I've never really seen anyone affirm definitely the fact that QM can be used to justify the concept of having a 'free will'. I have seen some refutations of the PoSR (Principle of Sufficient Reason), which is the groundrock belief upon which determinism or necessitarianism hinge upon.
So, can it be affirmatively asserted that QM affirms the concept of having a 'free will'? — Posty McPostface
So, can it be affirmatively asserted that QM affirms the concept of having a 'free will'? — Posty McPostface
The indeterminacy of QM offers nothing in explaining the contradictory nature of free will. Free will asserts both something occurring outside the causal chain as well as the agent's control, and therefore responsibility, over that event, which is to suggest a God-like property that defies explanation. — Hanover
So, can it be affirmatively asserted that QM affirms the concept of having a 'free will'? — Posty McPostface
Moreover, human free choice would not be made possible by neuronal randomness in any case (and all the evidence so far seems to be against it) because no conscious human choice could ever operate to refashion neural networks directly at the neuronal level. Neural networks change through experience, not through will. — Heidi Ravven
So quantum indeterminism definitely challenges the Newtonian/LaPlacean paradigm that gave the freewill debate all its sociological charge. — apokrisis
But I think the many worlds stuff renews it though. — JupiterJess
Their advocates are especially passionate probably because they know they are a passing story. :) — apokrisis
These can be mechanistically analyzed using newtonian mechanics no? — aporiap
Ultimately we can say decision-making is mediated by neuronal population interactions, which are governed by laws of classical mechanics + some derivative chemical laws. — aporiap
And QM is moving towards that kind of interpretation with the quantum information or quantum reconstruction projects. — apokrisis
But I think the many worlds stuff renews it though. Since that is completely (super?) deterministic and people have no will over which worlds they find themselves in. — JupiterJess
This would be a good starting point — apokrisis
If she sets up Young's double-slit experiment, for instance, she can ensure that a photon (almost) never will strike the vicinity of a region of zero-amplitude on the receiving screen even though she will not control which one of the several bands with large amplitude the photon will strike. — Pierre-Normand
Under MWI, there will be infinitely many worlds in which all the bands are composed of the least likely events. So the bands will be exactly where they shouldn't be for an infinity of observers. — apokrisis
Decoherence theories seek to solve this privileged basis problem by means of an appeal to the interactions with the environment but run into other problems while attempting to factor out the quantum mechanical descriptions of the composite 'system + observer + environment' in a principled way. — Pierre-Normand
If we don't reify the many-worlds as metaphysically real entities... — Pierre-Normand
The main trouble with such interpretations, on my view, isn't so much the difficulty in accounting for the empirical verification of the probabilities derived from the Born rule so much as the ad hoc character of the definition of 'observers'... — Pierre-Normand
To my knowledge, the physics involved in modeling neural circuit doesn't go past basic EM and thermo. Wave mechanics of course for characterizing field potential fluctuation and action potential but not for modeling any properties or behavior of biological objects (macromolecules, neurons, neuronal populations).
No.
Well you can analyse them that way and discover nothing about what makes them tick.
You can probe a basic sensory system, layer by layer in something like drosophila and attempt to determine how stimulus information is represented within each layer. There are bottom up approaches that don't have the same inferential limitations as behavioral research.But if you are a neuroscientist, you might hope to decode what the patterns of activation mean by the way they correlate with observable behaviour. Which is analysing them semiotically.
It is just the same as understanding some ancient writing system. Knowing everything there could be to know about how the marks came to be impressed on a clay tablet or scratched on a rock will tell you zero about what the marks meant to their makers. The physics of marks isn't the semantics of marks.
There would be additional information processing laws but my point was that, within the biological context, 'initial conditions' - developmental precursor state + existing natural laws constrain the evolution in a way that the outcome is an adaptive, information processing system. CNS comes out of a self-guided natural process, ie deterministic play out of the precursor cells.Hell no. Even the most reductionist of neuroscientists believes that you would need some kind of laws of information processing.
As a machinery, populations of neurons may be ruled by some kind of standard syntax. And you might even use physical analogies as the inspiration for the kind of syntax that could work - like the "simulated annealing" popular as the kind of algorithmic constraint used in neural network modelling.
But Newtonian mechanics has zip to do with it. The whole bleeding point of information processing systems is that those kinds of physical constraints don't have anything to do with it. You can't run a computer program on hardware that is flipping all its gates for merely physical reasons, like they are feeling too hot or too cold. Information processing works only to the degree the vagaries of the real world material processes have been shut out.
So it is the other way round. For information processing to be predictable and deterministic, it must have the material world completely controlled.
Perhaps my reading is even more superficial than the article, but it seems to me that the new probabilistic approach being sketched in the article is just a vamped-up epistemology of QM, not a radically new metaphysical interpretation. It may end up predicting new experimental results and new ways of applying QM, but the metaphysics seems largely untouched.This would be a good starting point - https://www.nature.com/news/physics-quantum-quest-1.13711
Under GR gravity is not a force at all, it is the manifestation of the structure of spacetime, and is thus not something that can be transmitted from one body to another via particles like gravitons. — jkg20
↪apokrisis
This would be a good starting point - https://www.nature.com/news/physics-quantum-quest-1.13711 — jkg20
Perhaps my reading is even more superficial than the article, but it seems to me that the new probabilistic approach being sketched in the article is just a vamped-up epistemology of QM, not a radically new metaphysical interpretation. — jkg20
Nobody (as far as I know) has ever proposed a naive picture whereby a photon travels through the electromagnetic field. That would be a complete misunderstanding of electromagnetic theory. The naive picture, if there is one, is that the photon travelling through a region of spacetime is what constitutes the electromagnetic field in that region of spacetime. It is just here that the graviton as a particle model breaks down. The description of a graviton as a quantized part of spacetime (which I think is what you are getting at, but correct me if I'm wrong) makes perfect sense, at least if one allows that the structure of spacetime is discrete and not continuous, but the relation of the graviton to spacetime then becomes one of part to whole and the graviton is no longer a particle at all - it becomes a discretely identifiable element of the medium through which energy-bearing particles such as photons and gluons etc transfer their energy. However, one fairly standard picture of a graviton is to model it precisely along the lines of a photon insofar as it is also something that transfers energy from one part of space time to another, and that is the picture which I believe is fundamentally confused about what gravity actually is.But this naive picture wouldn't be correct as applied the the photon's relation to the electromagnetic field either!
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