Posted: Jul 08, 2018 11:40 am
romansh wrote:While Sabine Hossenfelder does not believe in free will, her essay here suggests we cannot eliminate the possibility of strong emergence. Not sure I understand all the details, but the essay is here.
And the general layman's termshere
If strong emergence does in fact occur, I am not sure how this might get us off the hook and allow us the luxury of free will. It just means there is a new set of rules at the coarser level of existence. Unless someone is claiming it is strong emergence all the way up?
Interesting.
There are various aspect to "free will" but one that Hossenfelder essay seems to apply to is the idea that future is a function by the past, that initial conditions and laws of physics fully determine how the universe unfolds. The ideas seems to be that Landau poles are a divergences in a coupling constant that are not determined functions of the past.
As far as I can see that boils down to arguing there is some indeterminacy to events but comes far short of the idea conscious will is a top-down driver of events. As such I see common ground with Conway and his free will electrons. Quantum dice mix things up a bit.