Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor asks, how can there NOT be free will?
| July 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Physics |
the open door/William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877)
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 a scientific fact that determinism in nature as commonly understood is simply not true. More.
Also at MMT: Attend your own funeral! It’s easy if you upload your consciousness to the cloud, says futurist. Ummm…
Big Question: Can Big Data read the minds of others? And should Facebook scan your posts for suicidal thoughts? (It does.) One thing we can be sure of: To the extent that Facebook’s suicide prevention program succeeds, we can expect the technology, seen as laudable, to be aimed at other issues, however defined and by whom.
See also: Can we choose not to believe in free will? (Peter Gooding)
Free will is compatible with physics The laws of physics don’t rule out free will? But that is just a well for the laws of physics because, if Dennett is right and consciousness is an illusion, then the “laws of physics” probably are too. The concept of evidence has been rendered powerless.
Neuroscientist: Free will is an illusion but we should believe we have it
Neuroscientist debunks hype about no free will, etc.
GP, Mike Pence and Free Will
At Physics Central: How human beings can have free will as complex, purely physical systems
Do the defects of real numbers open the door to free will in physics?
and
How can we believe in naturalism if we have no choice?
14 Responses to Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor asks, how can there NOT be free will?
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The construction and presentation of every argument presupposes some ability to choose.
Absent such an ability the argument itself is merely a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Trying to change a belief, which you believe had no cause in logic or rational choice, by presenting a rational argument to the believer, ends in the same self-refuting incoherence as every materialist proposition.
When your every conclusion devolves to self-refuting incoherence you must eventually give up, either (A) your axioms, or (B) your claim to a rational connection between your axioms and your conclusions.
Not a pretty choice, is it?
Putting 2 and 2 together, this morning I get “avocado”.
DOGS have free will. Lions and badgers and dolphins all have Free Will. Heck, fruit flies probably have Free Will. So why attempt to deny that humans also have Free Will?
We’re breaking in a new Golden Retriever. He’s perhaps 6 months old now, which is a LOT in dog years. And it is VERY evident that sometimes he wants to play sometimes he’s really needs to go outside to pee (since he now knows that well mannered members of his man-pack don’t pee on the floor).
In any competent nature show, the observers will comment on members of the pride or pod or pack being “thrown out” by the other members. That is, one day every thing is cool and friendly, and the next day you have a one way ticket to Loser-ville. The most common reason for exile is becoming a mature male (note that NOBODY does field studies on “bachelor” groups, regardless of whether we’re talking lions or whales or horses. It’s just so much easier to locate a traditional group to do field studies.)
So why attempt to claim that humans do NOT have the range of choices that other animals have?
“You have to believe in free will, you have no choice.” I.B. Singer ; – )
In regards to free will, quantum mechanics has progressed much further than just the undermining of determinism.
In what is termed ‘the instrumentalist approach’, humans are brought into the laws of physics at the most fundamental level instead of humans being a result of the laws of physics as Darwinists had falsely imagined us to be.
Needless to say, Atheists (such as Weinberg himself) don’t like the “instrumentalist approach” of quantum mechanics since it, by letting free will into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level., directly undermines the Darwinian worldview from within. Yet, the “instrumentalist approach”, in spite of how atheists may personally feel about it, is experimentally confirmed to be true by contextuality and/or by the Kochen-Speckter Theorem.
In regards to contextuality we find that “in the quantum world, the property that you discover through measurement is not the property that the system actually had prior to the measurement process. What you observe necessarily depends on how you carried out the observation”.,,, and,,, “Measurement outcomes depend on all the other measurements that are performed – the full context of the experiment. Contextuality means that quantum measurements can not be thought of as simply revealing some pre-existing properties of the system under study”.
And as Anton Zeilinger states in the following video, “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.”
Zeilinger and his team have now gone much further in verifying the reality of free will in quantum mechanics.
The only ‘loophole’ left for atheist who want to deny free will, as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, is a ‘truly exotic hypotheses’ involving ‘some kind of superdeterminism, so that the choice of measurement settings was determined at the Big Bang’.
Yet if Atheists really want to stubbornly go down this route of ‘superdeterminism’ in their futile, self-refuting, denial of their own free will, a road where all their choices were somehow determined before the big bang, then I say “Welcome to Christianity” since strict Calvanists have been arguing for ‘superdeterminism’ for several centuries now.
Here is an excellent sermon by Tim Keller that gets the Calvinist’s ‘superdetermism’ view of God across very well.
Personally, I hold with CS Lewis that our free will choice whether to accept or reject God is not ‘superdetermined’.
