I'm very familiar with her. Which is why I think her comments about 'free will' are a little odd because IMO they are non-testable beliefs she normally rants about.

Okay, I see your point. After studying the issue extensively, the one thing I can state with certainty about the question of free will us that it is not simple and obvious, as many people on both sides seem to think.

For example, if someone states that “I know I have free will”, they need to think a bit more about what “I” means.

Bob

 

You need to tell that to the lady in the video, not me.

Quite right, my apologies. Now that I've watched the video, I see that Sabine is indeed claiming that physics refutes free will.

 

Depends on what the meaning if random is. If you mean things can violate the laws of physics, no. If you mean there are things that cannot be predicted even with perfect information, yes. But note that that does not imply it is not deterministic.

Bob

Individual physical entity non-deterministic behavior doesn't violate the laws of physics as we understand those laws today. We can predict physical group behaviors to the point it becomes very deterministic like we do in the solid-state physics of semiconductors. When we actually make those semiconductors we discover there is a point where individual physical entity non-deterministic behavior becomes group behaviors in regions materials that approach the probability amplitude (the probability of finding the particle at a given location when it's position is measured) of single particles like in very thin, highly doped junctions. Electrons can locally violate the laws of (classical) physics by tunneling around an otherwise impossible to climb energy gap. While the three dimensional volume of this tunneling region is small for each particle, the 2D dimension of a group of tunneling electrons across a continuous junction (Boundary) can be arbitrarily large allowing for group behaviors like negative resistance diodes.

 

I always wonder what her position would be if someone runs into her car and causes her severe injury and perhaps kills someone she cares about. Will she support their argument before a court that they should receive no penalty of any kind since, according to her, that the accident was going to happen was established with absolute certainly in the first moment of the big bang? We should turn lose everyone in any prison or mental institution regardless of any consideration because how can is possibly be equitable to hold any of them responsible for something that was going to happen anyway?

If the accident was an unavoidable result of the initial conditions of the universe, then the guilty verdict (or acquittal) was also, and so -- according to this view -- the defendant's argument and her support (or lack thereof) are irrelevant.

If everything is going to be what it is and we have no influence on it, then what is the point of her making that video? By her own reasoning, it can't change anyone's mind or educate anyone or have any influence whatsoever.

She would argue that the point doesn't matter, it was inevitable that she would make that video. Further, it is entirely possible that one or more people who previously believed in free will had their opinions changed after watching it. Supposing that this indeed occurred, the inevitability of the outcome doesn't change the fact people's opinions were changed.

This gets to the core of why free will is not a scientific question: there is no physical difference between an outcome that was predetermined and one that was "freely chosen". We don't need a coefficient of agency to describe trajectories through phase space because intent and will are irrelevant to the physics. The why is inconsequential to the equations of motion.

One of her arguments is that people that talk about what might have happened had someone made a different choice is meaningless because we have no proof that making a different choice was ever a possibility. Well, that exact same argument applies the other way -- she has no proof that making a different choice wasn't ever possible, so talking about how it wasn't possible is just as meaningless.

This issue is less simple than it may first appear. The notion that hypothetical results to unperformed experiments are meaningful is called counterfactual definiteness. We tend to take it for granted that we can speak meaningfully about, e.g., unperformed coin flips, but the question of unperformed quantum experiments is rife with challenges. In particular, the predominant QM interpretations (Copenhagen, MWI, pretty much everything other than Bohmian mechanics) are necessarily counterfactually indefinite: only measured properties have physical meaning.

In this view, a hypothetical different "choice" is an unmeasured result, and so is unphysical and can't be meaningfully discussed. Of course, this view is entirely dependent on interpretation and entirely independent of the actual equations of QM, which points back to choice and free will being orthogonal to physics.

 

I think you are all missing her point. Science is based on the premise that the behavior of physical objects strictly follows discoverable laws. Free will requires that some non-physical entity can override these laws. The two ideas are logically incompatible.

I disagree that it's a logical incompatibility (there's no inescaple contradiction), it's more of a cognitive dissonance. Which is why many physicists (certainly not all) who give the question serious thought tend to consider "free will" in terms of predictability. So long as perfect predictability is impossible -- and QM strongly suggests it is -- they are content to say that they have free will.

Of course, the weather is also impossible to perfectly predict, and few would claim it has agency. Penrose takes a much stronger stance, but his theory is controversial, to say the least.

 

People who believe we have no free will are a fascinating lot, that's for sure.

Science hasn't a clue what consciousness is, but it can tell you you don't have free will...

