[ExI] Bell's Inequality

Jason Resch jasonresch at gmail.com
Wed Nov 30 14:54:03 UTC 2016


Are you familiar with:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism ?

I think a useful exercise is to try to clarify what the will is supposedly
'free' from in freewill.

Some say determinism, others say from the laws of physics, others might say
from the agent's own ability to predict it's behavior. You might have still
another answer, and it would be useful to identify it.

Personally, I think an agent can only be the agent that its meant to be to
the extent it's operations rely on deterministic processes. Otherwise it
would not be expressing its will but the will of dice. So for me, the will
must be free from coercion, malfunction, randomness, etc. to truly be free.
I am a compatibilist when it comes to freewill and determinism.

Someone earlier stated Bell's Inequality implies we have to give up one of:
locality, determinism, or realism. This list is incomplete, we must give up
one of: locality, determinism, realism, or counterfactual definiteness.

Counterfactual definiteness means experiments have only one outcome. MWI
gives up counterfactual definiteness and retains locality, determinism and
realism.

Jason

On Wednesday, November 30, 2016, Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:

>

> Stathis wrote:
> <How is the operation of free will different to the operation of any other
> physical system?>
>
> Good question. So lets start with types of physical systems that exist.
> Free will as it is commonly understood is a property of living organisms
> which are natural physical systems that are selectively open with respect
> to their environment. By selectively open, I mean that they are open in
> the thermodynamic sense but they are selective in the sense that not just
> any kind of matter and energy can cross the boundaries of the system.
>
> Furthermore living systems can maintain, relative to their environment, a
> relatively low entropy state within their porous boundaries through the
> selective importation of matter and energy energetically coupled to the
> export of heat and entropic waste.
>
> This process is called homeostasis and it grants living systems a high
> degree of fault tolerance and robustness compared to artificially
> engineered systems. This enables living systems to for example, climb
> mountains which non-living natural systems don't do and operate
> continuously for thirty plus years with no maintenance besides food,
> water, and oxygen.
>
> All this highlights the differences between systems containing free will
> and artifical physical systems such as machines.
>
> That being said, many man-made machines can also make decisions and act on
> them. Even analog systems like your washing machine example
>
> Using my very narrow definition of free will, that free will is simply a
> choice being made, then at the exact instant that a decision is made,
> there isn't really a difference between a human choice or a mechanical
> relay clicking into place. Ultimately, a decision is a decision, no matter
> who or what makes it.
>
> If it were otherwise, then replacing Alice and Bob in the Bell Inequality
> Test with robots or simply clock-work mechanisms that rotated the
> polarizing filters on a set time table, would make the photon correlations
> go away.
>
> I don't know if this experiment has ever been done, but my hunch is that
> the results would come out exactly the same as QM predicts. And that could
> increase the liklihood that we live in a superdeterministic universe and
> *don't* have free will.
>
> Stathis wrote:
> <I choose coffee rather than tea because the coffee-choosing neurons fire,
> and the coffee decision comes out; my washing machine chooses the spin
> cycle rather than the wash cycle because its spin cycle-choosing relay
> fires and spin cycle comes out.>
>
> I think you are underselling the brain here. While at the exact moment
> that the choice happens, the washing machine's act of decision and your
> act share a certain similarity, the processes by which the two reached
> those decisions are vastly different.
>
> The washing machine was following a very simple mechanical program and,
> barring unforeseen mechanical failure would have always chosen the spin
> cycle at that step of the program.
>
> Your brain, on the other hand, not only has coffee neurons firing but also
> has the tea neurons, soda neurons, beer neurons all firing. Your brain may
> or may not have thirst neurons firing, and a whole host of inhibitory
> signals firing such as the "it's too hot for coffee" or the "it's too
> early for beer" neurons. So all these neurons are firing, and some of
> these signals are building each other up while other signals are knocking
> them down.
>
> So you have this competition between sets of cooperating neurons
> representing different choices and contraints having a cacophonic tug of
> war for the future. Then suddenly in a flash, the decision is made, and a
> function in multi-dimensional probability space collapses down to a single
> point . . . Coffee.
>
>
> Stuart LaForge
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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