons.html Quantum paradox points to shaky foundations of reality - George Musser - Aug. 17, 2020 Excerpt: Now, researchers in Australia and Taiwan offer perhaps the sharpest demonstration that Wigner’s paradox is real. In a study published this week in Nature Physics, they transform the thought experiment into a mathematical theorem that confirms the irreconcilable contradiction at the heart of the scenario. The team also tests the theorem with an experiment, using photons as proxies for the humans. Whereas Wigner believed resolving the paradox requires quantum mechanics to break down for large systems such as human observers, some of the new study’s authors believe something just as fundamental is on thin ice: objectivity. It could mean there is no such thing as an absolute fact, one that is as true for me as it is for you. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/quantum-paradox-points-shaky-foundations-reality
Moreover, although there have been several major loopholes in quantum mechanics over the past several decades that atheists have tried to appeal to in order to try to avoid the ‘spooky’ Theistic implications of quantum mechanics, over the past several years each of those major loopholes have each been closed one by one. The last major loophole that was left to be closed was the “setting independence” and/or the ‘free-will’ loophole:
Closing the ‘free will’ loophole: Using distant quasars to test Bell’s theorem – February 20, 2014 Excerpt: Though two major loopholes have since been closed, a third remains; physicists refer to it as “setting independence,” or more provocatively, “free will.” This loophole proposes that a particle detector’s settings may “conspire” with events in the shared causal past of the detectors themselves to determine which properties of the particle to measure — a scenario that, however far-fetched, implies that a physicist running the experiment does not have complete free will in choosing each detector’s setting. Such a scenario would result in biased measurements, suggesting that two particles are correlated more than they actually are, and giving more weight to quantum mechanics than classical physics. “It sounds creepy, but people realized that’s a logical possibility that hasn’t been closed yet,” says MIT’s David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and senior lecturer in the Department of Physics. “Before we make the leap to say the equations of quantum theory tell us the world is inescapably crazy and bizarre, have we closed every conceivable logical loophole, even if they may not seem plausible in the world we know today?” https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140220112515.htm
And now Anton Zeilinger and company have recently, as of 2018, pushed the ‘free will loophole’ back to 7.8 billion years ago, thereby firmly establishing the ‘common sense’ fact that the free will choices of the experimenter in the quantum experiments are truly free and are not determined by any possible causal influences from the past for at least the last 7.8 billion years, and that the experimenters themselves are therefore shown to be truly free to choose whatever measurement settings in the experiments that he or she may so desire to choose so as to ‘logically’ probe whatever aspect of reality that he or she may be interested in probing.
Cosmic Bell Test Using Random Measurement Settings from High-Redshift Quasars – Anton Zeilinger – 14 June 2018 Abstract: In this Letter, we present a cosmic Bell experiment with polarization-entangled photons, in which measurement settings were determined based on real-time measurements of the wavelength of photons from high-redshift quasars, whose light was emitted billions of years ago; the experiment simultaneously ensures locality. Assuming fair sampling for all detected photons and that the wavelength of the quasar photons had not been selectively altered or previewed between emission and detection, we observe statistically significant violation of Bell’s inequality by 9.3 standard deviations, corresponding to an estimated p value of approx. 7.4 × 10^21. This experiment pushes back to at least approx. 7.8 Gyr ago the most recent time by which any local-realist influences could have exploited the “freedom-of-choice” loophole to engineer the observed Bell violation, excluding any such mechanism from 96% of the space-time volume of the past light cone of our experiment, extending from the big bang to today. https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.080403
Thus regardless of how Steven Weinberg and other atheists may prefer the universe to behave, with the closing of the last remaining free will loophole in quantum mechanics, “humans are indeed brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level”, and thus these recent findings from quantum mechanics directly undermine, as Weinberg himself stated, the “vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.” Moreover allowing free will and/or Agent causality into the laws of physics at their most fundamental level has some fairly profound implications for us personally. First and foremost, allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned,,,, (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders),,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands (with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”
