This just means that they don't care about (or are confused about) the consistency of their beliefs. Most people are inconsistent in their beliefs. Rationality is exercised only where convenient.mattt said:I know, but that's the way they feel, and that's what they say they believe.
That's what they say, I have had hundreds of conversations along these lines with all kinds of people that believe that they have Free Will, no matter if they are scientist or not, religious or not.
A. Neumaier said:This just means that they don't care about (or are confused about) the consistency of their beliefs. Most people are inconsistent in their beliefs. Rationality is exercised only where convenient.
Loosely speaking, yes, I do think that. I think my free will is just an a posteriori interpretation of my acts, emerging from my inability to pinpoint to the exact reason why have I chosen this rather than that.A. Neumaier said:Do you really think that a child is not free in its decisions just because we can predict that it will say yes when it is asked whether it likes to have ice cream?
Ah, so according to you, the freedom of will is not in the actions (which may well be perfectly determined by Nature) but how you interpret them a posteriori. This is of course also a resolution of the problem!?Demystifier said:I think my free will is just an a posteriori interpretation of my acts, emerging from my inability to pinpoint to the exact reason why have I chosen this rather than that.
In my opinion, yes.A. Neumaier said:Ah, so according to you, the freedom of will is not in the actions (which may well be perfectly determined by Nature) but how you interpret them a posteriori. This is of course also a resolution of the problem!?
Demystifier said:I think my free will is just an a posteriori interpretation of my acts, emerging from my inability to pinpoint to the exact reason why have I chosen this rather than that.
A. Neumaier said:so according to you, the freedom of will is not in the actions (which may well be perfectly determined by Nature) but how you interpret them a posteriori. This is of course also a resolution of the problem!?
Is your a posteriori interpretation of your acts a mental activity in the Platonic worlds of ideas, independent of quantum physical laws?Demystifier said:In my opinion, yes.
At the fundamental level it isn't, but at the emergent level it may look so.A. Neumaier said:Is your a posteriori interpretation of your acts a mental activity in the Platonic worlds of ideas, independent of quantum physical laws?
So at the fundamental level, there is no free will in your sense?Demystifier said:At the fundamental level it isn't, but at the emergent level it may look so.
That's right. But of course, there is "free will" in the sense of post #2.A. Neumaier said:So at the fundamental level, there is no free will in your sense?
Demystifier said:Compatibilism is an attitude that I never understood.
Demystifier said:I think my free will is just an a posteriori interpretation of my acts, emerging from my inability to pinpoint to the exact reason why have I chosen this rather than that.
Exactly. I would even go that far to say that Copehagen interpretation is not a stochastic interpretation. Truly stochastic interpretations are GRW interpretation and Nelson interpretation.DarMM said:Just to say quantum theory taken as a probability theory is more than just stochastic. A quantum system constitutes a stochastic process only when provided with another system to define the space of outcomes. With no second system a given quantum system isn't even random, there are no events in the formalism under such a scenario.
Could it be interpreted by saying that free will is an emergent higher level phenomenon, like e.g. a tiger? At the fundamental microscopic level there is no free will and there are no tigers, but at the higher level of organization of matter there are structures that can be interpreted as free wills or as tigers. If that's what compatibilism means, then I'm OK with it.PeterDonis said:One way of looking at it is that it is just recognizing what the terms "I" or "you" and "free will" actually refer to. You are not some abstract disembodied essence with magical powers. You are a physical thing, made of physical parts, that obey physical laws. So of course any interpretation of "free will" is going to have to be compatible with those facts, and any valid referent of the term "free will" is going to have to be some physical process going on in the physical system that is "you".
And compatibilism is simply the view that if your acts can be validly given such an interpretation, then they are acts of free will. You don't have to have magical non-physical powers to have free will.
Another way of putting it would be to say that the kind of "free will" I have just described, while it might not be what many people thought they meant by "free will", is still sufficient, because it gives us all the capability we need in practice to have the things that "free will" is supposed to give us.
