Does Physics disprove the existence of free will?

The phrase "coming together in a particular historical way" covers large and significant issues, as you probably know - but they need emphasis, due to being overlooked as a rule.

Note that the choice of cereal can be changed by a split second prior arrival of information - not biochemicals, not anything with mass or volume or particular shape, but a higher level pattern of some kind - that influences some aspect of the complexity of patterns we label "consciousness". That is where and when and by what the predetermination happens.

There's this: the existence of a chooser, an identity to which those appearances appear, is on the same logical levels of patterns in the mind as are available to the choice itself. You lose the entire setup when claiming the choice is merely appearance. All the "appearances" become merely appearances of appearances - there's nothing and nobody for anything involving the "choice" to "appear" to.

 

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If there are "many worlds" then there are "many Donald Trump". Each one of them did something or other five minutes ago. And each one of them only did one thing. The one thing each one has done. So, what does it mean to have free will in this context?
EB

 

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We are talking about physical systems, the ones dealt with by physics. Your system that always produces the same results from the same inputs is a physical one, here, if it's relevant at all. And this is made clear by the example of a human being making a choice - that is a physical event, we can observe and record its occurrence using lab instruments. That physical system is what you claim must produce different outputs from entirely identical inputs - contravene its determination - in order to be free.

No one here is altering that perspective, or ignoring the "actual" workings of physical systems. The opposite: you are being asked to pay attention to those workings, the nature of those inputs and outputs.

Dreams are causal, at the level of the will. Not quarks, atoms, or neurons: dreams.

 

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Is it possible that "free will" merely means that different people have the freedom to make different choices, even as their individual choices are deterministic. One guy chooses to jump, the other doesn't. Each was free to make the eventual choice they made.

Someone mentioned once that the relevant question should be if, going back in time to the exact same prevailing conditions, a person would always make the same decision as before.

Is that a legit way of asking the question?

 

That was exactly the point I made.
I was fleshing out your argument that free will can't stem from physical laws - even if you invoke randomness.



So, in answer to your question about where I arrived on the issue, I'd say, generally, free will - "truly" free will - is a concept of the "no true Scotsman" variety. What I mean by this is that it's a poorly-defined, moving target. We have the will we have, and that is based on a vast number of inputs, both present and past.

"Truly, actually free will" is a meaningless ideal, in an analogous fashion to the "how do we determine that an AI is truly intelligent - as opposed to just imitating intelligence to an unlimited degree?"

The answer, to both is: the proof is in the pudding. We can only conclude what our tests tell us. Everything else is philosophy.

 

IMO, FW is all about "motive" to perform an action. Can we ever change our personal motives (our character) ?

 

Matter being organized into a self-managing system means having constraints to begin with, and having preferences that dictate actions and make one's behavior somewhat predictable. Those characteristics are mutable over time (in the case of humans), but few want to suddenly (as opposed to gradually) lose their current identity via psychologically changing into another person with different settings and interests.

Thus most of the emphasis of the "free" adjective must revolve around whether or not external agencies are allowing one to be "who they are" in their habits, routines and choices. Instead of reference to being as liberated and unregulated as gas molecules wafting about in a room. Existing as a dynamic biological arrangement of parts is sacrificing that class of unconstrained, random existence to be a quasi-predictable object with behavioral patterns, desires, goals, and decision-making capacity (but still not be a non-autonomous puppet wholly manipulated externally).

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I wonder if the mathematical (non-random) nature of Nature is really fundamental to all dynamical events, or if the "uncertainty principle" allows for sufficient freedom to allow for non-preferential choice in humans.

Can "movement in the direction of greatest satisfaction" be intentionally ignored?

 

Now all you have to do is show that the people could have actually taken a different option, rather than only thought they could, and perhaps given the appearance that they could. Even IBM's Watson has internal processes to arrive at decisions that it then enacts (with an answer). Does Watson have free will? If not, what is the difference, in your view?

 

exploratory setup

Hermann Weyl: The objective world simply IS, it does not HAPPEN. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line [worldline] of my body, does a certain section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.

Max Tegmark: In the 1920s physicists explained away this weirdness by postulating that the wave function "collapsed" into some definite classical outcome whenever someone made an observation. This add-on had the virtue of explaining observations, but it turned an elegant, unitary theory into a kludgy, nonunitary one. The intrinsic randomness commonly ascribed to quantum mechanics is the result of this postulate. Over the years many physicists have abandoned this view in favor of one developed in 1957 by Princeton graduate student Hugh Everett III. He showed that the collapse postulate is unnecessary. Unadulterated quantum theory does not, in fact, pose any contradictions. Although it predicts that one classical reality gradually splits into superpositions of many such realities, observers subjectively experience this splitting merely as a slight randomness, with probabilities in exact agreement with those from the old collapse postulate.

[...] A mathematical structure is an abstract, immutable entity... If history were a movie, the structure would correspond not to a single frame of it but to the entire videotape. Consider, for example, a world made up of pointlike particles moving around in three-dimensional space. In four-dimensional spacetime --the bird perspective-- these particle trajectories resemble a tangle of spaghetti. If the frog [perspective] sees a particle moving with constant velocity, the bird sees a straight strand of uncooked spaghetti. If the frog sees a pair of orbiting particles, the bird sees two spaghetti strands intertwined like a double helix. To the frog, the world is described by Newton's laws of motion and gravitation. To the bird, it is described by the geometry of the pasta --a mathematical structure. The frog itself is merely a thick bundle of pasta, whose highly complex intertwining corresponds [in is view] to a cluster of particles that store and process information. Our universe is far more complicated than this example, and scientists do not yet know to what, if any, mathematical structure it corresponds.​

So it might depend upon whether an individual's "consciousness" is really migrating around through a vast, figurative maze or landscape of different body states s/he exists as or instead that "awareness" is simply distributed through all of them in static and "simultaneous" manner.

