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

[scerir]

From: "Anders Sandberg"

> 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.

As far as I know the only possible connection between free will and micro-
physics is via "entanglement", in the sense that, in principle, you can
suppose something in the brain to be entangled with something outside,
very far too. But Asher Peres made a very detailed analysis of all that
(Foundations of Physics, many years ago - I can find the exact
reference if somebody needs it) and showed the inconsistency of this
issue.

> 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.

In fact there are, at least, four different interpretations of the
Copenhagen interpretation. According to Bohr there is no physical
"collapse", what counts is what is "knowable" in principle, and Bohr's
complementarity interpretation makes little mention of wave packet
collapse or any other silliness that follows there from, such as
a privileged role for the subjective consciousness of the observer,
the observer being classical and "detached". Heisenberg (at least the
young Heisenberg) believed (as von Neumann, London, Bauer, and Wigner -
just till the end of '70s) in a "physical" collapse, caused by the
consciousness of the observer. Pauli developed his own interpretation
based on uncaused "occasio", "anima mundi", "attached" observers
because they choose the actual experimental set-up. Born developed
a more "realistic" interpretation based on quantum
"invariants" and, later, on the possible physical nature of the
wavefunction.

Of course the "consciousness and QM" issue is not over. Many
authors (like Penrose, Stapp, etc.) are still writing papers
and books. David Albert wrote a nice paper showing that a
quantum automaton (an automaton described by QM) behaves
(knows, predicts, feels) in a very strange manner, especially
when it performs self-measurements, or measurements performed
on systems made of subsystems and it-self. But it turns out that
this quantum automaton in fact does not perform true, irreversible
measurements, instead it just performs pre-measurements, or reversible
measurements. Thus when one introduces true (non reversible)
measurements, that is to say "recording apparata", the
"consciousness" issue arises again.

There are, of course, many more points of view about how
"consciousness" has/has not something to do with micro-physics.
In example see below (from Wigner Centennial)
http://quantum.ttk.pte.hu/~wigner/proceedings/papers/w58.pdf
http://www.eps.org/aps/meet/APR02/baps/abs/S2130003.html