But Born got in 1954 the Nobel prize ''for his fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially for his statistical interpretation of the wavefunction''!Demystifier said:I would even go that far to say that Copenhagen interpretation is not a stochastic interpretation.
statistical ##\neq## stochasticA. Neumaier said:But Born got in 1954 the Nobel prize ''for his fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially for his statistical interpretation of the wavefunction''!
The former is based on the latter:Demystifier said:statistical ##\neq## stochastic
Well, it's a matter of semantics. When I say "stochastic", what I have in mind is a stochastic process, meaning something akin to Wiener process, Brownian motion, Ito calculus, etc.A. Neumaier said:The former is based on the latter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_model
''in a statistical model specified via mathematical equations, some of the variables do not have specific values, but instead have probability distributions; i.e. some of the variables are stochastic.''
One has that also in a sequence of quantum measurements...Demystifier said:Well, it's a matter of semantics. When I say "stochastic", what I have in mind is a stochastic process, meaning something akin to Wiener process, Brownian motion, Ito calculus, etc.
Yes, but not in the meantime between the two measurements. In the meantime the system is in an undefined state (according to Copenhagen interpretation), which cannot be said for stochastic processes in the usual sense.A. Neumaier said:One has that also in a sequence of quantum measurements...
There are also discrete stochastic processes. They are much used in practical time series analysis, where one only has access to a discrete series of measurements. Continuous stochastic processes arise in the quantum mechanics of continuous measurements.Demystifier said:Yes, but not in the meantime between the two measurements. In the meantime the system is in an undefined state (according to Copenhagen interpretation), which cannot be said for stochastic processes in the usual sense.
Repeated application of Born's rule with collapse, as usually stated since Heisenberg and Dirac, already provides a well defined (though too idealized) statistical model involving a discrete stochastic process.DarMM said:To be completely clear this is part of the formalism. Another system constitutes the POVM selected for the system under study. Only a POVM provides a well defined statistical model, the full algebra of projectors does not.
Of course, that's (in general) a sequence of POVMs. What distinction are you pointing out?A. Neumaier said:Repeated application of Born's rule with collapse, as usually stated since Heisenberg and Dirac, already provides a well defined (though too idealized) statistical model involving a discrete stochastic process.
Not quite. A POVM neither specifies the observed value nor the posterior state. To have a well-defined and realistic discrete stochastic process, one needs more than a POVM, namely a quantum instrument.DarMM said:Of course, that's (in general) a sequence of POVMs.
The main point was that no POVMs are needed to have stochastic processes in a quantum setting. Note that POVMs for quantum measurement were introduced in 1968, long after Born obtained his Nobel prize.DarMM said:What distinction are you pointing out?
Of course true. I was only referring to the need for an external system to define an outcome space. That system being represented by a choice of POVM. I wasn't saying you only need a POVM, you of course need the state as well, etc. Rather it is that only after the selection of a POVM is the statistical model defined, unlike the classical case where no such selection is needed on the algebra of random variables.A. Neumaier said:Not quite. A POVM neither specifies the observed value nor the posterior state. To have a well-defined and realistic discrete stochastic process, one needs more than a POVM, namely a quantum instrument.
Again of course. My point was more so that one needs something to select an outcome space for the system in order to have a well defined statistical model, unlike in the classical probabilistic case where events are defined without such a choice of an auxiliary system.A. Neumaier said:The main point was that no POVMs are needed to have stochastic processes in a quantum setting. Note that POVMs for quantum measurement were introduced in 1968, long after Born obtained his Nobel prize.
Unlike only in simplistic classical models.DarMM said:My point was more so that one needs something to select an outcome space for the system in order to have a well defined statistical model, unlike in the classical probabilistic case where events are defined without such a choice of an auxiliary system.
I don't think so. Since one simply has a Boolean algebra of propositions the events can be considered to occur independent of the device, with the device simply recording them with some small disturbance to both. All observables "mesh" correctly to be considered random variables on one sample space of outcomes.A. Neumaier said:Unlike only in simplistic classical models.