Sorry, not buying it.

Very good. That's almost what i was thinking too except i went down to the complete brain function. My take is that if she can show us that she knows everything about the brain then i might believe it. Without that actual data however i think it is still up for grabs.

Her point is interesting nonetheless however. If we pay attention to what we are hearing like on the news and from others around us it may help us to 'choose' a better future.

Also, i have to believe it in part because we are basically logical beings and make decisions based on our input and memory we dont randomly make decisions. If we see a rotten egg and a good egg and we want to eat lunch, we will always pick the good egg. The rotten egg is not forgotten however, because depending on input some people may pick the rotten egg on a bet, and that bet constitutes previous input.

The argument about something being done is done and something that could have been don cant be done because it is too late however i think isnt that good. That's because we have no way of proving that, at least until time travel is (or may be) possible.

One last point. If we 'choose' to look at more facts before we make a decision is that act of choosing free will, which then helps to decide. Some people will look at a ton of facts while others will believe just about anything they hear without fact checking. If there is no free will wouldnt they all choose the same thing? I guess that we can say that they all had different inputs in the past and that taught them to choose more facts over less.

If we really want to get down to it, it has been proven that if we had someone who knew everything there is to know and therefore it is assumed that they can always return the correct answer, we can force them to return an incorrect answer for some carefully designed questions. That is interesting because they would have no choice but to give us an incorrect answer.

 

 

Interesting video except the spam at the end I guess it was worth it though.

A simple example i like to look at that is somewhat similar is a perfect integrator with a tiny tiny DC input offset. Even with a 1 picovolt (1e-12 volt) DC input offset the output will eventually evolve into an infinite value even with an integrator time constant of 1e12 years. Such a tiny tiny difference at the start that makes a huge difference in the distant future.

 

Found this. Sounds even more arrogant in writing than in the video...

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/01/free-will-is-dead-lets-bury-it.html?m=1

 

Reading her reply to someone, brings things to square one as far as I understand this.

This is entirely correct, which is why I am formulating this so carefully. I am not saying free will doesn't exist. I am just saying that according to our best present knowledge it doesn't exist. This also means though that if you want to insist it does exist, the proof is on you to show how it can be compatible with the laws of nature that we know already.

I then will stop posting in my own thread. Done here.

 

Another good comment.

"I wish people would stop insisting they have free will."

How could they, if they have no free will!

Superdeterminism depends on local hidden-variables but Bell's theorem proves that quantum physics is incompatible with local hidden-variables.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2020.00139/full

In this situation it makes sense to go back and look for the path we did not take, the wrong turn we made early on that led into this seeming dead end. The turn we did not take, we argue here, is resolving the shortcomings of quantum mechanics. At the least, we need a physical description of the measurement process that accounts for the non-linearity of quantum measurement.

The major reason this path has remained largely unexplored is that under quite general assumptions (defined below) any theory which solves the measurement problem in a form consistent with the principles of relativity, makes it impossible to prepare a state independently of the detector that will later measure it. If one is not willing to accept this dependence then—by virtue of Bell's theorem [1]—one necessarily has to conclude that a local, deterministic completion of quantum mechanics is impossible. This, then, requires us to abandon the principles on which general relativity is based and adds to our difficulty reconciling gravity with the other interactions.

If one is, by contrast, willing to accept the consequences of realism, reductionism, and determinism, one is led to a theory in which the prepared state of an experiment is never independent of the detector settings. Such theories are known as “superdeterministic.” We wish to emphasize that superdeterministic theories are not interpretations of quantum mechanics. They are, instead, theories more fundamental than quantum mechanics, from which quantum mechanics can be derived.

Superdeterminism is frequently acknowledged as an experimentally unclosed loophole (see e.g., [2]) with which one can explain deterministically the observed violations of Bell's inequality. However, for a variety of reasons, many physicists think Superdeterminism is a non-starter. For example, they argue that Superdeterminism would turn experimenters into mindless zombies, unable to configure their experimental apparatuses freely. A similar argument has it that Superdeterminism implies the existence of implausible conspiracies between what would otherwise be considered independent processes. Alternatively, it would seemingly lead to causes propagating backwards in time. Above all, so it is claimed, Superdeterminism would fatally undermine the notion of science as an objective pursuit. In short, Superdeterminism is widely considered to be dead in the water.

This means ideas and things that use quantum mechanical principles don't actually work, the dials are just preset to give the expected QM result in every experiment or the right answer in any possible QM computer.

 

Seems like this reminds me of something that has happened recently. Could say what it is/was but it would get me banned.