While the former might conform more to commonsense or what one experiences (i.e., that you seem to be transiting from one specious moment or different state of the body slash world to the next), I personally doubt it. From the standpoint that I don't consider "consciousness" to be a chunk of substance or essence oozing through hyperdimensional pipes or framework. We're slaves to what the brain of each body state "knows" in terms of its information processing. A discrimination of cognition can only be about a particular specious "moment" it applies to and not all the others, even if overall awareness is likewise distributed through or inherent in them as well.

But that said, the commonsense avenue might offer a possibility of unpredictability or arbitrary transition in terms of a mathematical structure that accommodated a multiverse or Julian Barbour's arguably different take on it (as opposed to conventional spacetime depictions). In terms of where "consciousness" treated as a nomadic essence would wander next. However, randomness like that wouldn't qualify as decision-making on the surface; a lot of additional proposals and arguments would probably need to be loaded underneath to make the case of will playing a role.

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Why would you want to make a choice that goes against or is outside of your characteristics and workings? An individual might want to demonstrate that they can "surprise", but that would simply be a concept or principle that's regulating their behavior occasionally (part of their character, tendencies, identity, etc).

http://www.sciforums.com/threads/do...ence-of-free-will.161342/page-20#post-3552059

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Randomness at first glance would seem to be another type of external agency, rather the person producing their own outputted behavior according to their individual characteristics / constraints. But the door isn't necessarily closed to devising a way to smuggle it in as a contributing component of the brain/body's internal decision-making.

One could devise a personal rule to intermittently ignore it. "Why" an individual would want it as a concept regulating their nature may vary...

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This is not an argument from causation.
This is an argument from determinism.
Determinism is a specific form of causation that states, effectively, if A then B - in that if A you will only ever get B.
Causation merely states if A then something.
If the premises are accepted (and I'm not saying that you should - but if you don't I would like to know which you disagree with) then the conclusion is not just that the will has causes but that the will is a deterministic system - i.e. that if it is confronted with state A then the following state will always be B.
If B then always C, if C then always D.

Correct.

Something along the lines of being able to do more than one thing, and to have control over what is done, would suffice.

In as much as I don't see freedom in any system that is fundamentally a case of "if A then you must do B", then yes.

I don't, and I haven't.
Others have, though.

While I concur in principle, I'm not sure one can beg the question by using the term "willed" as that is what is in question.
Lack of control, something like that might be better.

That is the conclusion of the logic I offered, arguing from determinism.
The conclusion, however, is only true if the premises are sound.
I don't know if they are or not, although I suspect they might be.
So "free" will might exist if, for example, a system built from deterministic interactions is not itself deterministic, or if the will itself is not such a deterministic system (i.e. is not built from deterministic interactions).
But if one accepts the premises then the conclusion is what it is.

To be honest that is like asking how consciousness works.
I could offer a guess that the illusion is necessary for consciousness itself, that consciousness only arose above the level of mere machine when it could convince itself it was more than a mere machine.
Perhaps it is because we are only ever aware of fairly macro "causes", the dreams that iceaura keeps referring to, and we are simply not aware of, not capable of being aware of, the lack of "freedom" we actually have, and that according to what we are aware of we appear to have freedom.
But we're getting into pure speculation as far as I am concerned.
I find it a fascinating question of why we feel the way we do, why we feel as if we have freedom.
But it is not a question I can answer.

I don't agree.
We just need to be aware of where the various definitions are applicable, and abide by the context.

 

How much choice is there, free or otherwise, if one's characteristics and workings result in a single possible outcome, with the internal consideration of other outcomes simply being a byproduct of those workings, with no actual possibility of transpiring?

I agree.

 

Should one truly have free-will it must include the capacity to do great evil, which must also be a valid choice, and allowed, if free-will is indeed a reality. "You CAN do good or evil, and you are free to do evil, should you choose it." ☺ Perhaps some people simply do not want to, "do the right thing." ☺ This must also be allowed and a valid willing.

 

That seems an uncommon definition of choice, that it's not supposed to result in a single outcome or some kind of decrease in quantity.

choice: One of a number of things from which only one can be chosen [wordweb]

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That's incorrect. One is OFFERED a choice, the result is the decision.

 

One might devise such a rule, but would you be able to keep it at all times? Moreover, would you want someone else to live by such a rule?
IMO, such a pattern could not be exercised if the pre-set choice is mathematically disallowed.
In the end it's always the mathematics that determine the result, no?

 

How about ; if A then B, unless .....(secondary influence) ?

 

I didn't say that it's not supposed to result in a single outcome. I referred to it resulting in a single possible outcome. e.g. if given the choice between box A and box B this results in two possible outcomes: box A or box B. How much choice is there, free or otherwise, if one's characteristics and workings result in just box A as a possibility, with the apparent option of box B being nothing more than a by-product of the process that leads to "choosing" box A?