George Ellis is professor of complex systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and he has written an essay in defense of the idea of free will. It is a long essay but his argument is really against classical determinism of the Laplacian kind, as can be seen by this statement.
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.
He then turns to the issues of morality and the horrible consequences of denying free will.
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 behaviour, and responsibility wouldn’t enter into the picture.
That’s a devastating conclusion. We can be grateful it’s not true.
But classical mechanics has of course been superseded by quantum mechanics with its associated indeterminancy and is no longer seen as viable. I doubt that any serious student of the topic of free will takes classical determinism and the above consequences seriously. The people making the case against free will have long gone past that stage, as can be seen in the debate between Greg Caruso (who denies the existence of free will) and Daniel Dennett (who thinks it exists), neither of whom bother to consider it even perfunctorily.
So where does Ellis find the source of free will?
So what determines which messages are conveyed to your synapses by signalling molecules? They are signals determined by thinking processes that can’t be described at any lower level because they involve concepts, cognition and emotions in an essential way. Psychological experiences drive what happens. Your thoughts and feelings reach ‘down’ to shape lower-level processes in the brain by altering the constraints on ion and electron flows in a way that changes with time.
For example, suppose you’re walking down the street, and just in front of you a terrible accident happens – smashed-up cars, people injured, blood everywhere. You react with horror: sympathy for those who’ve been hurt, fear that they will die, a guilty sense of relief that it didn’t happen to you. These are all mental events that take place because of the way your brain functions at the psychological level, based on some combination of past experience and innate responses. None of those qualities – sympathy, fear, guilt – occur at the ion or synapse level. These high-level mental operations act down to alter the shape of ion channels, and so change the motions of billions of ions and electrons in your brain. In an intricate causal dance between levels in your brain, those thoughts are able to occur because of the underlying spike chains, but it’s their essentially psychological nature – what it means to recognise an accident, which thoughts flow through your mind as you decide what to do, what it feels like to experience the shock of seeing the event – that causes what happens. Physics enabled what took place in your head and body, but didn’t determine it; your mental interpretation of the event did.
But he does not address where these thinking processes, these psychological processes, come from, what the material basis is from which they arise. He seems to assume that they are just there and somehow emerge independently of the brain but can influence the workings of the brain.
Arguments for free will like Ellis’s usually boil down to saying that there is a one-way street from higher-level cognitive processes (such as thoughts) to the low-level material substrate that makes up the brain and drives our motor functions and thus our actions, without dealing with the flow in the other direction, of how that substrate creates the higher-level cognitive processes.
By doing so, they are essentially begging the question.
Psychological experiences drive what happens.
… and psychology’s entire premise is that our thoughts are not random -- they are determined by prior events and current ones. I.e: psychology is meaningless if we are non-deterministic.
Cryptographic randomness does not have to be random, it just has to be unpredictable. And true randomness is the easiest way to get that. Our sense that we have free will obviously works the same whether we do, or not. So, for one thing, how could we tell? And, for another, so what? We may be meat robots programmed to believe we have free will, and to act accordingly -- so let’s just mind the gap and carry on. After all, we have no choice.
This twaddle is really getting tiresome. Even if the universe were classically deterministic, the response to “The universe made me do it!” is “Yeah. The universe made me put you in jail.”
As for the “defense” of free will, it’s even worse twaddle. He is, as you say, simply divorcing higher level functions from lower ones, without any explanation. Emergence, how the fuck does it work?
Another dumbass with a PhD.
Marcus @1:
Never heard that. You must have a reference for such a fundamental principle.
… classical mechanics has of course been superseded by quantum mechanics with its associated indeterminancy and is no longer seen as viable.
So quantum flux changes cellular/neural ion states enough to randomize cognition? I had thought subatomic events remained below the threshold of influencing more macro-level processes.
In any case, can we still call our will “free” when Zuckerberg sells it wholesale (even at such remarkably reasonable rates)?
Rob Grigjanis@#3:
Never heard that. You must have a reference for such a fundamental principle.
It’s a given -- how can we talk about “brain states” and “behaviors” and “learning” or “self-actualization” or any of the other concepts used in psychology if they are not deterministically/causally connected to brain states? I can’t “learn” a “behavior” and then act randomly, can I? If so, how?
Rob Grigjanis@#2:
This twaddle is really getting tiresome. Even if the universe were classically deterministic, the response to “The universe made me do it!” is “Yeah. The universe made me put you in jail.”
