Posted: Jul 08, 2018 1:05 pm
GrahamH wrote: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.
As you say, even if it does turn out that there’s more randomness to brains than physicists currently think probable, this would not in itself be relevant to free will. For ultimate free will, the gap in mathematical laws would need to be filled by some sort of morally relevant decision-making not controlled by a brain (a top-down driver of events), for which there’s no evidence.
I find myself agreeing with the two commentators in romansh’s second link (linked again here) who argue for compatibilism (disagreeing with Sabine Hassenfelder), saying that while we use group sanctions to discourage people from acting against group norms, it makes sense to check that the disapproved actions were “free”, in the sense of being the result of a decision by the person. Punishing someone for something they could not help is more likely to damage than to improve group effectiveness. This kind of freedom is entirely compatible with determinism, and as the second commentator, Martijn, points out, it’s a concept which we use all the time, like “cats”, “Brazil”, “money”, “water waves” and “molecules”. None of those concepts are ultimate, and if we reach the stage of understanding everything in terms of physical fields they may cease to be useful. Meanwhile, they are useful enough to keep. Quoting those two comments:
gowers (in comment 8.56am 5th July 2018) wrote:Sabine Hossenfelder wrote:
Now, there are a lot of people who want you to accept watered-down versions of free will, eg that you have free will because no one can in practice predict your behavior, or because no one can tell what’s going on in your brain, and so on. But I think this is just verbal gymnastics. If you accept that the current theories of particle physics are correct, free will doesn’t exist in a meaningful way.
I am one of those people you refer to. The way I like to put it is this. Let us define two notions of free will. One, which corresponds roughly to our everyday intuitions about free will, is what you refer to as a watered-down version. I would note that it isn't meaningless, and indeed plays a crucial role in society. (For example, if I leave my car for longer than allowed in a parking space because I have been kidnapped, I may get shown some leniency because I was not free, in this everyday sense, to drive it away.) The other, which basically means the opposite of "is determined" (given various qualifications about randomness etc. which I fully agree are irrelevant to the discussion, since randomness doesn't give any extra control) is incompatible with most physical theories, but incompatible by definition rather than for any interesting reason.
So I am very happy to grant you that free will, as you conceive it, doesn't exist. But I maintain that free will in the everyday sense is a rather more interesting and useful concept. (It's important to stress that unlike your notion of free will, everyday free will is not a black and white matter: there are many shades of grey.)
Martijn (in comment 4.48pm 5th July 2018) wrote:Sabine Hossenfelder wrote:
"Now, there are a lot of people who want you to accept watered-down versions of free will, eg that you have free will because no one can in practice predict your behavior, or because no one can tell what’s going on in your brain, and so on. But I think this is just verbal gymnastics. If you accept that the current theories of particle physics are correct, free will doesn’t exist in a meaningful way."
I'd be more careful here, especially in an article about RG-flows and EFT: a hardcore reductionist can argue in a similar way that cats, Brazil, money, water waves and molecules don't exist 'in a meaningful way'. They merely represent certain patterns we recognize in fundamental quantum fields, which 'really' exist (until something more fundamental is found of course).
The obvious (Wilsonian?) response is that all those things are meaningful mental constructs for humans at their appropriate scales. As moral agents of imperfect knowledge who have to deal with each other, in day to day life or the justice system, just putting a black box around people's heads and 'integrating out the neurons' can be very useful. I'd argue this is the way most people use the concept of free will and it gives you pretty much everything you can sensibly want free will to do.
4:48 PM, July 05, 2018