Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor: Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is really confused about free will

_{Denyse O'Leary

May 6, 2019

Intelligent Design, Mind, Physics}

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We’ve often written about Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, whose take on current physics hype is not to be missed.

But then she decided to tackle a philosophical topic, free will. And, according to neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, who writes a lot on the topic, it didn’t go well:

Actually, her critics have a point. Why does she try to get people to change their minds if they aren’t free in some real sense to change their minds? It makes no sense to reason with someone whose will is wholly composed of “particles” and “equations”:

“I have come to the conclusion that a large fraction of people are cognitively unable to question the existence of free will, and there is no argument that can change their mind. ”

It’s hilarious. She misses the irony that she insists that people “change their minds” by accepting her assertion that they… can’t change their minds. Michael Egnor, “Can physics prove there is no free will?” at Mind Matters News

It really is quite funny. And physicists should stick to physics.

Also by Dr. Michael Egnor on free will:

Does “alien hand syndrome” show that we don’t really have free will?

How can mere products of nature have free will?

Does brain stimulation research challenge free will?

Is free will a dangerous myth?

and

But is determinism true?

Comments

BA77 @ #7 'Yet, regardless of how he and other people who lean towards atheism, (such as Hossenfelder), may prefer the world to behave, quantum mechanics itself could care less how atheists prefer the world to behave.' An elliptical way of expressing it that makes it an even more LOL fact. There is absolutely no question, is there, that atheists are anti-science, the best only producing science under the duresse of cognitive dissonance - to earn their living.Axel_{May 15, 2019
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Brother Brian:
The fact that people use reasoning to draw conclusions,...
Many people, like materialists, do not use reasoning.
We all believe that we have free will but has anybody ever developed a test that can prove it?
Science isn't about proving anything. The evidence says that we have free will.ET_{May 9, 2019
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KF
Folks, if you start from the wrong footing, it will be very hard to recover. In this case, it is material that we must be free to follow logical inferences or our claimed reasoning will be utterly untrustworthy.
The fact that people use reasoning to draw conclusions, conclusions that other people using their own reasoning disagree with, strongly suggests that our reasoning is often untrustworthy. We all believe that we have free will but has anybody ever developed a test that can prove it?Brother Brian_{May 9, 2019
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Hey bob o’h “Raymond Tallis There has been much breathless talk of late about all the varied mysteries of human existence that have been or soon will be solved by neuroscience. As a clinical neuroscientist, I could easily expatiate on the wonders of a discipline that I believe has a better claim than mathematics to being Queen of the Sciences” That’s straight from Raymond Tallis’ his mouth As a clinical neuroscientist yes he’s a medical professional but he’s also neuroscientist, I took this from an old essay of his that I had copied long ago I was using talk text when I wrote that last post I see that it does say neurologist, it is supposed to be neuroscientist, That I apologize forAaronS1978_{May 8, 2019
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AaronS1978 - Raymond Tallis is actually a medical doctor.Bob O'H_{May 8, 2019
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“And presumably neurosurgeons should stick to neurosurgery” agreed, Seriously I agree with this. On the same token the likes of Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker, Stephen Hawkins, Patrick Haggard, Sam Harris, Patricia Churchland, JD Haynes, CS Soon, and Freid should stick to their professions too instead of philosophy. Even though some of the above are just professional atheist (anti-theist) The list actually can go on I’d leave the Philosophy to people like Alfred Mele, Raymond Tallis, Edward Fesser, Even the likes of Daniel Dennet, and one of my least favorite Alex Rosenberg. At least they are philosophers even though Raymond Tallis was a Neurologist. I also would leave the philosophy to people like David Chalmers, Naoma Chomsky and even Kristof Koch I’m a particular fan of Edward Fesser, Alfred Melee, and David Chalmers Btw A lot of Michael Egnor’s philosophies come from Edward Fesser although Egnor is not always the greatest at delivery the message that Fesser can really articulate. Pardon my misspellings on any of these names I am using talk text on my phone right nowAaronS1978_{May 7, 2019
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Bob O'H:
And presumably neurosurgeons should stick to neurosurgery
Evos stick to their anti-science agenda.ET_{May 7, 2019