Sure, but there is no “responsibility” for either party’s behavior, since they did not have an alternative and they did not make a choice. (They may have felt they had a choice, but they didn’t have a choice about feeling that, either)
The notion of “responsibility” seems to me to depend on having a choice between alternatives and then “taking responsibility” for a particular outcome by choosing an action/alternative that causes a particular result. It has always seemed like a vague/silly idea that does not match observable reality (which is that our “choices” are always constrained to some degree or another) -- there is a problem that some people want to build moral systems and jurisprudence that depends on “responsibility” and “blame” -- sure, we can take a mechanistic approach such as the one you illustrated, but uh.. I guess we have no choice, huh?
Pierce @4:
Yeah, a more technical way of saying that is that in the brain, the time scale for decoherence of quantum states is many orders of magnitude smaller than the time scale for neural processes. That’s because the brain is so hot and dense (in Ellis’ case, pun intended).
However, even macroscopic processes are essentially quantum; they just have a ridiculously large number of degrees of freedom which blurs the quantum granularity, and gives the appearance of “classicalness”. If you wait long enough, quantum uncertainty will manifest itself. That goes for coin tosses, baseballs travelling through space, or a network of neurons firing back and forth.
Paging Dr. Chopra to surgery, Dr. Deepak Chopra to surgery, please….
Marcus @5: Yes, there are causal relationships. That’s not determinism. You might as well say all of medicine is meaningless if we are non-deterministic. Nonsense.
“By doing so, they are essentially begging the question.”
Well, yes, but so do free will deniers. It’s because (afaIk) nobody has succeeded to formulate a proper definition of free will. Since I realized this I lost interest in the topic. Also I have a very hard time to see what difference it makes in practice to accept or reject free will. Save yourself the effort to argue against religious (especially) catholic understanding of the concept; that only results in strawmen. I’m a 7 on the scale of Dawkins and the free will debate has exactly zero impact on this stance.
For what it’s worth: the quantum approach looks useless to me as the scale on which brain processes take place is too high to make any difference. At the other hand neuroscientists apparently aren’t capable of scoring better than 75 % in the famous Libet experiment, so free will deniers still have a long way too go. When they’re at 95 % (still considerably lower than the standard for the higgs-boson) we’re talking. Until then my bet is that in scientific models of the human brain there is room for a probabilstic definition of free will. Note that I tend to lose such bets.
Rob Grigjanis @ # 7: If you wait long enough, quantum uncertainty will manifest itself.
Given a set number of atoms -- say, those in a human brain -- do we have to wait for seconds or years for such manifestation(s)?
Oops -- apologies to all for closetag fail @ # 11!
[I fixed it for you-Mano]
Pierce @11: My guess is far, far longer than the lifetime of a brain, so certainly not relevant to our description of the brain. Uncertainly arising from the sheer complexity of the brain would, however, be very important.
Marcus @5: I was quoting the wrong sentence in my #3. It certainly is the case that psychology cannot assume that thoughts are random. My objection was to “psychology is meaningless if we are non-deterministic.”, and my following comments still apply.
Sorry for any confusion.
Not the first bit of silly bullshit I’ve heard from George Ellis. Crank magnetism in action….
Just a ridiculous, nonsensical strawman. “Logical thinking by a human” is a physical process, according to determinism. If you thought that determinism implies that logical thinking by a human is any other sort of thing, then you’re definitely wrong. But it simply does not claim that this kind of process plays no role in the writing of any words in books.
Mano:
Well, it’s true that classical physics isn’t relevant to the actual world, because it isn’t strictly true.
But things aren’t as simple as you make it sound here. Various quantum theories say the world is deterministic. Like them or not, Many-worlds and Bohmian mechanics are some of the leading contenders of that kind. So, you shouldn’t treat its purported indeterminacy (of your preferred theory/interpretation) as if that were a known fact which has somehow been validated experimentally, because that’s just not the case. At least not unless we have a good way of sorting out which sort of theory is right.
So, you could try to argue for some kind of objective collapse theory like GRW. That would honestly constitute a serious claim about the real world being indeterministic. That is, it’s not just saying something irrelevant about epistemic states or whatever, which isn’t saying anything substantive about whether the world is deterministic, like many other proposals do (different flavors of “Copenhagen” or QBism, for example). But anyway, you would need an argument to support a claim that an objective collapse theory of some kind is right, which is … not easy.
