Are there any? Even if there is no free will and you act in a harmful way, there will be consequences and responses from other people…
Waveforms don’t collapse in MW. Every possible quantum measurement is realized somewhere in the multiverse. This is conceptually different from other interpretations, where the waveform collapses to a single “real” value.
It may be indistinguishable to us, because a nonexistent possibility is equivalent to a possibility that we can’t interact with. But with multiple coexisting worlds, there is the possibility of meta-relationships existing only between certain sets of worlds. And that’s a backdoor for free will in a deterministic universe.
Sabine got you covered
Right, that’s why I wrote collapse/decoherence. Decoherence is what gives the appearance of wave function collapse in MW.
She insists she’s not making a polemical point, but it really sounds like she is.
Insisting on a false dichotomy - if it’s not capital-S Science, then it must be religion! - is a bit of a giveaway. Are we going to pretend that Hugh Everett’s PhD thesis is a religious text now?
Not that I’m in any way a fan of Many Worlds (nor in fact do I know enough of the maths to be entitled to an opinion, really). But this seems like an absurdly simplistic dismissal. And raises the question; do we apply our strictly purist stance on what counts as capital-S Science to the other competitors? The Copenhagen Interpretation is pretty heavily rooted in philosophical assumptions that have nothing to do with any scientific process.
I think she overreaches quite a bit. She doesn’t talk about quantum mechanics or the measurement problem at all. She doesn’t address the reasons why MW is a thing. It’s a pretty cavalier dismissal.
And I think she’s making an epistemological error. MW proponents don’t “believe” in the multiverse. It’s merely proposed as a potential solution to the problem of what happens when the wavefunction collapses during measurement: “what if the wavefunction doesn’t collapse?” In that sense it differs from the god hypothesis: the god hypothesis is a stand-in for ignorance. It doesn’t have any formalism, doesn’t try to conform to existing data, doesn’t proceed along any scientific methodology.
Have you guys watched Devs (by Alex Garland)? I can recommend it. It spurred my interest in quantum mechanics again… Free Will, many worlds, determinism are the themes in Devs…
I’m not a Sabine fan, for reasons I won’t go into.
For science explainers, among others I find Sean Carroll, Janna Lavin, Brian Greene (and some of his World of Science panels), plus the astronomy/physics/biology talks (and follow up Q&A) at the Royal Institute illuminating. (I also try to watch Spacetime on PBS but something about the presenter’s tone, i.e. the sound and pitch of his voice more often than not puts me to sleep. :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FanhvXO9Pk
This is a good talk, and sometimes really funny. Against free will. I have not found any good video on a pro-free-will-site. One video started good (Dennet), but it went into moral philosophy, which is a totally different question.
Thought this was an interesting article I stumbled across today:
I read it when it was originally published (over a year ago). I would swear I’ve seen it linked on the forum, but can’t seem to find it, so maybe not.
Its a really good article, but it starts a little misleading. It goes into a very nuanced take towards the end of the article.
I like how it explains the compatibilist approach, and how it explores how free will is defined different by hard scientists and philosophers, much as we discussed earlier in this thread. The universe is deterministic, and while most philosophers accept that, they define free will as our conscious pero esa allowing us to make decisions (versus, say, being hypnotized). That the conscious process itself is physically deterministic does not matter. As long as the decision is due to a sentient process, it’s free will (also note there are people that dispute that consciousness has any effect on decisions and that it might work the other way, which would be a much more serious negation of free will -also it’s not mainstream-).
We do not originate our choices ex nihilo; instead, they are determined by our history. As Sapolsky puts it, bluntly:
The intent you form, the person you are, is the result of all the interactions between biology and environment that came before. All things out of your control. Each prior influence flows without a break from the effects of the influences before. As such, there’s no point in the sequence where you can insert a freedom of will that will be in that biological world but not of it.
The upshot, for him, is that “there can be no such thing as blame, and that punishment as retribution is indefensible.”
Free will a manifestation of the quantum uncertainty principle.
While I agree that time is fake, it is not deterministic. Everything everywhere is happening all at once (that’s possible) (not necessarily interesting).
Okay, what crime is he trying to get ahead of here?
This is not true–that’s not how the uncertainty principle works.
Are you certain?
Here let me google for an article that supports my point of view!
But wait—I hear a serious objection. There is no question that the macroscopic world of human experience is built on the microscopic, quantum world. Yet that does not imply that everyday objects such as cars inherit all the weird properties of quantum mechanics. When I park my red Mini convertible, it has zero velocity relative to the pavement. Because it is enormously heavy compared with an electron, the fuzziness associated with its position is, to all intents and purposes, zero.
Cars have comparatively simple internal structures. The brains of bees, beagles and boys, by comparison, are vastly more heterogeneous, and the components out of which they are constructed have a noisy character. Randomness is apparent everywhere in their nervous system, from sensory neurons picking up sights and smells to motor neurons controlling the body’s muscles. We cannot rule out the possibility that quantum indeterminacy likewise leads to behavioral indeterminacy.
Somebody has written a book to defend materialistic determinism?
There’s so much pop science on free will it feels like the internet search about it is polluted beyond redemption. But, from my limited and utterly mediocre understanding of it, the “quantum” guys see in-built randomness as the “way out” of determinism, but their critics point out there’s no clear mechanism between quantum randomness (states) and neurons firing.
I think Sapolsky’s Free Will issue is much less fundamental and more that in ordinary life most people are so vastly influenced by their environment that their lives are effectively deterministic, and so we need to think much harder and issues of crime and punishment, but also success and failure, in light of those causes.
To address the positive end of the spectrum, those “golden ticket” holders in life almost certainly had all the right factors that made them successful, such as stable childhood homes, leisure time, money, health, supportive environments, family wealth, GDP, networks of connected people, ect, that their success was almost “a given”.