Over at her BackReAction blog, Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist based at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Frankfurt, Germany, has written an article titled, Free will is dead, let’s bury it. However, her arguments against free will are both scientifically unsound and philosophically dated. She writes: There are only two types of fundamental laws that appear in contemporary theories. One type is deterministic, which means that the past entirely predicts the future. There is no free will in such a fundamental law because there is no freedom. The other type of law we know appears in quantum mechanics and has an indeterministic component which is random. This randomness cannot be influenced by anything, and in particular it Read More ›

Well, no, it’s not, but … we didn’t think many people other than Peter Woit had noticed. Many have rather pursued a war on falsifiability to protect it. Ethan Siegel in Forbes distinguishes between a mathematical theory and a physical theory. Can we make testable predictions of string theory, which we should be able to do fora physical theory? The answer, so far, is no. The first one is a huge problem: we need to get rid of six dimensions to get back the Universe we see, and there are more ways to do it than there are atoms in the Universe. What’s worse, is that each way you do it gives a different “vacuum” for string theory, with no Read More ›

This is just a note for record on what monism is (as opposed to dualism, Creation by a Supreme and maximally great and good being, etc). A useful point of departure is a diagram from Wikipedia on dualism (and they give only one type) vs monism: Wikipedia notes, next to this: Different types of monism include:[12][18] Substance monism, “the view that the apparent plurality of substances is due to different states or appearances of a single substance”[12] Attributive monism, “the view that whatever the number of substances, they are of a single ultimate kind”[12] Partial monism, “within a given realm of being (however many there may be) there is only one substance”[12] Existence monism, “the view that there is only Read More ›

From Mind Matters Today: Succinctly, researchers using Bell’s theoretical insight into quantum entanglement have shown that there are no deterministic local hidden variables. This means that the final state of entangled quantum particles is not determined by any variables in the initial state. Nature at its most fundamental level is indeterminate. The states of bound particles are not determined by any local variable at the moment of separation. Bell’s inequality and the experimental work that has followed on it conclusively demonstrate that quantum entanglement, and thus nature, is not determinate, at least locally. There remains the remote possibility of non-local determinism, but that view is considered fringe and is rejected by nearly all physicists working in the field. It is Read More ›

Via Chad at Truth Bomb, quoting Christian philosopher J. P. Moreland, …you can’t get something from nothing…It’s as simple as that. If there were no God, then the history of the entire universe, up until the appearance of living creatures, would be a history of dead matter with no consciousness. You would not have any thoughts, beliefs, feelings, sensations, free actions, choices, or purposes. There would be simply one physical event after another physical event, behaving according to the laws of physics and chemistry…How then, do you get something totally different- conscious, living, thinking, feeling, believing creatures- from materials that don’t have that? That’s getting something from nothing! And that’s the main problem…However…if you begin with an infinite mind, then Read More ›

From Peter Gooding at The Conversation: A recent study showed that it is possible to diminish people’s belief in free will by simply making them read a science article suggesting that everything is predetermined. This made the participants’ less willing to donate to charitable causes (compared to a control group). This was only observed in non-religious participants, however. … It may therefore be unsurprising that some studies have shown that people who believe in free will are more likely to have positive life outcomes – such as happiness, academic success and better work performance . However, the relationship between free will belief and life outcomes may be complex so this association is still debated. … People using a philosophical definition Read More ›

Yes, according to Rob Sheldon: Woit & Hossenfelder & Wolchover are saying something more profound than they realize. It is not simply, as Wolchover put it, “a diphoton hangover”, or as Hossenfelder put it, “we are completely lost”, nor even as Woit said in his 2013 essay, a “nightmare scenario” in which, “After centuries of great progress, moving towards ever deeper understanding of the universe we live in, we may be entering a new kind of era. Will intellectual progress become just a memory, with an important aspect of human civilization increasingly characterized by an unfamiliar and disturbing stasis?” For Peter, as well as Sabine and Natalie, “progress” is the birthright of humanity, and “stasis” the curse. But imagine for Read More ›