Einstein totally trumps quantum technobabble here - by establishing the relativity of time, he demonstrated that my future can be in your past, making the future no less fixed than the past, since past/future is subjective.
Never mind all the other arguments; I can’t see anyone getting past that one.
Do you know if that’s compatible with the holographic universe theory?
It’s true that if you define past and future by whichever clock is ahead of the other, they can be subjective. But relativity also gives you a definition where they’re not – your past and future light cones. There’s no frame of reference that will mix those up, and those are all the events that could influence your present moment and that it could influence, unless it turns out there is a way to send information faster than light or you invent some weird geometry like wormholes.
Merging relativity and quantum mechanics has its challenges, but mostly from its curved spacetime; there’s no inherent conflict with having an arrow of time like in decoherence (interpreted as non-deterministic or not) or entropy.
I’m not sure that makes sense. It’s not exactly a new idea that people can predict what’s going to happen and take steps to avoid it, and this is just saying they could in theory do so more precisely.
But a model can’t precisely include itself, so it’s not actually information from the future, it’s an approximation based on what information you have about the present. The two diverging isn’t necessarily non-determinism, just chaos. People who have proposed informational things like digital physics haven’t required that the universe couldn’t be a deterministic program.
Edited to add: and just for the record, I have a tough time understanding how for instance even Newton’s deterministic physics wouldn’t count as computable, at least if you supposed quantized time. But that’s not really saying anything beyond it being math, it doesn’t make it any less deterministic, right?
I wonder how many Physics majors transition to Semiotics after being exposed to this idea.
My blood sugar is currently so low I’m having trouble processing a mere double negative, so I’ll have to come back to this.
To you, observing yourself, you have free will if you can do things that you want to do. Your choices are not coming from somewhere outside yourself. Whatever is making the choices is part of you.
To other people observing you, your actions are either predetermined, according to the deterministic laws of physics, or else they are random, according to the random laws of physics.
Arguments about free will amount to word games that probably should have been retired a while ago, like the Four Humours or Zeno’s Paradox.
In that particular example I’m not invoking a predictive model of future behaviour, I’m positing that someone lives through a specific period of time in space and then sends information about themselves through a very distorted patch of spacetime, a Closed Time-Like Curve, into the past, interfering with their past behaviour. There are multiple versions of CTC’s that comply with GR that allow for this without resorting to wormholes, massively distorted spacetime around interacting black holes or cosmic strings, negative enegry density, Kerr Black holes etc.
The information might be really traversing the CTC into a new region of the bulk, and I guess you could argue that this implies a version of super-determinism, but so long as there can be apparent violations of local determinism, I’m happy enough.
But maybe CTCs are not possible even though the appear to comply with GR…
So, I’m not necessarily suggesting a simulation of local events, including the simulation and the accompanying madness of endless recursivity but, ultimately, perhaps there is no problem with that either, given the possibility of non-turing computation, universal simple-programs, hyper-computation and the rest.
If the universe is informational then it is almost certainly computable, and without invoking the non-traditional computation possibilities I’ve mentioned above, you could use knowledge of that computability to program states that violate locality such as temporal super-position and then we’re back to getting our future information into the past.
There are also potential violations of locality from black hole complementarity and in holographic theory, which I guess I touched on in the computability hypothesis, programming using knowledge of condensed physics, and I’m aware of the firewalls and various other temporal alignment propositions that disallow retro-causality but usually these are for macro scale events and I’m really talking about leveraging small scale, lower dimensional, informational structures.
/tired rant (I’ll try and go back over this more thoroughly in the morning… well, afternoon 
)
I have no idea.
I’m skeptical of free will because of Occam’s Razor.
Plus I think if you go through the Ship of Theseus experiment with a brain (ie replace parts of the brain with machinery), you get to a point where either you have a machine with free will or conclude that free will is an illusion.
But really, I’m mostly just really fond of the idea that everything is mathematics.
Is this where I confess that I don’t get the holographic universe idea? I mean, I understand the holographic principle. It’s like a greatly upgraded divergence theorem, you can take all the physics in some region and express it in terms of the boundary instead. Neat and maybe useful.
But then people start talking about just the one as reality. If they’re mathematically isomorphic, aren’t they the same thing written with different variables? And it’s the version in variables that actually have measurements that we call an illusion? What the barbapapa does that even mean to say? None of the few treatments I’ve seen have really explained it.
In any case, such physics may allow a lot of things. Maybe it’s possible a hyper-computer could model itself, though I’m not sure why the usual mathematical problems wouldn’t apply. You can definitely make closed time curves in the framework of GR, and I’m not surprised any theory that builds on it could have more things like that. Right now many are very open theories, more about what could exist than what couldn’t exist.
But so far these things are rigorous science fiction. There’s often no reason to assume they ever occur, and those that do probably matter on near-inaccessible scales, the limits of the universe, or other edge-cases. Because we still have the correspondence principle, and we know a directional arrow of time with rising entropy gives a good description for most of what we know in some 1031 cubic light-years spanning the last 13½ billion years.
Fair enough. I’m skeptical of determinism because it means that there must be a conservation of information in the universe. That is, since every past moment leads necessarily to a single future, then, given enough information, you can compute exactly what the future will contain. This leads to some absurd results, such as extrapolating the complete works of Shakespeare (and, in fact, the entirety of the creative works of the human race) from the positions, velocities, etc. of the particles emitted from the Big Bang.
