[extropy-chat] The omniscience of God and the free will of Man

[Anders Sandberg]

Giu1i0 Pri5c0 said:
> I wish to contribute to the discussion without mentioning God, as "Is it
> possible to have a deterministic universe sporting free-will?" (by
> deterministic universe I mean one where the future is uniquely determined
> by the past).

Have you looked at Daniel C. Dennett's _Freedom Evolves_
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0670031860/002-3149024-8068866?v=glance)

My personal view is that it is a red herring altogether to worry about the
microphysics when discussing free will. Free will is something we observe
on the macroscale as people make free choices, and even if all quantum
randomness came from a deterministic look-up table we would not see a
difference. Besides, indeterminacy is no real friend of freedom either.

> Our universe is deterministic only if we accept some form of
> the
> Everett interpretation of quantum physics. Otherwise, there is some kind
> of
> magic effect that kills off all possible outcomes of the current state of
> the universe, except one selected randomly, as soon as an act of
> observation
> by a conscious observer takes place.

That is *one* interpretation of the Copenhagen interpretation. Notice that
in the original phrasing it did not involve (to my knowledge) any
reference to a conscious observer, just an observer. It could just as well
be a human observer, a male observer or something else, but the idea that
consciousness somehow has something to do with quantum mechanics is
extremely popular with some people.

I think today people prefer to speak about decoherence, the effect of
coupling a quantum mechanical system with a large environment, rather than
some kind of observer-induced collapse.

> If we choose the Everett interpretation, the state of the universe
> (reality)
> evolves without random effects, but our consciousness only perceives a
> specific projection of the state of the universe (our reality), which by
> itself does not contain any information or laws that could permit
> predicting
> deterministically its evolution in time. In this case, there is a Platonic
> metareality that we do not perceive, but we can hold the concept of free
> will within the universe that we perceive.

A bit like the algorithmic complexity of a number, which in general is of
the same size as the number of bits in it, but the algorithmic complexity
of the set of all numbers is much smaller (just the length of the shortest
program that prints them all).

Notice that other kinds of parallel worlds (Tegmarks levels, including
being distributed far away in an spatially infinite universe, other
inflation bubbles and other kinds of universes, plus of course the
simulation argument's simulations) also could act as the platonic
metareality here.

-- 
Anders Sandberg
http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa
http://www.aleph.se/andart/

The sum of human knowledge sounds nice. But I want more.