Friday, June 18, 2021

The Physics of Free Will

Many physicists today are arguing that as everything is predetermined by cause and effect we therefore have no free will. 

But this lady's hypothesis of how one day a supercomputer might be able to predict the future is interesting. 

The hypothetical supercomputer will be able to predict her future, but as she has access to this knowledge this will most likely alter her behaviour. Now, whatever she chooses, the supercomputer will be able to predict it. But this knowledge alters her behaviour and changes the future. 




The Physics of Free Will

10 comments:

Ahmed Fares said...

Causality does not exist. There is only the illusion of causality. This is because of continuous creation.

Oliver Crisp summarizes [Jonathan] Edwards's view: "God creates the world out of nothing, whereupon it momentarily ceases to exist, to be replaced by a facsimile that has incremental differences built into it to account for what appear to be motion and change across time. This, in turn, is annihilated, or ceases to exist, and is replaced by another facsimile world ... and so on."

Jonathan Edwards from Wikipedia:

Jonathan Edwards (October 5, 1703 – March 22, 1758) was an American revivalist preacher, philosopher, and Congregationalist Protestant theologian. Edwards is widely regarded as one of America's most important and original philosophical theologians.

The same idea from physicist Julian Barbour:

Two views of the world clashed at the dawn of thought. In the great debate between the earliest Greek philosophers, Heraclitus argued for perpetual change, but Parmenides maintained there was neither time nor motion. Over the ages, few thinkers have taken Parmenides seriously, but I shall argue that Heraclitan flux, depicted nowhere more dramatically than in Turner's painting below, may well be nothing but a well-founded illusion. I shall take you to a prospect of the end of time. In fact, you see it in Turner's painting, which is static and has not changed since he painted it. It is an illusion of flux. Modern physics is beginning to suggest that all the motions of the whole universe are a similar illusion - that in this respect Nature is an even more consummate artist than Turner. This is the story of my book. —Julian Barbour (The End of Time - The Next Revolution in Physics)

Julian Barbour from Wikipedia:

His 1999 book The End of Time advances timeless physics: the controversial view that time, as we perceive it, does not exist as anything other than an illusion, and that a number of problems in physical theory arise from assuming that it does exist. He argues that we have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it, and no evidence of the future other than our belief in it. "Difference merely creates an illusion of time, with each individual moment existing in its own right, complete and whole." He calls these moments "Nows". It is all an illusion: there is no motion and no change. He argues that the illusion of time is what we interpret through what he calls "time capsules", which are "any fixed pattern that creates or encodes the appearance of motion, change or history".

Matt Franko said...

That’s a reification of wave theory…

Matt Franko said...

Ahmed many people go to liberal art schools and get Art degrees in physics… not ideal…

You’ll see them making reification errors … like the douches that get BAs in economics and think the figure of speech “money!” is real and we can run out of it… etc…

So these people think wave theory (frequency) is real and the stuff disappears momentarily and then reappears quickly faster than the sampling rate of the human eye so we don’t see it disappear when it’s been there the whole time…

lastgreek said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
lastgreek said...

So these people think...

Physics. Always the same. Forces acting this way. Forces acting that way. Almost everything in life is about adding and subtracting vectors.

mike norman said...

Quantum mechanics shows that the mere act of observing a system changes its outcome.

Ahmed Fares said...

Mike,

It's actually stranger than that. It can do so backwards in time, if time existed, which it doesn't, but I digress. Here is a description of Wheeler's delayed choice experiment:

Wheeler imagined an experiment where a particle goes through a double-slit obstacle and then meets a screen. This screen is movable and can be taken away. Behind it, there are two detectors aligned with each of the two slits of the obstacle. This way, without the screen in the middle, the detectors can tell through which slit the particle passed. There are thus two options: with the screen, the particle (as a wave) "passes through both slits" and we see an interference pattern on the screen made of dark and light stripes; without the screen one of the two detectors will click when the particle hits it and the particle "goes through one slit." Two very different paths, depending on the screen being there or not.

Wheeler added an amazing twist to this set up: take the screen away after the particle passed through the double-slit. This way, the observer controls whether the particle should create an interference pattern (as a wave) or just hit one of the two detectors (as a particle); the particle doesn't "know" which of the two it will be, or which path it must take. In other words, the observer determines the physical reality of the particle (wave or particle) backwards in time!

Remarkably, Wheeler's "delayed choice" experiment has been performed and confirmed in 2006 and again with even more stringent controls in 2012.


As an aside, my description of reality is rather tame compared to what some physicists want us to believe. The "many worlds" interpretation as one example:

In 1957 Hugh Everett III believed that he had solved the infamous measurement problem in quantum mechanics by explaining probability as an illusion in an evolving, deterministic universe of universes. His “relative state” theory horrified Niels Bohr, who treated Everett’s doctoral thesis (written under the guidance of John Wheeler) with disbelief and scorn.

Everett’s theory was reborn as the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics in the 1970s. Yet, despite his idea’s growing popularity, Everett never wrote another word about quantum mechanics. Instead, he worked on military operations research, designing nuclear missile targeting software. In this lecture, investigative journalist and Everett biographer Peter Byrne traces how Everett’s theory evolved over the course of his often-troubled life.

lastgreek said...

Quantum Dick Mechanics

The phenomenon that occurs when looking at once own penis from differing angles. For example from their own perspective versus in a mirror.

The penis will seem to be a completely different size.


https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Quantum%20Dick%20Mechanics

Btw, has anyone here observed the above phenomenon?


PS: I am happy to report as a dad that my kid just aced math, chemistry, and physics :)))))))

My advice was simple: Pay attention to the teachers's classroom lecture and do ALL the assigned problems and then some. Don't be shy to ask questions, and I am here for you for help. Also, leave the distracting hocus-pocus stuff like "time does not exist" etc.

Ahmed Fares said...

Also, leave the distracting hocus-pocus stuff like "time does not exist" etc.

This from Julian Barbour:

Two views of the world clashed at the dawn of thought. In the great debate between the earliest Greek philosophers, Heraclitus argued for perpetual change, but Parmenides maintained there was neither time nor motion. Over the ages, few thinkers have taken Parmenides seriously, but I shall argue that Heraclitan flux, depicted nowhere more dramatically than in Turner's painting below, may well be nothing but a well-founded illusion. I shall take you to a prospect of the end of time. In fact, you see it in Turner's painting, which is static and has not changed since he painted it. It is an illusion of flux. Modern physics is beginning to suggest that all the motions of the whole universe are a similar illusion - that in this respect Nature is an even more consummate artist than Turner. This is the story of my book. —Julian Barbour (The End of Time - The Next Revolution in Physics)

As an aside, they pulled a fast one on us in physics. Remember how they told us that you had to isolate the variable. Except that they didn't.

Speed, which is motion, is defined as distance divided by time. But then they defined time as motion, i.e., the swinging of a pendulum, the vibrations of a quartz crystal, the rotation of the earth. Try as you might, every definition of time is involved with motion. That means they had motion on both sides of the equation. Incidentally, it was when I realized that, Googled it, and came upon Julian Barbour's writings.

Speed is not distance divided by time but distance divided by some real change elsewhere in the world. —Julian Barbour

lastgreek said...

The only Barbour I know is the brilliant Greek classicist Amy Barbour of Yale. She edited an exciting collection of Herodotus’ writings: Selections from Herodotus.