[ExI] Bell's Inequality

Stuart LaForge avant at sollegro.com
Mon Nov 28 06:39:33 UTC 2016


John Clark wrote:
<​Apparently you believe the ​word "choice" explains everything that needs
explaining about that odd phrase "free will". I do not. There are only 2
possibilities,  you "chose" to do X rather than Y for a reason in which
case you're a cuckoo clock, or you "chose" to do X rather than Y for no
reason in which case you're a roulette wheel. Where does this thing you
call "free will" enter into this?>

Free will is the ability to choose something because you want to. Neither
the cuckoo clock, nor the roulette wheel can express intent. Therefore
neither has free will.

If you are a cuckoo clock, then you don't choose anything at all, you
simply do what you do without choice, independent of what you want,
because you don't want anything. Similarly if you are a roulette wheel,
your choice is random, and completely independent of what you want since
you don't want anything. Since, in actuality, you do have wants, you can
be neither a cuckoo clock nor a roulette wheel.

I did not intend to venture out into the murky waters of metaphysics and
philosophy with this thread so I defined free will as simply and clearly
as I could. Do you believe you have something as obvious and trivial as a
naked choice when you set the angle of your polararizing filter during a
Bell Test experiment? If so, that qualifies as free will for purposes of
the Bell Trilemma of: "local-determinism, realism, or free will.

If you don't really have that choice, then the universe is
superdeterministic. Your entire life is an already written script, and you
are just cog in the big wheel.

But the upside of being a cog in the wheel is that you get to have your
local-determinism and your realism. The photons matched each other because
you were predestined to pick that polarizer angle since before you were
born and the photons knew it. Furthermore relativity reigns and the moon
is still there when you are not looking at it.

Conversely, if you do actually have that choice of polarizer angle (i.e.
FREE WILL), then you have to give up either local-determinism and accept
super-luminal influences and time-reversed causation, which you seem fine
with doing . . . OR you have to give up realism, and that naive belief
that the moon is still there when you are not looking at it.

John wrote:
<I find all this no more mysterious than the fact that you don't know what
you will decide to do before you've decided to do it. Even a calculator
doesn't know what number it will decide to put on its screen when you type
in 2+2 until the microprocessor has finished making the calculation.>

On the contrary. You plug that commonplace notion of a "choice" into
Bell's Trilemma and the fate of the universe is suddenly at stake. It's
weirdness no matter which way you cut it.

Stuart LaForge






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