Proof of Free Will
Principle of Least Action
First off, I'm hardly a physicist and so I might not have understood the above principle well enough to use it as the cornerstone of my proof.
Suffice it to say that, for me, the principle of least action implies that deterministic pathways, e.g. the flow of a river down a mountain from its source, are such that they (the paths) are the easiest (least) given the circumstances (for the river this would be the contours of the terrain it traverses).
Human behavior, if you'll take the time to notice, breaks this easiest route rule - we do things in very inefficient ways, most of the times failing to take the shortest route between beginning (of a project) and its end. In essence we violate the Principle of Least Action.
Since deterministic systems have to adhere to the Principle of Least Action and humans consistently violate this principle, is this free will?
First off, I'm hardly a physicist and so I might not have understood the above principle well enough to use it as the cornerstone of my proof.
Suffice it to say that, for me, the principle of least action implies that deterministic pathways, e.g. the flow of a river down a mountain from its source, are such that they (the paths) are the easiest (least) given the circumstances (for the river this would be the contours of the terrain it traverses).
Human behavior, if you'll take the time to notice, breaks this easiest route rule - we do things in very inefficient ways, most of the times failing to take the shortest route between beginning (of a project) and its end. In essence we violate the Principle of Least Action.
Since deterministic systems have to adhere to the Principle of Least Action and humans consistently violate this principle, is this free will?
Comments (138)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary-action_principle
Yes, we behave inefficiently very frequently. BUT we have reasons for those behaviors. They may not be very good reasons, but they are reasons and thus, it's not "free" will in the traditional conception of the phrase.
Methinks you're trying to eat the cake and have it to.
[quote=Math]The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.[/quote]
[quote=Humans]The shortest distance between two points is a smooth curve.[/quote]
Math says something, humans say something totally different. Free will?
Humans, it appears, can defy mathematical laws/principles. If I choose to, I needn't travel along a straight line from point A to point B.
No, but you will from point A to point A.1. A smooth curve is a series of infinite straight lines. You were never headed to point B, you were going to point A.1 first.
Yet, a curved line is longer than a straight line (irrational/free will). It doesn't make mathematical sense to meander, travel on a curve, when we can make a beeline to our destination.
The natural (nonliving) world follows the principle of easiest path (least resistance, like you said). You might point to a river, winding its way to the sea and say "there, that's not how things work!" However, if we bring math & physics to bear on the matter, you'll, I'm certain, discover that a river's course is mathematically sound.
For humans, this is most likely false. Our paths in life aren't mathematically sensible; one could even say that it's quite like a river flowing uphill!
I'm not sure if processes have to adhere to any principle. That's just our way to say that these processes have to obey to our principle. If we mentally construct a variety of paths of a particle between two fixed points in space and time, and put forth the proposition that it's the path with least action that is the actual path taken, does that mean then that the particle has to adhere to The Principle? Isn't it the other way round?
If you throw yourself from the stairs at your mom's house, do you obey to The Principle? You start from a point at the top at noon, and end up down the steps somewhere, a fraction of a second later. Two defined points in space and time. The path taken is precisely the one for which the action is minimal. Your path is such that it ensures one can project this property on them.
The Principle seems to be teleological in nature, but it's just us giving the system initial and final conditions, like begin/end positions in space and time. If a particle finds itself, in the absence of force, at an origin, and 5 seconds later at a point 10 meters away from it, then you can let the particle move in 1001 possible ways between the two points. Let it go fast, then slow, and then fast again.
If you evaluate the integral of the kinetic energy over time you will note that the path (history) for which the kinetic energy is constant is the path with least action, or resistance.
As the particle moves in a force free region this is understandable. Any other path you let the particle follow in your mind involves a force. If you let it move fast in the first part and slow in the second you have to apply a force to decelerate it and change direction if the parts of the path have different ones.
This is even clearer if you let the particle in a circle first and then, kzjong! straight to the end point. The only path without using forces is a straight line with constant velocity. No resistance of forces is met.
Same for a free particle in a force field. The path of a particle in a gravitational field can be varied. Between the two given points in spacetime, the path on which you don't have to apply forces to the particle during its motion on the path is a parabolic trajectory on which the particle moves with varying velocity. The parabola with varying velocity in a gravity field is the equivalent of the straight line with constant velocity in the force free casus.
If the particle is constrained to a path, then it won't follow a path of least resistance. The particle experiences forces along the path (say a marble shot in a madly curved tube). You could have chosen the shape of the tube as a path to follow in the free particle case. The path would have given a higher value of the action then the straight line. But if you force the particle, it obviously doesn't follow a path of least resistance, as that is a straight line (or a parabola). But given the constraint, the particle still moves with least resistance or least action. The forced path is always in disagreement with the free path.
The variational principle can't be applied if frictional forces are present. If you imagine a rough solid box on a rough table, and imagine it stands on on end at a given time and on the other side at a later time, what is the actual path taken?
The principle seems teleological insofar it seems that the particle chooses the right path. It seems to know that to arrive at a point in space at a given time, it has to start with a certain velocity, follow the right path, with varying (or not) velocities, and end up at the right time at the desired point. This is obvious nonsense. It's us who vary the paths and choose the right path.
Wouldn't that describe that math forced your choice? e.g I chose to [I]not[/I] walk straight because of math.
I would expect a mathematical system to exhibit behavior in line with mathematical principles one of which is always take the shortest distance between two points. Any deviation from linearity, in my humble opinion, can't be mathematical.
I would say that if you wanted to, I'm sure you could describe linear deviation in a mathematical fashion. Even more so, we are subject to linearity, just not all the time. (e.g I'm really hungry and want a sandwich, I naturally take the shortest way there, to the kitchen.)