It’s also at least worth mentioning that, for better or worse, GRW-type theories aren’t widely accepted by most physicists. And they involve a different set of equations to model the collapse, not just the usual Schrodinger equation. So whether or not something like that is correct, you can’t act as if it were just standard or textbook quantum mechanics.
My attitude is that free will is probably a fiction. But hey, I’m a fiction teacher, and I think most things worth caring about (including money, love, success — the list goes on) are also fictions. So we might as well go on pretending its real, just like all the other important fictions in our lives.
cr @15: Yes, some interpretations are called ‘deterministic’ for technical reasons.
In BM, the particle has a definite location and moves deterministically. But we cannot know the initial position of the particle. So our predictions must be indeterministic.
In MW the wave function evolves deterministically. But we don’t know which branch we will be on in the next microsecond. Once again, our predictions must be indeterministic.
Saying something like ‘the world is deterministic’ under these interpretations is going way past the (different) technical meanings of the word. ‘The world’ is what we can perceive, and what we can predict. In any interpretation, those predictions are indeterministic. So the ‘determinism’ you are talking about has no bearing on discussions like this.
“If all you have is a hammer….”
If you actually mean that money, love, success (and who knows what else) don’t exist, then please let me know. I’m sure we can set something up. I will happily trade all of my nonexistent love for all of your nonexistent money.
No, like I said, that relevant claims here are that the world itself is deterministic. If there are things we don’t know or can’t no, it makes no difference. Determinism is a metaphysical claim, about how the world actually is, independently of us and whatever we may know.
That’s a bizarre claim which nobody needs to accept. Can we perceive or predict an atom in Jupiter’s atmosphere? No, we can’t, but it’s still part of the world, in the ordinary sense that nearly everyone understands it.
You’re just wrong here. I’ll refer you again to the SEP link on determinism above. That’s at least a decent place to begin.
gah…. edit: “thing we don’t know or can’t know”
cr @19: First of all, spare me your links. I’ve read that article, and it has sophomoric howlers like
It replaces some weirdness with other weirdness. Yawn. And the physics of atoms and photons is indeterministic. Period. In any interpretation. You can still only calculate decay rates, etc, which are probabilistic.
Note that the ‘determinism’ of BM is a radically different animal than the ‘determinism’ of MW; in MW the particle doesn’t have a definite position, so whatever metaphysical claims you think they are making must also be very different, no?
But if you think BM has a profound effect on discussions about free will, please share your thoughts. You’ve obviously thought about it for a long time, so you must have insights to share.
As an aside, there are some issues with determinism in Newtonian mechanics, involving oddities like Norton’s Dome and Space Invaders and so forth. Sure, those involve extremely rare/fined-tuned physical states, which presumably never occur in reality, but the theory itself doesn’t rule out things like that.
You just have to say something like “well, good: it doesn’t look like there are any conditions like that for us to worry about. Move along, nothing to see here.” But whatever that’s supposed to be, even if you consider that satisfactory for our purposes, it’s still not derived from Newton’s laws.
There seems to be two ways of denying free will. First is through some sort of duality, even if not explicitly, which is what Ellis is doing by removing some of our thinking processes and emotions from physical reality. The other way is to have such a contrived definition of free will as to be meaningless as Dennett is doing.
And I’m annoyed by the conflation between determinism and predictability. Predictability requires having the correct and complete model and the ability to have the exact initial conditions. We’ll never have the latter and I don’t see how we can have the former while constrained by our limitations so it seems premature to reject determinism.
Yes. So what?
Those are two different quantum mechanical theories. For an obvious example, one says there are many worlds, while the other does not. In both cases, things are deterministic. There is no contradiction in that.
For all I care, you can leave BM out of it. I think that you should understand what determinism is about, according to the philosophical community which has a right to coin and use its own terms however it wants.
cr @24:
In BM, if you know the initial location of a particle, and its interactions, you could in principle know its entire future. In MW, no matter how much you initially localize the initial position, you can only make probabilistic statements about its future. Whatever these ‘things’ are, they are not the same.
Sure, they (actually, not all of them), and you, can be as sloppy as you like about definitions. Nice gig.
Just so we’re clear on this, I’m a compatibilist. So, I don’t think the question of determinism vs. indeterminism makes a difference with regard to free will.
