[extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing

[scerir]

> > I tend to agree here. But I think the criminals
> > engage in their behaviour also because it is
> > determined by their 'will', and not just by
> > their genes or by contextuality.

Stathis Papaioannou
> Isn't their will determined by their genes and
> environment? What other factors could possibly
> be at play?

I do not think that genes and environment
play a major role when people buy, or sell,
(or keep) shares of IBM, or Apple.
But for sure genes and environment are
important factors, in general.

> Some people find a place for free will in indeterminacy, 
> perhaps the indeterminacy in QM (or at least the CI of QM). 
> But at best, that means free will is *randomness*, 
> and why should we be any happier to believe that our
> behaviour is random than that it is determined?

Asher Peres wrote several pages (with calculations)
about free will, especially in case of (possible) 
physical 'entanglements' between a subject and 
another subject. But he found that the 'will' was
'free' enough, in any possible condition. 

Note that the 'free will' of the observer is itself
a precondition if one wants to prove Bell
theorems. If you remove the essential assumption
of 'free will' you can also explain the so called 
quantum nonlocality, via a sort of 'superdeterminism',
as Bell called it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism 

s.

"It has been argued that quantum mechanics is not locally causal and
cannot be embedded in a locally causal theory. That conclusion depends on
treating certain experimental parameters, typically the orientations of
polarization filters, as free variables. But it might be that this apparent
freedom is illusory. Perhaps experimental parameters and experimental
results are both consequences, or partially so, of some common hidden
mechanism. Then the apparent non-locality could be simulated."
-John Bell, "Free Variables and Local Causality",  'Epistemological
Letters', 15, (1977)