 

 

I could not watch the video right now, but do they consider quantum effects as well as classical in that video?
Thanks.

 

It is entirely about quantum mechanics. There is no question of determinism in classical physics.

Bob

 

Found this. Sounds even more arrogant in writing than in the video...

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/01/free-will-is-dead-lets-bury-it.html?m=1

From said article:

Even if you don’t have free will, you are of course responsible for your actions because “you” – that mass of neurons – are making, possibly bad, decisions.

How can "I" (this mass of neurons) make "bad decisions" if I have no free will? ... without free will I have no choice, and therefore everything I do is the result of pre-set physical and chemical reactions. I'm just another ball in a game of pool having zillions of other balls bouncing around.... in simple words, the capacity of making a choice (or a decision) simply does not exist in a universe in which free will does not exist either.

Miss Hossenfelder is one of the smartest people in the net ... but this time I can't help but disagree with her... funny how many scientists out there think that they can easily tackle philosophy

 

funny how many scientists out there think that they can easily tackle philosophy

As do you apparently.

Let me ask you a simple question. What does “I” mean in your post?

I don't believe I can easily tackle philosophy, but after reading multiple books and essays on the topic, I believe that anyone who believes in free will is either making a supernatural claim, which is exactly what Sabiine is saying when she claims it is incompatible with physics, or is saying that we have a decision making process that cannot be fully predicted or comprehended which could apply equally to a sohisticated enough machine, which, oddly enough, is what I am saying when I say I do not believe in free will.

Bob

 

As do you apparently.

Let me ask you a simple question. What does “I” mean in your post?

I don't believe I can easily tackle philosophy, but after reading multiple books and essays on the topic, I believe that anyone who believes in free will is either making a supernatural claim, which is exactly what Sabiine is saying when she claims it is incompatible with physics, or is saying that we have a decision making process that cannot be fully predicted or comprehended which could apply equally to a sohisticated enough machine, which, oddly enough, is what I am saying when I say I do not believe in free will.

Bob

It's totally a matter of faith either way. She's totally justified in her position but it can't be proved one way or the other. It's not incompatible with physics, it's question that physics can't answer with our current or near-future understanding of the universe.

https://aeon.co/essays/heres-why-so-many-physicists-are-wrong-about-free-will

For the sake of argument, let’s suppose I’m wrong. Let’s ignore all these issues and take the deterministic view seriously. It implies that the words of every book ever written – the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Das Kapital, the Harry Potter series – were encoded into the initial state of the Universe, whatever that was. No logical thinking by a human played a causal role in the specific words of these books: they were determined by physics alone.

It’s unclear how any words could have been encoded into the Universe, which led to apparently random fluctuations at the time when matter and radiation decoupled from each other. How would they have been represented in those fluctuations? It’s virtually impossible that they could have affected the detailed brain-state of the authors when they wrote their books. The issue of quantum uncertainty adds another layer of implausibility to these claims. But let’s set all these major issues aside for now. Let’s suppose it is indeed possible that present-day brain-states are determined by initial conditions in the Universe, because causally deterministic physics underlies all.

The problem then is, how did all those words get there? Was there a demiurge who coded all that stuff into the detailed initial state of the Universe? It’s certainly not there in the Schrödinger equation per se, or in a randomly determined set of fluctuations in the early Universe as is normally envisaged in cosmological studies. By definition, they don’t encode either any detailed information or any logical argumentation.
...
If you seriously believe that fundamental forces leave no space for free will, then it’s impossible for us to genuinely make choices as moral beings. We wouldn’t be accountable in any meaningful way for our reactions to global climate change, child trafficking or viral pandemics. The underlying physics would in reality be governing our behavior, and responsibility wouldn’t enter into the picture.

That’s a devastating conclusion. We can be grateful it’s not true.

 

As do you apparently.

Let me ask you a simple question. What does “I” mean in your post?

I don't believe I can easily tackle philosophy, but after reading multiple books and essays on the topic, I believe that anyone who believes in free will is either making a supernatural claim, which is exactly what Sabiine is saying when she claims it is incompatible with physics, or is saying that we have a decision making process that cannot be fully predicted or comprehended which could apply equally to a sohisticated enough machine, which, oddly enough, is what I am saying when I say I do not believe in free will.

Bob

What NSA just said.

 

What NSA just said.

Another question for both of you. Can a machine have free will? If not, does, incorporating chaotic and / or true random processes change that conclusion as it seems to ( for humans) for the author if the article NSA linked?

Bob