As a writer and avid consumer of fiction, it seems to me that each creative act is adding knowledge to the universe, and I just can’t reconcile that with determinism.
A cell is a biological machine that turns certain chemicals into other chemicals based on instructions coded into DNA. Humans are, physically, a (largely) coherent pile of cells - a Rube Goldberg machine for allowing the DNA in the cells to reproduce itself. We’re each a larger biological machine made of smaller biological machines.
If consciousness can arise within a biological machine, and free will with it, I can see no reason why it can’t arise within a mechanical machine.
Just time for a quick response.
I agree with the propositional nature of that stuff, but I’m also inclined to therefore treat absolute determinism as the same kind of proposition. It’s easy to take measurements and then after the fact declare they would have always resulted in some specific fashion, but its quite well accepted that tiny, even unmeasurable, even unfathomably unmeasurable perturbations in initial conditions can lead to vastly varying results. Good old chaos. Why this reality should wane in the face of determinism for determinisms sake whilst other propositions that fit in with GR and QM, or even string theory, should be treated as unknown and therefore ignorable factors seems… ideological. I’m not saying that’s what you are doing but rational minds persist with that behaviour. If we’re really to come at this from an established point of view, determinism still needs to be developed as a concept much the same as those other potentialities do.
The headline and the actual experiment itself as described in the rest of the post seem to be at odds. The experiment talks about some rapid-fire choices being made before we are consciously aware that we have done so, which is interesting, but really doesn’t say anything about the existence of free will.
And determinism as you seem to be suggesting is a giant cop out right up there with Rand’s egoism. This is some seriously weak and uncritical thinking. You don’t happen to be one of the frat boys from my first year ethics class?
In what way is determinism a cop out? I’m not going to accept an explanation for how the universe works that involves magic or the supernatural and as far as I can see, that’s what free will is.
Free will emerges from deep thought. Trying to throw people off balance with meaningless selections of circles in abbreviated realtime proves little to me about free will. Why not give the participants something substantial to think and decide about, with time sufficient to exercise their abilities to research and collaborate and think before choosing? Is it because you are going in with an ideological chip on your shoulder, hoping to disprove free will by any means necessary, or are you in fact a scientist?
How does this experiment mean anything when it’s so manifestly flawed to this casual observer? Learn to ask mother nature the right questions and she’ll give you meaningful answers.
hoping to disprove free will by any means necessary, or are you in fact a scientist?
To claim to posses free will seems like an extraordinary claim. I think it should be up to you to prove the existence of free will, not the other way around. It’s like telling somebody it’s up to them to prove that God doesn’t exist.
Popper stresses the problem of demarcation—distinguishing the scientific from the unscientific—and makes falsifiability the demarcation criterion, such that what is unfalsifiable is classified as unscientific, and the practice of declaring an unfalsifiable theory to be scientifically true is pseudoscience. ( Falsifiability - Wikipedia )
I agree with Karl Popper generally, and I don’t believe that free will (of a subject) is falsifiable by the very same human will (of another observer), even if you demonstrate that some poor souls under very narrow constraints might as well be robots. Even under those constraints, I think there’s a strong argument those subjects merely ceded their free will momentarily in order to participate with a test that is ultimately meaningless to them, or they already discharged their free will by choosing to participate.
I believe in free will. Its a belief tempered with the profound insight of Erich Fromm as certainly free will appears to be the illusion when we are trapped under oppression. This is just my personal paradigm. Also, I get ridiculously fired up over this sort of thing so I had to chill in the interest of coherency.
Caveat complete.
Coming from a culture dominated by abrahamic traditions I feel like discussions of free-will are all giving the ontological argument side-eye while my whole being screams to just face it head on. For me this means pouring over Gödel. He never fails to cause my mind to explode with uncountable angels; dancing on un-see-able pins; in endless recursion; on a perfect island. I don’t claim to understand modal logic, but his incompleteness theorems make me feel funny inside. Like my mom says, “you always did love to stare into the abyss”.
There is that experiment where a green dot on the left is replaced by a red dot on the right (or whatever color) and the viewer reports a jump in position with a color change mid jump. Only thing is he doesn’t know in advance what the end color will be so he must see the end color and revise his memory accordingly. Or so I heard. I can’t seem to find the experiment now and I never bothered to try and replicate it on a computer.
I won’t deny that quantum mind theory intrigues me and I think it would be shorted sited to preemptively discredit, I also think that it would be short sited to preemptively confirm or endorse it. It is just a theory, that is all, and we still much to learn about quantum mechanics and how they really work. I realize that that the wave function theory has been disproven but you can no longer cite a lack of quantum activity on a Macroscopic level as reasoning for why you might think quantum mind theory is BS.
The rational wiki page on quantum mind theory is probably the most well rounded source on it. It seems to fit perfectly in the middle area of not discouraging future research but weeding out the pseudoscientific quacks who are sure it exists and have created broken theories to justify their belief.
Of course not all of it is flapdoodle-this doesn’t rule out the possibility of quantum effects, but no coherent mechanism able to be replicated by experiment has been proposed thus far.
As of late, it seems that Penrose and his followers have allowed their brand of quantum consciousness to bleed into Chopra’s and that of other woo-meisters.[13] This is rather unfortunate due to the fact that while many predictions made by the Orch-OR model have been wrong, it might have eventually shown promise in a protoscientific sense, while Chopra’s nonsense is mostly unfalsifiable and not even wrong.