Jesus Christ as the correct "Theory of Everything" - video https://youtu.be/Vpn2Vu8--eE The Copernican Principle, (and/or the Principle of Mediocrity), itself has now been overturned by both General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, our two most powerful theories in science: April 2021 - https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/asked-of-steve-meyer-if-humans-are-so-important-to-god-why-did-they-take-so-long-to-develop/#comment-727599
Verse:
Colossians 1:15-20 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
bornagain77
April 21, 2021
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As to:
Bruce Gordon: In Quantum Physics, “Reality” Really IS What We Choose To Observe - April 20, 2021 Excerpt: The very fact that we can make a causally disconnected choice of whether wave or particle phenomena are manifested in a quantum system essentially shows that there is no measurement-independent and causally connected, substantial material reality at the micro physical level. It is created by the measurement itself. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/bruce-gordon-in-quantum-physics-reality-really-is-what-we-choose-to-observe/
In order to show just how devastating this is to Darwinian presuppositions, I will give a short overview of the neuroscientific and quantum evidence for free will. Free will is often thought of as 'merely' allowing us to do things in the physical world that are not determined by the prior state of the physical world, and/or more particularly, by the prior state of our physical brain. And indeed experiments have now proven that, although our thoughts can be influenced by physical influences, (such as brain injury, alcohol and drugs, etc..), thoughts are not caused by the physical brain itself. For example, in direct contradiction to the atheistic claim that our thoughts are merely the result of whatever prior state our material brain happens to be in, 'Brain Plasticity', the ability to alter the structure of the brain, via a person's focused intention, has now been established by Jeffrey Schwartz, as well as by other researchers.
How Research on OCD Challenges Materialism – David Klinghoffer – June 18, 2019 Excerpt: Patients with OCD are under the command of the brain — to wash their hands obsessively, for instance, fearing they never quite get them clean. But using techniques that Jeffrey Schwartz pioneered, they can choose to train themselves to reinterpret their compulsive impulses, and, remarkably, change the structure of the brain itself. How is this possible? As Schwartz describes, a “wise advocate” or (quoting Adam Smith) “impartial spectator” stands outside and above the brain (not spatially but conceptually). This personality is the true self, and can objectively evaluate messages from the brain, because it is not the brain! https://evolutionnews.org/2019/06/how-research-on-ocd-challenges-materialism/
The ability to change the structure of the brain itself, merely by our thoughts, is simply impossible under materialistic presuppositions. Atheists will often try to invoke Benjamin Libet's experimental work to say that free will doesn't exist, yet the following research shows that Libet’s experimental work does not indicate what atheists believe that it does.
A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake. BAHAR GHOLIPOUR – SEP 10, 2019 Excerpt: In a new study under review for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Schurger and two Princeton researchers repeated a version of Libet’s experiment. To avoid unintentionally cherry-picking brain noise, they included a control condition in which people didn’t move at all. An artificial-intelligence classifier allowed them to find at what point brain activity in the two conditions diverged. If Libet was right, that should have happened at 500 milliseconds before the movement. But the algorithm couldn’t tell any difference until about only 150 milliseconds before the movement, the time people reported making decisions in Libet’s original experiment. In other words, people’s subjective experience of a decision—what Libet’s study seemed to suggest was just an illusion—appeared to match the actual moment their brains showed them making a decision. When Schurger first proposed the neural-noise explanation, in 2012, the paper didn’t get much outside attention, but it did create a buzz in neuroscience. Schurger received awards for overturning a long-standing idea. “It showed the Bereitschaftspotential may not be what we thought it was. That maybe it’s in some sense artifactual, related to how we analyze our data,” says Uri Maoz, a computational neuroscientist at Chapman University. For a paradigm shift, the work met minimal resistance. Schurger appeared to have unearthed a classic scientific mistake, so subtle that no one had noticed it and no amount of replication studies could have solved it, unless they started testing for causality. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/
Interestingly, Libet himself believed that his experimental work confirming the reality of ‘free won’t’, “accorded with the traditional religious understanding of free will”.