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Folks, if you start from the wrong footing, it will be very hard to recover. In this case, it is material that we must be free to follow logical inferences or our claimed reasoning will be utterly untrustworthy. Further, we find ourselves undeniably under the moral government of duty to truth, right reason, prudence, fairness etc. Otherwise, reason reduces to little more than a capacity to manipulate others. This is an underlying premise of all disciplines. KFkairosfocus_{May 7, 2019
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To give us a small glimpse of the power that was involved in Christ resurrection from the dead, the following recent article found that, ”it would take 34 Thousand Billion Watts of VUV radiations to make the image on the shroud. This output of electromagnetic energy remains beyond human technology.”
Astonishing discovery at Christ’s tomb supports Turin Shroud – NOV 26TH 2016 Excerpt: The first attempts made to reproduce the face on the Shroud by radiation, used a CO2 laser which produced an image on a linen fabric that is similar at a macroscopic level. However, microscopic analysis showed a coloring that is too deep and many charred linen threads, features that are incompatible with the Shroud image. Instead, the results of ENEA “show that a short and intense burst of VUV directional radiation can color a linen cloth so as to reproduce many of the peculiar characteristics of the body image on the Shroud of Turin, including shades of color, the surface color of the fibrils of the outer linen fabric, and the absence of fluorescence”. ‘However, Enea scientists warn, “it should be noted that the total power of VUV radiations required to instantly color the surface of linen that corresponds to a human of average height, body surface area equal to = 2000 MW/cm2 17000 cm2 = 34 thousand billion watts makes it impractical today to reproduce the entire Shroud image using a single laser excimer, since this power cannot be produced by any VUV light source built to date (the most powerful available on the market come to several billion watts )”. Comment The ENEA study of the Holy Shroud of Turin concluded that it would take 34 Thousand Billion Watts of VUV radiations to make the image on the shroud. This output of electromagnetic energy remains beyond human technology. http://westvirginianews.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-study-claims-shroud-of-turin-is.html
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." https://phys.org/news/2019-04-scientists-machine-quantum-superposition-futures.html
,,, in a theistic view of reality that veritable infinity of options all boils down to just two options. Eternal life with God, or Eternal life without God. C.S. Lewis stated the situation for people as such: “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
To support of C.S. Lewis’s contention that “Without that self-choice there could be no Hell”, all I have to do is to point to the many people of today who are fanatically ‘pro-choice’ as far as abortion in concerned, demanding the unrestricted right to choose death for their unborn babies no matter what stage of development their babies may be at. Unbelievably, infanticide itself, unthinkable in our society just a few short years ago, is now being demanded as a right by many on the ‘pro-choice’ side.
Proverbs 8:36 But those who fail to find me harm themselves; all who hate me love death."
On top of that, in order to support the physical reality of heaven and hell, I can appeal directly to two of our most powerful and precisely tested theories ever in the history of science. Special Relativity and General Relativity respectfully. As the following video shows, with General Relativity we find an ‘infinitely destructive’ eternity associated with it. And with Special Relativity we find an extremely orderly eternity associated with it:
Quantum Mechanics, Special Relativity, General Relativity and Christianity – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4QDy1Soolo “But why was the big bang so precisely organized, whereas the big crunch (or the singularities in black holes) would be expected to be totally chaotic? It would appear that this question can be phrased in terms of the behaviour of the WEYL part of the space-time curvature at space-time singularities. What we appear to find is that there is a constraint WEYL = 0 (or something very like this) at initial space-time singularities-but not at final singularities-and this seems to be what confines the Creator’s choice to this very tiny region of phase space.” Roger Penrose - How Special Was The Big Bang? “Einstein’s equation predicts that, as the astronaut reaches the singularity (of the black-hole), the tidal forces grow infinitely strong, and their chaotic oscillations become infinitely rapid. The astronaut dies and the atoms which his body is made become infinitely and chaotically distorted and mixed-and then, at the moment when everything becomes infinite (the tidal strengths, the oscillation frequencies, the distortions, and the mixing), spacetime ceases to exist.” Kip S. Thorne – “Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy” pg. 476 Kip Thorne and Charles Misner, and John Wheeler wrote Gravitation (1973), considered a definitive textbook on general relativity. “I started to move toward the light. The way I moved, the physics, was completely different than it is here on Earth. It was something I had never felt before and never felt since. It was a whole different sensation of motion. I obviously wasn’t walking or skipping or crawling. I was not floating. I was flowing. I was flowing toward the light. I was accelerating and I knew I was accelerating, but then again, I didn’t really feel the acceleration. I just knew I was accelerating toward the light. Again, the physics was different – the physics of motion of time, space, travel. It was completely different in that tunnel, than it is here on Earth. I came out into the light and when I came out into the light, I realized that I was in heaven.” Barbara Springer – Near Death Experience – The Tunnel – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv2jLeoAcMI