Indeterminism wouldn’t help. Determinism wouldn’t hurt. The whole thing is a big pile of confusion. Those are my thoughts, in a nutshell.
Mano @ # 12 -- Thanks!
Rog Grigjanis @ # 13: My guess is far, far longer than the lifetime of a brain, so certainly not relevant to our description of the brain.
Maybe not, if you expand the relevant criteria by >7B brains…
Uncertainly arising from the sheer complexity of the brain …
Eh what? A 10B-piece (rough estimate of human neurons, according to a dubious source I read decades ago) clockwork remains a clockwork
Sounds like “free will” essentially consists of unpredictability due to limited data/calculation ability. If we imagine a Star Trek-ish transporter, able to disassemble Captain Kirk in orbit and reassemble him on a planetary surface still thinking and wanting what he thought and wanted before Scotty pulled that lever, free will goes “poof!”
Yes, and they don’t have to be the same, because they’re different scientific theories which have different ontologies. The question is still this: “so what?”
I’ve heard people like Sean Carroll (a popular Everettian/MWI person) say that, according to many-worlds (or maybe that specific version of it), reality just is the wave function (of the whole MWI universe, not of a physical subsystem). He does not regard that as merely a tool for calculating probabilities or something along those lines, but simply as a ray in Hilbert space. That’s what there is, and that’s it. I don’t know how to make sense of it, but whatever else you may want to say, that’s not particles moving around in spacetime.
It isn’t particles moving around in spacetime. Nope; it is wave functions all the way down.
Pierce @27:
I’m not sure why you think that would reduce the time for quantum effects to manifest.
OK, so let’s say there are 10B bits distributed uniformly in a lattice throughout a certain volume. We could impose a simple rule like; if a bit has value 1, in the next Δt seconds it flips the closest six bits. If it has value 0, it has no effect. So, with an initial condition which specifies the values of all 10B bits, you could in principle calculate any future state of the system. Good luck with that, unless the initial state is really simple (like all bits 0). If an appreciable number of bits are initially 1, you’re screwed.
It’s analogous to considering a container of some gas. You could assume really simple underlying physics, like the molecules undergo only elastic collisions with each other and the boundary. Even then, keeping track of all the molecules would be impossible. So we use statistical methods, and come up with concepts like temperature, entropy, and so forth. The exact state is always uncertain.
@10 Mnbo “Well, yes, but so do free will deniers. It’s because (afaIk) nobody has succeeded to formulate a proper definition of free will.”
I used to think this as well in my student days. I viewed free will completely through my physicist’s determinism vs unpredictability glasses. Until I talked to a philosophy student who simply defined free will as “does it make sense to hold someone accountable for their actions?”
cr @28:
Yes, a mind-bogglingly vast Hilbert space.
Yes it is, once you shed the silly insistence that ‘particle’ means ‘something always at a definite location’. The universal wave function is a many-particle wave function. If you prefer to say “it’s probability amplitudes fluctuating throughout spacetime”, that’s fine too. To me, that’s the same thing.
robert79 @31: I’ve long thought that free will and consciousness are things people rattle on about endlessly without getting anywhere.
We hold people accountable (very imperfectly) for their actions because it is in the interests of social animals to do so.
Rob:
I don’t care what you consider silly. So there is that.
More seriously, if someone makes a claim that, in reality, there is only the wave function, then of course BM rejects this. The particles which exist according to BM are not the very same thing as the wave function (as they are according to the view you express here). Their actual positions are the (poorly named) “hidden variables” that you know and love. Or, you may be the type to make a big stink about the fact that it’s a theory with something other than the wave function.
But however you feel about it, that’s just what there is, according to that theory. If you think it’s just plain wrong, okay. (Make your case if you feel like it. Or don’t. I don’t care.) That is nonetheless what BM says, whether or not it’s wrong, and you have no reason to think it says something else.
I’m pretty sure you already understood this and didn’t need me to tell you. So do you have a point? It doesn’t look like you do. Hilbert space isn’t the 4D spacetime we live in. The particles that BM claims to exist simply don’t, according to theories like many-worlds. They just do not tell you the same things about what the world is like.
But I’ve been trying to get across to you that there is nothing about determinism which entails that such theories would need to have the same ontology, or that they’d need to be the same (or similar) in various other ways that one could imagine. So I just don’t think that matters.
