jonesy
A Wicked Kendragon
I meant to ask earlier, but forgot. What's your opinion on the idea that mental processes might work as a quantum computer? Would that alter the scenario significantly?
Why does the idea of no Free Will bother some people?
Yeah, sometimes people confuse free will with freedom of action. If I go down to the soda machine with a dollar, being able to choose between Coke and Diet Coke is free will. Being driven inexorably to Coke by a hard-coded need for sugar is lack of free will.
Not being able to choose Diet Dr. Pepper, because it is sold out, isn't lack of free will - it is just being SOL.
Hindsight is 20/20. Or maybe it just looks that way.
thats always true, but I meet too many people that can't accept why somebody did something a certain way. Once I get enough info, I tend to accept that person's decision, despite not agreeing with it. So it's not about having hindsight on "here's what you should have done" and more about "I see what led you to make the choice you made"
This is the concept of will power. An overweight person can become skinny by exercising will power. Scott Adams doesn't think will power exists.
Somebody will put in the work, lose weight, but the wiring in their brain still rewards eating more than any other activitity, and after a while, they will backslide and gain the weight back.
I covered the criminal aspect when I said that society would still be interested in taking the bad robots off the factory floor. Bad code is bad code, and you want to get that off the streets as quick as you can. Prison reform ideas get to the heart of the matter on whether you can get them to stop doing the bad behavior.
In this, I have no clue. Some people think that you can somehow convince a criminal to stop criming, or a fat person to stop eating. I don't think these people are stupid. I think they KNOW they need to stop. But something in their brain rewards them for doing it anyway. I don't think science is at a point where we can reliably psychologize or surgically alter this with time on the operating table or analysts' couch.
Maybe. It is my personal guess (not a science fact, just a personal guess) that having mental processes have *some* QM dependency is required for free will, but may not be sufficient.
The action of quantum computers is not necessarily any less deterministic than that of a digital computer. It is just that they process information differently, allowing them to perform certain calculations more quickly than a digital computer can. But the two will still come up with the same answer - the difference is just a matter of when.
Now, here's where interpretation of QM comes in. Remember Schrödinger's cat? The cat is in the box, and it is *both* alive and dead, until someone goes to look at it, and then its choice of state is made?
The typical interpretation is that the observer has a special quality - the ability to cause the quantum wave function to collapse from a wide range of possibilities to one single reality. Reality as a single thing only crops up when you have some entity capable of perception entering the picture.
For hundreds (I think thousands) of years, humans have posited that free will, as such, depends upon being "self aware" - you cannot have a will if you don't have some concept of a self separate from the rest of the universe. To be aware of the self, you must of course, be able to perceive the self.
And now you can probably see where I am going - free will then comes in as being able to collapse the QM waveform of your own mind!
I hope that is sufficiently scientifically mumbo-jumbo for everyone concerned
S.O.L. Invictus, even.
gamerprinter
Mapper/Publisher
Playing D&D I roll dice to determine results, however, regarding any free will over a decision I make is done in my head, and not to include physical decision making devices like coins or dice.
That said, there are too many variables in flipping a coin to determine if it were constrained or not. Beyond my level of caring, actuallly.
I have not read Mr. Adams' piece. But I would not be surprised if he would be well-served by reading up some on the trials of those with great illness (I'm thinking "spoon theory" here), or those with issues with anxiety or PTSD. He might find them enlightening.
The typical interpretation is that the observer has a special quality - the ability to cause the quantum wave function to collapse from a wide range of possibilities to one single reality. Reality as a single thing only crops up when you have some entity capable of perception entering the picture.
For hundreds (I think thousands) of years, humans have posited that free will, as such, depends upon being "self aware" - you cannot have a will if you don't have some concept of a self separate from the rest of the universe. To be aware of the self, you must of course, be able to perceive the self.
And now you can probably see where I am going - free will then comes in as being able to collapse the QM waveform of your own mind!
I hope that is sufficiently scientifically mumbo-jumbo for everyone concerned
that was pretty good.
So if I've got a Shroedinger's Box sitting in the kitchen, and I'm watching TV, and my dog goes into the kitchen and sniffs at the box. Does my dog have Free Will if she comes back to me with a dead cat in her mouth? (I mean that the dog opened the box and extracted the dead cat, not that the dog killed the cat).
After all, my dog has resolved a quantum situation and finalized it to being a live or dead cat?
In slightly more serious note, I could buy an argument that "I think therefore I am" meaning you have Free Will if there's a science experiment that can "collapse the QM waveform" by virture of human percpetion, versus that of my dog or some non-qualifying perciever.
I'm not framing it well, but I think your point is that a human percieving the Shroedinger experiment causes a quantum decision point to resolve itself. If there's a way to show that happens for humans, and not for things that we don't think have free will (it's possible that my dog has a much free will as I do based on the definition).
Diet always tastes bad, so I would never drink Diet unless there was no non-diet, and even then, I'd have to be really thirsty.
Therefore, I have no free will because my decision tree eliminates the choice. I will almost always choose Dr. Pepper. then root Beer, then orange, then Coke.
Today, I did deviate and choose root beer at lunch.
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