Again, the implications for individual humans, to put it mildly, are fairly drastic.
Bill Wiese (Man Who Went To Hell) – 23 Minutes in Hell (8 Minute Version) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqufixPt2w0
To put the drastic implications for us even more clearly, we, with either our acceptance or rejection God and what He has done for us through Jesus Christ on the cross, 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 refusal to accept God, and to now choose God, even eternal life with God, 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.
Turin Shroud Hologram Reveals The Words “The Lamb” – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tmka1l8GAQ Shroud of Turin: From discovery of Photographic Negative, to 3D Information, to 3D Hologram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-TL4QOCiis
Of supplemental note: The following 2017 article states: James Clerk Maxwell (said), “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”,,, quantum information theory,,, describes the spread of information through quantum systems.,,, Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
The Quantum Thermodynamics Revolution – May 2017 Excerpt: the 19th-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell put it, “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.” In recent years, a revolutionary understanding of thermodynamics has emerged that explains this subjectivity using quantum information theory — “a toddler among physical theories,” as del Rio and co-authors put it, that describes the spread of information through quantum systems. Just as thermodynamics initially grew out of trying to improve steam engines, today’s thermodynamicists are mulling over the workings of quantum machines. Shrinking technology — a single-ion engine and three-atom fridge were both experimentally realized for the first time within the past year — is forcing them to extend thermodynamics to the quantum realm, where notions like temperature and work lose their usual meanings, and the classical laws don’t necessarily apply. They’ve found new, quantum versions of the laws that scale up to the originals. Rewriting the theory from the bottom up has led experts to recast its basic concepts in terms of its subjective nature, and to unravel the deep and often surprising relationship between energy and information — the abstract 1s and 0s by which physical states are distinguished and knowledge is measured.,,, Renato Renner, a professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, described this as a radical shift in perspective. Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,, https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-thermodynamics-revolution/ How Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Correlate - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f0hL3Nrdas
Apparently, contrary to what Hossenfelder falsely believes beforehand about what quantum physics is telling her, according to recent advances in quantum mechanics itself, humans certainly are much more than just particles in motion as she apparently falsely believes:bornagain77_{May 7, 2019
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Apparently, besides being confused about free will, Hossenfelder is also confused about quantum mechanics itself. Hossenfelder states:
"Physics deals with the most fundamental laws of nature, those from which everything else derives. These laws are, to our best current knowledge, differential equations. Given those equations and the configuration of a system at one particular time, you can calculate what happens at all other times.",,, I think I here spell out only the obvious, and use a notion of free will that most people would agree on. You have free will if your decisions select one of several possible futures. But there is no place for such a selection in the laws of nature that we know, laws that we have confirmed to high accuracy. Instead, whatever is about to happen was already determined at the big bang—up to those random flukes that come from quantum mechanics."
Yet as Steven Weinberg, who is an atheist himself, stated, "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 people who lean towards atheism, (such as Hossenfelder), 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
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 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 ? 7.4 × 10^21. This experiment pushes back to at least ? 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
Moreover, here is another recent interesting experiment by Anton Zeilinger, (and about 70 other researchers), that insured the complete independence of the measurement settings in a Bell test by using the free will choices of 100,000 human participants instead of having a super fast randomizer determine the measurement settings (as is usually done in these quantum experiments).
