[Paleopsych] free wills and quantum won'ts

[HowlBloom at aol.com]

This is from a dialog Pavel Kurakin and I are having behind the  scenes.  I 
wanted to see what you all thought of it.  Howard
 
You know that I'm a quantum skeptic.  I believe that our math is  primitive.  
The best math we've been able to conceive to get a handle on  quantum 
particles is probabilistic.  Which means it's cloudy.  It's  filled with multiple 
choices.  But that's the problem of our math, not of  the cosmos.  With more 
precise math I think we could make more precise  predictions.
 
And with far more flexible math, we could model large-scale things like  
bio-molecules, big ones, genomes, proteins and their interactions.  With a  really 
robust and mature math we could model thought and brains.  But that  math is 
many centuries and many perceptual breakthroughs away.
 
As mathematicians, we are still in the early stone age.
 
But what I've said above has a kink I've hidden from view.  It implies  that 
there's a math that would model the cosmos in a totally deterministic  way.  
And life is not deterministic.  We DO have free will.  Free  will means 
multiple choices, doesn't it?  And multiple choices are what the  Copenhagen School's 
probabilistic equations are all about?
 
How could the concept of free will be right and the assumptions behind the  
equations of Quantum Mechanics be wrong?  Good question.  Yet I'm  certain that 
we do have free will.  And I'm certain that our current  quantum concepts are 
based on the primitive metaphors underlying our existing  forms of math.  
Which means there are other metaphors ahead of us that will  make for a more 
robust math and that will square free will with determinism in  some radically new 
way.
 
Now the question is, what could those new metaphors be?
 
Howard

 
----------
Howard Bloom
Author of The Lucifer Principle: A  Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of 
History and Global Brain: The Evolution  of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 
21st Century
Visiting Scholar-Graduate  Psychology Department, New York University; Core 
Faculty Member, The Graduate  Institute
www.howardbloom.net
www.bigbangtango.net
Founder:  International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic 
of Evolution  Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The 
Big Bang Tango  Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American 
Association for the  Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, 
Academy of Political  Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International 
Society for Human  Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; 
executive editor -- New  Paradigm book series.
For information on The International Paleopsychology  Project, see: 
www.paleopsych.org
for two chapters from 
The Lucifer  Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, 
see  www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of  Mass Mind from the Big 
Bang to the 21st Century, see  www.howardbloom.net

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/paleopsych/attachments/20050516/47e31909/attachment.html>