I’m beginning to believe Mano only brings such incompetent thoughts to rile us up and generate a lot of comments. Free will believers that take moral culpability seriously in any more than social communication are obviously morons. It makes sense from an informal communication perspective. Otherwise it is, of course, bankrupt.
And that’s all fine. Most of us want to be held accountable, despite the obvious lack of control we have over the contexts that feed into our meat-bags. Those of us who don’t are assholes, suck, and if we find sufficient evidence of such, deserve to be punished.
@31, that is the crux of the matter. And of course it does. But free will is an awful descriptive word for the processes that occurred. At least you’re reasonably clear in what is actually at stake, and probably what most of the debate is about.
@33, Also a good summary. The most frustrating thing about this topic is the diversity of words that charlatans use to engage it. Because they are not interested in clarity.
By the way, I find the arguments over quantum or more classical physics as manifest operators to be completely unimportant and irrelevant. There are two ways any process can possible operate. Via RNG or determined cause and effect. I have no idea how this impacts ‘free will’ at all. I really don’t. It seems moronic that people argue over this, because I truly do not see how change in mechanism would really change my mind about culpability at the social scale. Because you now, we all have to estimate behavior from prior behavior, and none of us has access to what will happen in the future, but cool if you are delusional enough to believe we ever could. That’s really, cool (/s, if was needed).
But you know, keep arguing away.
@1, of course, I’ve been reading backwards, but hell yes. of course. If we have ‘quantum choice’, we didn’t really have choice in the sense a dumb-assed philosopher believes. Philosophers mostly don’t seem to understand what a probability distribution is, unfortunately.
@5 I’m reading backwards, but I would be a ‘psychologist’ or former neuroscientist, that would freely admit thoughts may be ‘random’. And I find that viewpoint consistent with your criticism. Of course not random in a ‘uniform sense’, but random in that it could be a random draw from a severely weighted distribution. QM can’t disagree with me, there.
Ron Grigjanis@#9:
That’s not determinism
OK, what are you saying is determinism, then? Perhaps you have one of those personal definitions.
Sam N@#39:
Of course not random in a ‘uniform sense’, but random in that it could be a random draw from a severely weighted distribution.
If your mental state is “roll 2d20 on the mental state table” are it random or deterministic?
@40, Weighted, but random (of course I’m thinking of a pure, ideal, 2d20, not rolled by hand in an atmosphere). Like if 36-40 cause a type of response. That’s weighted.
Psychologists have never had clean data to work off. It’s always messy. This bring to the fore tendencies, not deterministic actions. We should definitely thing in terms of tendencies.
Determinism is stupid in that no one we know has the ability to 100% know what anyone will do. I don’t reject it as a possibly, just negligible in that we all operate on what we know about the world and thus are uncertain. So of course, whether or not QM is actually determined, it doesn’t matter (and the evidence it is not is compelling). We would never even be in a place to have that kind of certainty. It’s why I don’t sweat it, and accept the model. It works.
Marcus @40: Gosh, I’ve had ‘Rog’ and ‘Ron’. You guys must be drinking more than me.
No, I don’t have a personal definition. Causality and determinism are two distinct concepts. Look ’em up, FFS.
Rob Grigjanis@#42:
I’ve had ‘Rog’ and ‘Ron’. You guys must be drinking more than me.\
iPhone keypads suck for arthritic fingers, asshole.
Causality and determinism are two distinct concepts. Look ’em up, FFS.
Where the fuck did I say they’re the same thing? Please try not to mischaracterize what other people say, that’s high school debate club bullshit.
You have, in fact, managed to pretend to completely avoid the main point I made, which is that psychology depends on trying to understand brains in terms of modeling some kind of behavior -- brains in certain situations do this or that because of hypothetical inner states and past experience. [Unless you’re a total Skinnerian -- but a total Skinnerian would treat brains as a deterministic thing that can only be known by measuring its outputs. I’m trying to grant that not all of psychology is Skinnerian] Right, so psychologists build a model of how a brain behaves because they want to understand it -- and the only way to validate that the model is any good is because it has some predictive power. No model or theory of behavior that says, “poke a brain and random things happen” is worth forming a hypothesis about, because you can’t -- unless the hypothesis is “forget it we have no idea.” That is how I argue that psychology depends on determinism. (macro, not quantum) If I’d been drinking, as you imply, I’d probably try to argue that the entire scientific method is deterministic, in that it depends on cause and effect playing out the same way, always -- and, when it doesn’t, the non-deterministic parts are quantified into “roll 2 D 20 on the quantum stuff table” or flip a coin or whatever.