Challenging local realism with human choices – A. Zeilinger – 20 May 2018 Abstract: A Bell test, which challenges the philosophical worldview of local realism against experimental observations, is a randomized trial requiring spatially-distributed entanglement, fast and high-efficiency detection, and unpredictable measurement settings. While technology can perfect the first two of these, and while technological randomness sources enable device-independent protocols based on Bell inequality violation, challenging local realism using physical randomizers inevitably makes assumptions about the same physics one aims to test. Bell himself noted this weakness of physical setting choices and argued that human free will could rigorously be used to assure unpredictability in Bell tests. Here we report a suite of local realism tests using human choices, avoiding assumptions about predictability in physics. We recruited ~100,000 human participants to play an online video game that incentivizes fast, sustained input of unpredictable bits while also illustrating Bell test methodology. The participants generated 97,347,490 binary choices, which were directed via a scalable web platform to twelve laboratories on five continents, in which 13 experiments tested local realism using photons, single atoms, atomic ensembles, and superconducting devices. Over a 12-hour period on the 30 Nov. 2016, participants worldwide provided a sustained flow of over 1000 bits/s to the experiments, which used different human-generated bits to choose each measurement setting. The observed correlations strongly contradict local realism and other realist positions in bi-partite and tri-partite scenarios. Project outcomes include closing of the freedom-of-choice loophole, gamification of statistical and quantum non-locality concepts, new methods for quantum-secured communications, a very large dataset of human-generated randomness, and networking techniques for global participation in experimental science. https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04431
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, 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”. Here are a few posts where I lay out and defend some of the evidence for that claim:
(April 2019) Overturning the Copernican principle Thus in conclusion, the new interactive graph by Dr. Dembski provides a powerful independent line of evidence, along with several other powerful lines of evidence, that overturns the Copernican principle and restores humanity back to centrality in the universe, and even, when putting all those lines of evidence together, brings modern science back, full circle, to Christianity from whence it originated in the first place. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/bill-dembski-and-colleagues-create-an-updated-magnifying-the-universe-tool/#comment-675730 I will reiterate my case for Christ’s resurrection from the dead providing the correct solution for the much sought after “Theory of Everything”. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/bill-nye-should-check-wikipedia/#comment-671692 (February 19, 2019) To support Isabel Piczek’s claim that the Shroud of Turin does indeed reveal a true ‘event horizon’, the following study states that ‘The bottom part of the cloth (containing the dorsal image) would have born all the weight of the man’s supine body, yet the dorsal image is not encoded with a greater amount of intensity than the frontal image.’,,, Moreover, besides gravity being dealt with, the shroud also gives us evidence that Quantum Mechanics was dealt with. In the following paper, it was found that it was not possible to describe the image formation on the Shroud in classical terms but they found it necessary to describe the formation of the image on the Shroud in discrete quantum terms. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/experiment-quantum-particles-can-violate-the-mathematical-pigeonhole-principle/#comment-673178 Supplemental notes defending the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin: https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/viruses-devolve/#comment-674732
bornagain77_{May 7, 2019
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It really is quite funny. And physicists should stick to physics.
And presumably neurosurgeons should stick to neurosurgery.Bob O'H_{May 7, 2019
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Walt Whitman wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” Sabine is not a blasted slide ruler, and she often writes in a way that suggests she is musing. Musing about binaries like, there is no free will, yes there is free will, enables her to reach clarity - perhaps in a compromise like this action is, but that action isn’t, an example of free will.Belfast_{May 6, 2019
