Created: August 21, 2020
Modified: October 04, 2021
Modified: October 04, 2021
free will
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- NameRedacted points out the strong free will theorem. This says that electrons sometimes have 'choices': situations where their behavior is not determined by physical law.
- But if my electrons are choosing, it's still not really me that's choosing. I can't just cause my electrons to choose differently. If I could, it would be the case that my thoughts (which are physical phenomena corresponding to neuronal activity in the brain) would be affecting the behavior of the electrons. But we defined 'free will' to be the set of circumstances in which the electron's behavior is not constrained by physical law. So our own brain activity can never have a causal effect on the electron's choices -- it's really the electron's free will, not ours! Whatever processes determine an electron's choices are not going to be human-level emotions, beliefs, or calculations.
- Now one could say that the electron's free will generates ours, because our thoughts are determined by the electrons' choices. Even if that were true, saying that our thoughts are determined by something else seems like giving up the argument. And while it might be true in a chaos-theory 'everything affects everything' sense, I actually think it's false to the extent that our thoughts perform computations: logic, reasoning, planning. Those computations are clearly implemented at the macro scale in our brains; individual electrons are not doing the computations internally. A reliable computation requires noise reduction, and the choices of individual electrons are almost certainly going to appear as 'noise' from the algorithmic perspective, so the computation will evolve to be robust to them.
- Also presumably the free will theorem is true only in a certain model, and it's possible that we will one day have a different model that does explain the electron's choices. Unless they've proved that no possible model can explain them? I imagine they've proved something more like 'no model in (some widely-accepted set of models) can explain the electron's choices'.