I'm finding this discussion to be knowledgable about mathematics and physics, but pretty naive philosophically. In particular, I don't in the least buy the identification of free will with nondetermnism. If your behavior is controlled by unpredictable random chance, rather than as a result of decisions made in your brain, why would that fell subjectively like "Free Will" any more than a decision caused by brain activity. On the contrary, a decision caused in a way completely unrelated to your sense perceptions, memories, and past history wouldn't feel like a "free choice" by you; it would feel like a random choice made by some outside agency you have no control over. What do we mean when we say "Agent A has free will"? I don't think we mean "Agent A does not obey deterministic laws of physics"; I think that we mean something much closer to "in predicting the future behavior of A, it is far more useful to adopt an intentional stance towards A, and reason according to A's goals, than to adopt a physical stance and reason according to the physical components of A". This isn't something that quantum mechanics or relativity can shed any useful light on. Recommended reading: Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth having, http://www.amazon.com/Elbow-Room-Varieties-Worth-Wanting/dp/0262540428/ref=p..., and Consciousness Explained, http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Dennett/dp/0316180661... both by Daniel Dennett. Andy Latto On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 3:34 PM, James A. (Andy) Moorer <jamminpower@earthlink.net> wrote:
I thought the free-will issue was done in decades ago by General Relativity. Brian Greene discusses it as follows: Visualize space-time as a loaf of French bread with time as the long axis (forget Z for the moment). "now" is a slice across the loaf. The crucial observation is that a bit of acceleration changes the angle of the slice. It still goes through your "now" point, but "now" on the other side of the universe is suddenly 100 years earlier, or 100 years later (!) - that is, the universe for all time must be extant everywhere - ergo, both free will and the arrow of time are illusory.
That notwithstanding, I personally like to cling to the illusion, even though I know it can't be real. I rather prefer to remain plugged into the Matrix . . .
James A. (Andy) Moorer www.jamminpower.com
----- Original Message ----- From: "Henry Baker" <hbaker1@pipeline.com> To: "Ray Tayek" <rtayek@ca.rr.com> Cc: "math-fun" <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Saturday, March 21, 2009 7:59 AM Subject: Re: [math-fun] If We Have Free Will, Then So Do Electrons
Hopefully, these upcoming lectures will appear as Princeton University podcasts, which you can get for free & automatically using iTunes (or other podcast receiver):
http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/podcasts/
At 01:24 PM 3/20/2009, Ray Tayek wrote:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/20/1229233
snahgle writes "Mathematicians John Conway (inventor of the Game of Life) and Simon Kochen of Princeton University have proven that if human experimenters demonstrate 'free will' in choosing what measurements to take on a particle, then the axioms of quantum mechanics require that <http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604079>the free will property be available to the particles measured, or to the universe as a whole. Conway is giving
<http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S23/69/84A24/index.xml?section=announcements>a series of lectures on the 'Free Will Theorem' and its ramifications over the next month at Princeton. A followup <http://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200226p.pdf>article strengthening the theory (PDF) was published last month in Notices of the AMS."
--- vice-chair http://ocjug.org/
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