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Do you really think that’s the case is it really that bad? I mean it really would honestly explain why this is such a butchered mess in comparison to what she normally writes. I believe she said that she didn’t believe in free will before but then she also put this post up “It occurred to me some years ago, however, that there is a much simpler example for how reductionism can fail. It can fail simply because the extrapolation from the theory at short distances to the one at long distances is not possible without inputting further information. This can happen if the scale-dependence of a constant has a singularity, and that’s something which we cannot presently exclude. With singularity I here do not mean a divergence, ie that something becomes infinitely large. Such situations are unphysical and not cases I would consider plausible for realistic systems. But functions can have singularities without anything becoming infinite: A singularity is merely a point beyond which a function cannot be continued. I do not currently know of any example for which this actually happens. But I also don’t know a way to exclude it. Now consider you want to derive the theory for the large objects (think humans) from the theory for the small objects (think elementary particles) but in your derivation you find that one of the functions has a singularity at some scale in between. This means you need new initial values past the singularity. It’s a clean example for a failure of reductionism, and it implies that the laws for large objects indeed might not follow from the laws for small objects. More. Note her qualification: It will take more than this to convince me that free will isn’t an illusion, but this example for the failure of reductionism gives you an excuse to continue believing in free will.” Here she calls the idea of reductionism a failure Here But she uses it in this current post to prove that there is no free will So I kind of see what you’re getting at I expected that kind of stupidity from the likes of Wikipedia To be honest with you Google scholar is way better for the things that we look up at least then we don’t get a horrible mixture of opinions and bad interpretations of what is considered evidence or at least it’s minimized But that is kind of freaky News (u the person lol) And not a good sign of things to comeAaronS1978_{May 6, 2019
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What chance is there - just a thought - that the wolves are circling and SH needs to prove her loyalty in some way? Her thinking might look like a mess to UD readers but she does not have a chair in theoretical physics, after all, and we can't find her work. Probably the opposite. Maybe this kind of performance signals that people who do give her work won't be surprised by a Gunter Bechly (“erased from Wikipedia”) episode. Doubtless a tough life. All the Wrong People all the time.News_{May 6, 2019
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I normally really like sabine’s writings But the moment she said that your decisions matter contradicted everything that she said previously about not having free will and she becomes a Compatiblelist She also contradicted herself by saying that quantum mechanics is random but it’s predetermined by the big bang the whole point of want to mechanics is that the probability of an outcome is not determined that means if we rewind the tape we wouldn’t have the same outcome is we might not even have the same survivors, quantum mechanics has a lot to do with that. Quantum mechanics as a baseline for everything in this universe and seems to be unaffected by time so the quantum state currently would be the same in the past as it is now but tomorrow it might change and so would that state in the past it’s very confusing at times but there is no way if this is 100% true that you would ever get the same outcome because the quantum state would never be the same even if you rewind the tape I’m gonna say I don’t understand that at all and I’m not going to claim that I do But if determinism is true then we can not know what the illusion of free will is or if free will is actually an illusion that’s not possible. A blind man at birth does not know the difference between the color red and the color blue and can never know the difference of the color red and the color blue if he was born that way. It hard determinism is 100% true then we can never know the difference between free will And it’s opposite we were born that way. Furthermore it doesn’t make sense to say that the laws of physics which have been categorized and named by humans and somehow transcend humans but we are capable of understanding these laws that determine that we do not have free will. that presupposes that we understand 100% of the laws of physics which I guarantee we do not Finally if anything is truly predetermined then our decisions absolutely do not matter furthermore believing that we don’t have free will does have impact on how we act and causes people to go into depression’s and really hurts them. She can change a person’s mind by convincing them that they have no free will and people fight to maintain it because it’s depressing. It’s not a stubborn illusion that we can’t help it’s we want free will and we want to know that we are making our own choices This is why when you change someone’s mind by convincing them that they don’t have the ability to exercise a choice that change is painful and in a lot of cases they continue to try to live their lives with that change of mind and it is a very difficult thing to cope with. I know personally and it is also been verified scientifically. You can change someone’s mind on whether they believe in free will or not. Saying you can’t and then turning around and saying a your decision matters and try to continue to live your life as you normally did, because your free will didn't just suddenly evaporator is painfully hypocriticalAaronS1978_{May 6, 2019
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Wow, she definitely needs to leave the philosophy to the professionals. She displayed a stunning ignorance about logical consistency in her article. Embarrassing, actually.OldArmy94_{May 6, 2019
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