You might as well say all of medicine is meaningless if we are non-deterministic. Nonsense.
Medicine depends on having deterministic models: you give someone this much something, then this thing happens. You stop someone’s heart, they don’t go jogging, that kind of thing. Nobody would do medicine except as a hobby, if we didn’t have deterministic models that say, “most of the time, doing this helps.” The key is what is “most of the time” right? Roll 2 D 20 on the LD50 table and see if you survive.”
Now, if what you’re doing is conflating “determinism” with “predestination” then, yeah, let me offer you your own quip back at you: you need to go read a dictionary. [And, lastly, causality -- that this thing has this effect -- is a piece of those models.]
My not-very-well-explained remark about cryptographic randomness was an attempt to illustrate a difference between something that is literally unpredictable, and something that is literally unknowable. The whole “predestination” trope regarding free will has always struck me a silly; I don’t see how unpredictability gives us free will [which is what the ‘quantum’ argument seems to hang on] because that comes back to “roll 2 d 20 on the mental state table.” Is that ‘free will’? If I recall Dennet’s argument, that’s “free will” to him because we perceive ourselves as having made a choice. I don’t buy that.
I was serious when I asked Sam whether “roll 2 d 20 on the mental state table” is deterministic or non-deterministic. I’d say it is, because there’s a deterministic model that contains a set of outcomes that are not predictable but I can tell you in advance that it’s going to be something off the “mental state table” and nothing else.
Marcus @43: Let’s recap, shall we?
Me: Yes, there are causal relationships. That’s not determinism.
You: OK, what are you saying is determinism, then? Perhaps you have one of those personal definitions.
[Now, maybe it’s just me, but here you seem to be questioning that causal relationships are not determinism. Or maybe you just took a sudden interest in my own definition of determinism?]
Me: No, I don’t have a personal definition. Causality and determinism are two distinct concepts.
You: Where the fuck did I say they’re the same thing? Please try not to mischaracterize what other people say, that’s high school debate club bullshit.
[And that is what I’d call high school debate club bullshit, with some nice grade school level outrage thrown in]
Marcus @43:
And you’ve just rendered the word ‘deterministic’ utterly meaningless. By your definition, quantum mechanics (any interpretation) is deterministic because every initial state has a set of outcomes with calculable probabilities.
to the OP. I had the unfortunate experience of teaching biology at a community college over the last year. The first concept, after defining biology, in bio 190 (basic cell bio), is emergent properties. That NaCl is very different from elemental sodium or chlorine gas. That macromolecules and organelles have all sorts of properties that small molecules do not. (Working up the chain to the biosphere). It’s always stunning to me that people lack the imagination to see that a massive computation machine (brains) would not have emergent properties, like the type of consciousness we experience. Dennett basically converts free will into a social construct, so fine, I agree with his definition of it, at least he sensibly defines it, something most philosophers fail to do in spectacularly frustrating fashion. But he also renders it a question of how should we hold people culpable, and drops all of the nonsensical philosophical baggage typically loaded onto it.
Can I actually get paid $120,000 a year for failing to clearly define stuff, and just making vague circular arguments? I feel like I’ve been living my life incorrectly.
Rob Grigjanis @ # 30: I’m not sure why you think that would reduce the time for quantum effects to manifest.
If a quantum event influences the function of a human brain once in n years, it will take only n/7B+ years to influence the set of brains in the human population.
… you could in principle calculate any future state of the system. Good luck with that…
The question of determinism vs free will hinges on the hypothetical combination of all physical factors, not their actual calculability with resources practically available. We’re in philosophy-space here, not empirical-space.
Damn me, another html-foo!
[I corrected it-Mano]
Pierce @47: OK, fair enough, though I suspect n/7B is still astronomically huge. I’m just handwaving.
Quite right. I’ll do my best to stay out of it.
Mano @ # 48 -- Thanks again!
Rob Grigjanis @ # 49 -- Physicists seem to do better in a qualitatively-different immeasurable-phenomena realm.
Pierce @50: I have no idea what that means, but it sounds wonderfully jargony. I wouldn’t think physicists would be very concerned with immeasurable phenomena. Not professionally, anyway.