As CS Lewis alluded to, 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. Eternal life, (infinity if you will), with God, or Eternal life, (infinity again if you will), without God.
And exactly as would be expected if the Christian view of reality were correct, we find two very different eternities in reality. An ‘infinitely destructive’ eternity associated with General Relativity and a extremely orderly eternity associated with Special Relativity:
Verse:
If quantum non-determinism is the same as free will, then absolutely everything in our universe has free will, making the term fairly meaningless.
Off-topic, for BA: https://phys.org/news/2018-07-shroud-turin-fake-retracted.html
https://www.romereports.com/en/2018/07/17/holy-shroud-expert-study-authors-who-deny-presence-of-blood-on-it-havent-seen-it-up-close/
Thanks SA,
only jdk and other atheists would be so gullible to fall for Garlaschelli’s work. He tried to fool people before:
EricMH:
Quantum non-determinism is not the same as free will. It’s just the best model of interface through which free will can express itself without violating any natural law.
I like Egnor’s article from yesterday:
Also of note, here is better playlist link to the video I listed earlier:
@gpuccio but if free will can influence quantum non-determinism in a non-random way, then it could theoretically violate physical laws like 2nd law of thermodynamics and perhaps other things.
On the other hand, if quantum non-determinism is only random, it’s hard to understand why there is any coherence to reality.
EricMH, in regards to the second law and quantum mechanics, I would definitely hold the Quantum Zeno Effect to be, shall we say, counter-intuitive.
The ‘Quantum Zeno Effect’, is, to put it simply, “an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay.”
As the following author commented, “In the quantum world, the folk wisdom really is true: “A watched pot never boils.”
The Quantum Zeno Effect has now also been confirmed with ‘interaction free measurement’.
The reason why I am very impressed with the Quantum Zeno Effect as to establishing consciousness and free will’s primacy in quantum mechanics is, for one thing, that Entropy is, by a wide margin, the most finely tuned of initial conditions of the Big Bang:
In fact, entropy is the primary reason why our physical, temporal, bodies grow old and die,,,
For another thing, it is interesting to note just how foundational entropy is in its explanatory power:
And yet, to repeat,,, “The quantum Zeno effect is,,, an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay.”
This is just fascinating! Why in blue blazes should my choice whether to observe a unstable particle or not put a freeze on the entropic decay of that unstable particle unless consciousness and free will was and is more foundational to reality than the 1 in 10^10^123 entropy is?
Quantum Mechanics also falsified Rolf Landauer’s notion that ‘information is physical’ by doing something, shall we say, ‘unexpected’ as far as the second law was concerned. As the following two articles state, “We’re working on the edge of the second law. If you go any further, you will break it.” and “Landauer said that information is physical because it takes energy to erase it. We are saying that the reason it (information) is physical has a broader context than that.”
Also of related interest in regards to the second law and quantum mechanics, the following article states, “It establishes a connection between well-documented quantum physics processes and the theoretical quantum channels that make up quantum information theory.”
The work predicts certain conditions under which the H-theorem might be violated and entropy—in the short term—might actually decrease.,,,
“Although the violation is only on the local scale, the implications are far-reaching,” Vinokur said. “This provides us a platform for the practical realization of a quantum Maxwell’s demon, which could make possible a local quantum perpetual motion machine.”
The preceding has now been experimentally verified. As the following article states: “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.”, (and then they state more provocatively as far as free will and consciousness is concerned), “Now in information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
EMH, why would intentional ordering of information, choice and work VIOLATE 2nd law, instead of simply implying compensating entropy creation as is commonplace with heat engine theory? Remember, the 2nd law was developed in the context of designed heat engines that carry out shaft work. All that a Smith Model two tier controller bio cybernetic loop entity would be doing is having intelligent supervision of the loop as a vehicle for freedom to act in an intent-driven, rational way. The locus for the quantum influence would be the brain and CNS as in the loop i/o controller. Influence on microtubules has been suggested. KF
EricMH at #11:
“but if free will can influence quantum non-determinism in a non-random way, then it could theoretically violate physical laws like 2nd law of thermodynamics and perhaps other things.”
I don’t think that is the case.
The quantum interface would allow consciousness to “select” specific quantum events among those possible in accord with physical laws. IOWs, it would act, in a sense, like a Maxwell’s demon of sort.
The only violation would be the generation of new complex functional information, but that is of course possible if it is consciousness that originates the process.
I believe that no violation of the second law as a physical law is necessary to input functional information into a material system