The Strong Free Will Theorem (2009) [pdf]

110 点作者 lainon超过 6 年前

14 条评论

simonh超过 6 年前

I really think this, along with much philosophical musing about free will, is entirely missing the point. Pre-determination is essential to free will. You literally cannot have free will without it. Random choice, or even non-predetermined correlated outcomes of entangled objects don't lead to free will, they lead to uncertain decisions and those are not the same thing.If my decisions are not a product of my prior state, then they are not my decisions. The definition of 'me' is my prior state. If my decisions are unpredictable given complete knowledge of my prior state, and the ability to extrapolate it forward, then the decisions do not come from me. If they're not mine, then I have no responsibility for them. Any discussion of my responsibility for my actions must take into account my personal contribution to the decision as a being.Dualism does not solve this problem. It simply foists a chunk of a person's state into some non-material constituent, but if that constituent does not have a persistent (though presumably malleable) state or does not deterministically contribute to the process, again whence comes responsibility?

评论 #18399801 未加载

评论 #18399980 未加载

评论 #18402454 未加载

评论 #18399040 未加载

评论 #18399097 未加载

评论 #18399247 未加载

评论 #18399042 未加载

评论 #18399530 未加载

评论 #18402488 未加载

评论 #18399066 未加载

评论 #18400784 未加载

评论 #18403292 未加载

评论 #18399566 未加载

评论 #18399403 未加载

评论 #18401158 未加载

评论 #18401360 未加载

评论 #18399687 未加载

评论 #18400587 未加载

评论 #18399640 未加载

评论 #18399789 未加载

评论 #18399394 未加载

esotericn超过 6 年前

Free will is not well defined.What does it mean for "will" to be "free"? If you could rewind time around one of your decisions, and replay it, you'd make the same decision every time, unless there was a random element involved, because the state would be the same every time.And if there's a random element involved, it's not really your will, is it?

评论 #18399556 未加载

waynecochran超过 6 年前

<pre><code> Although, as we show in [1], determinism may formally be shown to be consistent, there is no longer any evidence that supports it, in view of the fact that classical physics has been superseded by quantum mechanics, a non-deterministic theory. </code></pre> I am surprised at the number of folks who still try to argue that science (particularly physics) has "proved" that these is no free will. This may in fact be true, but you can't argue that it follows from Physics in a post-Quantum world.

评论 #18402310 未加载

评论 #18402157 未加载

starbeast超过 6 年前

I been juggling the following three papers for a bit and trying to brush my maths up. I don't know why I feel a hunch between them, but I do know that the hunch is to do with this problem.<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.06824.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.06824.pdf</a><a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1306.0533.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/pdf/1306.0533.pdf</a><a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.2779.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.2779.pdf</a>I will almost certainly be wrong about whatever it is. However I may have more updates on how wrong and what it is I am wrong about, in maybe a decade or so ;)

dooglius超过 6 年前

> Another customarily tacit assumption is that experimenters are free to choose between possible experiments. To be precise, we mean that the choice an experimenter makes is not a function of the pastGarbage in, garbage out. It isn't clarified whether an experimenter in a nondegenerate superposition of states (will choose x, will choose y, will choose z) is considered to have "free will". If you call that free will, then the result that result that the particle can end up in a superposition of states is not novel. If you don't call that free will, then the assumption is false and the theorem vacuous.

评论 #18399187 未加载

EamonnMR超过 6 年前

I've honestly had trouble understanding how one would go about defining free will in a way that it could be observed. I can explain how I made my decisions and non-decisions, I know the difference between freedom and duress, but I have yet to see a definition of what free will is meant to mean, and why I am supposed to have it, while dice, my phone, and a plant growing towards the sun are not. It probably also requires a strong definition of consciousness, right?

评论 #18403412 未加载

TheOtherHobbes超过 6 年前

This is a subtle version of the Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy.Assumption: free will is defined by unpredictability and indeterminacy. (Actually not a given. This is hotly debated, to put it mildly.)Therefore if a physical system behaves in an intrinsically unpredictable way (quantum systems do...) it is showing evidence of free will.If you start from the premise that the universe and everything in it is sentient (etc, etc) this makes perfect sense. Of a sort.But it's not in any way a proof of that premise.In fact it doesn't even come close to being a proof. All it does is take the long way around proving that constrained unpredictable systems are in fact unpredictable but constrained - something that's proven by Kochen-Sprecker anyway.Then it pulls the free will rabbit out of the hat and says "Of course! This is just like human free will!"I'm going to go with "no" on this one.The irony is that KS is usually taken as a proof that quantum systems aren't just indeterminate, they're essentially partially unknowable. There is no possible one-to-one mapping between states and observables.If particle free will existed there would either be a tighter constraint on the possible mappings, which would disprove KS, or the free will would be indistinguishable from quantum randomness, which makes it an untestable metaphysical epiphenomenon.Either way it doesn't add anything to our understanding.Of course if someone designs an experiment where particles use observables to signal their consciousness to human experimenters, I'll change my mind about that.

ganzuul超过 6 年前

If life has meaning, will is not free. - This is the strongest statement that I think can be said about the subject.There is a great conceptual distance between the self-assertion popuparized by Descartes and the theories and observations of physics. Science, even cosmology, has a very long way to go before its methods begin to answer the questions of philosophy.

lainon超过 6 年前

I am myself skeptic of this. First of all - How does on control indeterminism?And does QM indeterminism really play a role on a neuronal level? This paper by Tegmark argues it doesn't - <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9907009" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9907009</a>

评论 #18398932 未加载

michael2l超过 6 年前

Quite apart from the math and science of deterministic physics and probabilistic quantum physics, there's a broader evolutionary question.Why would we evolve this hallucination that we have free will, if in fact we fundamentally don't? It seems like a lot of effort and metabolic energy on a moment-by-moment basis to maintain the illusion. I guess you could make an argument we're in some sort of simulation the maker of which required this illusion to be present for reasons of their own.But the conscious awareness of our moment-by-moment availability of choice is one of the most difficult things to deny even if you're incredibly skeptical about everything else you can observe through the senses (a la descartes).

评论 #18402449 未加载

pcpcpc超过 6 年前

Derk Pereboom posits that there is no free will but that fact is not inconsistent with moral responsibility.<a href="http://derk-pereboom.net/views/" rel="nofollow">http://derk-pereboom.net/views/</a>

ThomPete超过 6 年前

Most people miss the point when they discuss free will because they focus on the idea of whether we are free to make decisions in real time.Free will is something that happens OVER TIME.In other words you have free will to the extent that your previous decisions allowed you to survive which was again based on other previous decisions and so you are constantly accumulating and changing "code to your program" so to speak because you can reflect on the results of your pre-defined behavior.