Events are also not defined in a Laplacian classical universe without such a choice of an auxiliary system.
A. Neumaier said:Do you really think that a child is not free in its decisions just because we can predict that it will say yes when it is asked whether it likes to have ice cream?
A classical universe has no probability - everything is deterministic. It just has particles with time-dependent positions and momenta - no observers or detectors, unless these are introduced through a Heidelberg cut.DarMM said:I don't think so. Since one simply has a Boolean algebra of propositions the events can be considered to occur independent of the device, with the device simply recording them with some small disturbance to both. All observables "mesh" correctly to be considered random variables on one sample space of outcomes.
Do you have a reference for this?
The Emperor's new Mind? Not sure, read it some 10 years back -- didnt even finish it iirc.mattt said:For me, it would be a huge surprise if it is ever shown that biological systems, and concretely neural systems, follow laws independent of the laws of physics.
As far as I know, there is currently not a single hint that points in that direction.
A. Neumaier said:A classical universe has no probability - everything is deterministic.
A Bell test is a randomized trial that compares experimental observations against the philosophical worldview of local realism1, in which the properties of the physical world are independent of our observation of them and no signal travels faster than light. A Bell test requires spatially distributed entanglement, fast and high-efficiency detection and unpredictable measurement settings2,3. Although technology can satisfy the first two of these requirements4,5,6,7, the use of physical devices to choose settings in a Bell test involves making assumptions about the physics that one aims to test. Bell himself noted this weakness in using physical setting choices and argued that human ‘free will’ could be used rigorously to ensure unpredictability in Bell tests8. Here we report a set of local-realism tests using human choices, which avoids assumptions about predictability in physics. We recruited about 100,000 human participants to play an online video game that incentivizes fast, sustained input of unpredictable selections and illustrates Bell-test methodology9. The participants generated 97,347,490 binary choices, which were directed via a scalable web platform to 12 laboratories on five continents, where 13 experiments tested local realism using photons5,6, single atoms7, atomic ensembles10 and superconducting devices11. Over a 12-hour period on 30 November 2016, participants worldwide provided a sustained data flow of over 1,000 bits per second to the experiments, which used different human-generated data to choose each measurement setting. The observed correlations strongly contradict local realism and other realistic positions in bipartite and tripartite12 scenarios. Project outcomes include closing the ‘freedom-of-choice loophole’ (the possibility that the setting choices are influenced by ‘hidden variables’ to correlate with the particle properties13), the utilization of video-game methods14 for rapid collection of human-generated randomness, and the use of networking techniques for global participation in experimental science.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05080The scientific method relies on facts, established through repeated measurements and agreed upon universally, independently of who observed them. In quantum mechanics, the objectivity of observations is not so clear, most dramatically exposed in Eugene Wigner's eponymous thought experiment where two observers can experience fundamentally different realities. While observer-independence has long remained inaccessible to empirical investigation, recent no-go-theorems construct an extended Wigner's friend scenario with four entangled observers that allows us to put it to the test. In a state-of-the-art 6-photon experiment, we here realize this extended Wigner's friend scenario, experimentally violating the associated Bell-type inequality by 5 standard deviations. This result lends considerable strength to interpretations of quantum theory already set in an observer-dependent framework and demands for revision of those which are not.
The wave–particle dual nature of light and matter and the fact that the choice of measurement determines which one of these two seemingly incompatible behaviours we observe are examples of the counterintuitive features of quantum mechanics. They are illustrated by Wheeler’s famous ‘delayed-choice’ experiment1, recently demonstrated in a single-photon experiment2. Here, we use a single ultracold metastable helium atom in a Mach–Zehnder interferometer to create an atomic analogue of Wheeler’s original proposal. Our experiment confirms Bohr’s view that it does not make sense to ascribe the wave or particle behaviour to a massive particle before the measurement takes place1. This result is encouraging for current work towards entanglement and Bell’s theorem tests in macroscopic systems of massive particles.