Do Benjamin Libet’s Experiments Show that Free Will Is an Illusion? – Michael Egnor – January 15, 2014 Excerpt: Materialists often invoke the experiments of Benjamin Libet when they deny free will.,,, (Yet) Libet himself was a strong defender of free will, and he interpreted his own experiments as validating free will. He noted that his subjects often vetoed the unconscious “decision” after the readiness potential appeared. ,,,”The role of conscious free will would be, then, not to initiate a voluntary act, but rather to control whether the act takes place. We may view the unconscious initiatives for voluntary actions as ‘bubbling up’ in the brain. The conscious-will then selects which of these initiatives may go forward to an action or which ones to veto and abort, with no act appearing.” – Libet Libet even observed that his experimental confirmation of free will accorded with the traditional religious understanding of free will:,,, Libet proposes (based on his work) a common-sense model of free will: our unconscious is a bubbling sea of velleities. We freely choose the impulses we wish to enact by prescinding from a veto, and we freely choose the impulses we wish to suppress by vetoing the act. Libet found experimental traces of the unconscious impulses (the readiness potential) and experimental confirmation of the freely chosen veto (the conscious choice unaccompanied by corresponding electrophysiological activity). He even noted that his experimental results validated a particular traditional religious understanding of moral choice — that sin is in the act, which is freely chosen, not in the temptation, which can arise without our choice. He even proposed a neurophysiological model of original sin! http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/01/do_benjamin_lib081171.html
Moreover, the following experimental work, using state of the art techniques, further refined Libet's work and further confirmed, to a more exacting degree, the reality of 'free won't'. As the article states, “A person’s decisions are not at the mercy of unconscious and early brain waves. They are able to actively intervene in the decision-making process and interrupt a movement,”,,, “Previously people have used the preparatory brain signals to argue against free will. Our study now shows that the freedom is much less limited than previously thought."
Do we have free will? Researchers test mechanisms involved in decision-making – January 4, 2016 Excerpt: Back (in the 1980s), the American researcher Benjamin Libet studied the nature of cerebral processes of study participants during conscious decision-making. He demonstrated that conscious decisions were initiated by unconscious brain processes, and that a wave of brain activity referred to as a ‘readiness potential’ could be recorded even before the subject had made a conscious decision. ,,, Until now, the existence of such preparatory brain processes has been regarded as evidence of ‘determinism’, according to which free will is nothing but an illusion, meaning our decisions are initiated by unconscious brain processes, and not by our ‘conscious self’. ,,, Using state-of-the-art measurement techniques, the researchers tested whether people are able to stop planned movements once the readiness potential for a movement has been triggered. “The aim of our research was to find out whether the presence of early brain waves means that further decision-making is automatic and not under conscious control, or whether the person can still cancel the decision, i.e. use a ‘veto’,” explains Prof. Haynes. ,,, “A person’s decisions are not at the mercy of unconscious and early brain waves. They are able to actively intervene in the decision-making process and interrupt a movement,” says Prof. Haynes. “Previously people have used the preparatory brain signals to argue against free will. Our study now shows that the freedom is much less limited than previously thought. http://m.medicalxpress.com/news/2016-01-free-mechanisms-involved-decision-making.html
In summation, and as neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor states, "an objective review of the neuroscientific evidence unequivocally supports the existence of free will."
