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   Author  Topic: Math profs link particle actions, human free will  (Read 821 times)
Joe Dees
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Math profs link particle actions, human free will
« on: 2004-12-06 01:27:50 »
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Re:Math profs link particle actions, human free will
« Reply #1 on: 2005-12-04 02:09:59 »
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Is there anything new on this?

I always get a little suspicious when someone tries to justify free will with quantum mechanics, though.  After all, even if our behavior isn’t completely predetermined—even if a lot of what we do depends on chance—that doesn’t give us free will in any meaningful sense of the term.  For example, if I were to base my decisions on the flip of a coin or the roll of a die, my actions wouldn’t be predictable, but they wouldn’t really be free either.

Still, I’m curious about whether these crackers actually have anything new to say on the “free will versus determinism” debate.
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Re:Math profs link particle actions, human free will
« Reply #2 on: 2005-12-04 12:22:25 »
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Even the fastest neural event in the human brain functions at the millisecond level.
Human brains are several hundred degrees (310.15) above absolute zero.
Because the temperature of the brain is so high, the slowest quantum superpositions disappear in 10-13 to 10-20 seconds. This leaves a gap of at least 1010 between the two. Whatever the brain's "quantum nature" might be, it decoheres far too rapidly for the neurons to take advantage of it.

Meanwhile, as I have frequently observed, we are rationalizing, not rational animals; and we cannot diagnose hard or soft brain failures or even changes for ourselves. This has repeatedly been proven at a physiological level. CAT and fMRI make it possible to analyse our brain in action. In 1985, Prof Benjamin Libet of Uni California did exactly this. He observed his research subjects' brain activity while his subjects flicked their hands at "random" moments. The significant finding was that the motion stimulus began about 300 to 400 ms before the subjects made a conscious decision to move. This demonstrated that when the subject "decided" that they would shake their hand, that the decision had already been made at a sub-conscious level - and that the idea that this was "random" was pure post hoc justification. Prof Alvaro Pascual-Leone (Harvard) later performed a number of related experiments designed to expand on these results. In one, he also asked his subjects to shake their hands, but only one at a time, and to decide which hand should be used only as they shook it.  Dr Pascual-Leone used TMS to stimulate areas of the subjects' brains as they were making these decisions. The results were highly significant When stimulating one hemisphere, the subjects would use the other hand 80% of the time, whereas, when no stimulation was present, this choice would be determined by their handedness, with a 60% preference to the dominant hand. The subjects were completely unaware that their selection had been forced, and asserted that they had made a completely free choice for themselves. Even after the subjects were told that they had been influenced, they denied that this was the case, arguing that the choice had been theirs alone.
I'm going to suggest that "free will" is an illusion. We are simply slow, faulty, but massively parallel analogue computers with a very high noise level to confuse the issue. Our brain's principle task is to tell us that we are behaving reasonably under all circumstances, and it does that job remarkably well. Which is probably the best we can hope for, all things considered.

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Re:Math profs link particle actions, human free will
« Reply #3 on: 2005-12-04 16:33:44 »
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In order to make sense of the concept of free will I think we have to move away from the interpretation that our actions are undetermined or magically determined. We can retain most of the meaning of free will by shifting the interpretation to "self-determined", in other words, something has free will to the extent that its actions are determined internally.

No doubt I owe a debt to Daniel Dennett for this view. I recommend his books Elbow Room, Consciousness Explained, and especially Freedom Evolves.

I just noticed that he has a new book coming out next year that takes on religion, Breaking the Spell. How exciting!
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