[ExI] The Quantum Zeno effect

[Damien Broderick]

On 12/14/2010 12:38 PM, John Clark wrote:
>
>> the sort of thing Nobelist Eccles got all excited about, because he
>> thought that might be a place where a non-physical entity or soul
>> might couple to the machinery.
>
> I suppose so, but I don't understand why he got all excited, randomness
> is not what people usually mean by the soul; as for free will, people
> don't mean anything by it, it's just a noise made by the mouth.

I haven't read Popper&Eccles for a while so I don't recall the exact 
argument, but I assume he thought that if a metastable state was somehow 
so delicately poised that it could flip any allowable way, a shove by a 
magical soul could tip it in the desired deterministic direction. In 
other words, it would be a hidden variable. Doesn't make any sense to 
me, either. But maybe Eccles-type souls live in the seventh rolled up 
dimension and can do shit like that.

Damien Broderick