Michael Egnor: Is free will a dangerous myth? – October 6, 2018 Excerpt: 4. ,,, an objective review of the neuroscientific evidence unequivocally supports the existence of free will. The first neuroscientist to map the brains of conscious subjects, Wilder Penfield, noted that there is an immaterial power of volition in the human mind that he could not stimulate with electrodes. The pioneer in the neuroscience of free will was Benjamin Libet, who demonstrated clearly that, while there is an unconscious material predisposition to acts as shown by electrical brain activity, we retain an immaterial “free won’t,” which is the ability to veto an unconscious urge to act. Many experiments have followed on Libet’s work, most of which use fMRI imaging of brain activity. They all confirm Libet’s observations by showing what is at most a loose correlation between brain activity and volition (for example, nearly half the time the brain activity that precedes the act is on the wrong side of the brain for the activity to determine the will)—the looseness of correlation being best explained as evidence for libertarian free will. Modern neuroscience clearly demonstrates an immaterial component to volition. Harari is wrong about free will. It is not a myth. Free will is a real and fundamental aspect of being human, and the denial of free will is junk science and self-refuting logical nonsense. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/michael-egnor-is-free-will-a-dangerous-myth/
Because of their reductive materialistic presuppositions, Darwinists simply deny the reality of free will. Yet, free will allows us the bring about effects in the physical world that are simply completely inexplicable to the 'bottom up' materialistic explanations of Darwinian materialists. For example, this short sentence, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" is calculated by Winston Ewert, in this following video at the 10 minute mark, to contain 1000 bits of algorithmic specified complexity, (i.e. functional information), and thus to exceed the Universal Probability Bound (UPB) of 500 bits that was set by Dr. William Dembski.
Proposed Information Metric: Conditional Kolmogorov Complexity - Winston Ewert - video?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm3mm3ofAYU
And this is how Dr. Dembski set the UPB at 500 bits,
10^80, the number of elementary particles in the observable universe. 10^45, the maximum rate per second at which transitions in physical states can occur. 10^25, a billion times longer than the typical estimated age of the universe in seconds. Thus, 10^150 = 10^80 × 10^45 × 10^25. Hence, this value corresponds to an upper limit on the number of physical events that could possibly have occurred since the big bang. How many bits would that be: Pu = 10-150, so, -log2 Pu = 498.29 bits?? Call it 500 bits (The 500 bits is further classified as a specific type of information. It is classified as Complex Specified Information (CSI) by Dembski. and/or as Functional Information by Abel and Szostak to separate it from merely Ordered Sequence Complexity or Random Sequence Complexity.
The creation of information, (via our free will choice to create information whenever we desire to do so), is simply completely inexplicable for the 'bottom-up' materialistic explanations of Darwinian materialists and is therefore considered to be evidence for a ‘miracle’ on Hume's definition of a miracle being a violation of the laws of nature.
“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and because firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the case against a miracle is—just because it is a miracle—as complete as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined to be.” – David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding – 1748
In fact, since Darwinian materialists deny the reality of free will, and therefore deny the reality of agent causality altogether, then demonstrating a miracle, i.e. 'a violation of the laws of nature', becomes as easy as falling off a log, and is a lot easier than going through a lot of tedious calculations trying to figure out how much information you created. Dr. Craig Hazen, in the following video at the 12:26 minute mark, relates how he performed, (for an audience full of academics at a college no less), a ‘miracle’ simply by raising his arm,,
The Intersection of Science and Religion – Craig Hazen, PhD – video https://youtu.be/xVByFjV0qlE?t=744
bornagain77
April 21, 2021
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Particles are an unnecessary entity. When you stick with waves, no paradoxes. And of course there is no observation apart from observation. Tautology.polistra
April 20, 2021
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They just can't let go of words like "which way" and "particle". ...These "things" are most certainly not particles, they are (for all practical purposes) math equations of a wave of complex numbers, which propagates in all available directions simultaneously until something (a "measurement") causes the wave to disappear everywhere but in one specific point in space, thus producing a "particle"-like observation. The million-dollar question is "what exactly causes the wave to collapse?". Some of us suspect this could be this phenomenon called consciousness.Eugene
April 20, 2021
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