Well you could as well turn it the other way around, and say that all of humanity is on a linear trajectory, from life to death. I think my problem is linear comparative to where? It seems subjective, where we place the two dots.
I'm pretty sure if you fire a human from a trebuchet, they will follow the path given by the principle of least action. So in an example that is equivalent to the physical behaviour you cite, people behave as expected.
What you seem to have in mind is that people do not always make the best possible decisions, and you're using action as a metaphor. But people are also ruled by other physical laws. One is the second law of thermodynamics, which forbids people from suddenly and opportunely knowing something they did not learn. As such, humans always make decisions in partial ignorance, leading (deterministically) to a high probability of suboptimal choices.
There are many other factors that influence decision-making (for instance, exercise in order to get fit), but none of them violate the principle of least action.
But wouldn't a human's partial ignorance be funded by his free will?
But the question is: Is she subject to the principle, or is this so only in the mind uttering the principle? After the launch friction will influence the motion, so the principle is not applicable anymore, as only conservative forces are implied. Even on the Moon, friction is involved, gravitational friction. During flight you can wobble around your center of mass, causing friction, and this motion won't be determined by a minimum action principle.
I'm convinced!
No, it's funded by the second law of thermodynamics. You can choose to be ignorant about something (or do your own research in contemporary parlance), but it doesn't follow that all ignorance is voluntary. We are born ignorant of almost everything.
Quoting Raymond
And the answer is what you quoted.
Quoting Raymond
Well you can look at that in three ways. One is that you'd have to perform the experiment under ideal conditions. Another is that you factor dissipation, which is still deterministic, into the calculation. Another is that you add "in principle" on the grounds that, on a molecular level, there are no dissipative forces but, on that level, the calculations are untenable.
None of which suggests that failure to obey the principle of least action is free will: indeed, you've just cited examples of its violation that are deterministic.
Quoting Yohan
I think you arrived already convinced, no?
What I meant, can one literally be under the influence of a principle we invented? I think it is the user of the principle projecting his will to power over the ones he projects it to.
Even if it were so, the principle doesn't hold for real processes, maybe by approximation only. Are we approximately subjected to it? The principle is even teleological, as it supposes a final point in spacetime that can't be known at the start, except for isolated systems.
If I act contrary to the principle, which I do, by every action I perform. My will is nor free, nor tied to determinism or any other abstract principle. The will simply is.
Hm, well it could be said that ethical behaviour is cost effective in a social setting, which would make it more or less scientific.
I did arrive as a non-physicalist but that is unrelated.
(PS. I don't believe in stupid free will after all)
It's the constriction of the will that should be part of ethics. The will is not "determined" by physical processes, it is just part of them, and they are a necessary a priori for the will even to exist.
The will simply is what?
My partial ignorance could be funded by an enormous chain of deterministic causes, or I could just have free will. Occam's razor?
A process unfolding, with or without possible consequences on processes somewhere around it. The fact that these processes are determined doesn't render them "not free". In fact, without being determined, the process can't develop in a way that's necessary for freedom. The very notion of determinism is a subjective feature we project on processes. A process isn't "determined" by a deterministic law. That's how we view it only. The will wouldn't care less, and can be pretty determined in that.
Occam's shaving gell seems more appropriate.
Sure, although wouldn't that mean that free will isn't free, to us?
I'm not going to get drawn in to antiscientific new age guff about disorder being evil. The basis for the argument in your OP was a scientific one: the principle of least action.
Quoting Raymond
But you don't act contrary to the principle. This is a conflation of mechanics and ethics. When you decide to walk the long way home, every molecule of you is still obeying the principle: when a conservative force acts on it, it changes via the trajectory of least action. This has nothing to do with your decision about which way you're going. If you fancied the scenary, your choice was an effective one. If you wanted to burn some calories, your choice was an effective one. If you were pressed for time, your choice would be a questionable one, but still every molecule in you subject to conservative forces would obey the principle of least action. It isn't something effected by choice.
Quoting Raymond
That's true of everything. If you pretend gravity is all there is, you're disobeying it right now by not falling through the floor thanks to electrostatic repulsion. Gravity isn't all there is: there's also electromagnetism. Likewise the principle of least action is not all there is when you're applying it at a macroscopic level. (The Langrangian does specify the laws of motion in quantum field theory though, though so if you _could_ calculate a human being catapulted through the air at this scale, the principle of least action would be sufficient. Something being mathematically intractable is not the same as it being approximate or untrue.)
Quoting Raymond
I think that's you imposing your preferred interpretation, ironically. Fundamentally these are boundary conditions only. An alternative interpretation is that causality proceeds in both directions of time. The usual interpretation is that the final point is merely one of many explored by the system until measurement occurs, after which the true final point is selected probabilistically. None of this requires sentience.
Quoting Yohan
It's very related, since there's a huge gap between the OP and your convincing.
Quoting john27
Occam's razor chooses the simplest explanation for the whole. Which is simpler?
1. Determinism.
2. Determinism + non-deterministic free will.
Since determinism itself is not being disputed here.
Also, Occam's razor is not an excuse to make stuff up. You could say everything is a goat, that's nice and simple, but counter to empiricism.
Well in terms of the predictability of humans and their choices, regarding the analysis of consciousness and thought I'd say 2. is simpler. Maybe consciousness and thought is predictable, but the amount of different variables one would need to make an accurate assessment is in my belief gigantic.
Just checking your arithmetic here. (2) consists of two things. (1) just one thing. To clarify, you're going on record that two things is simpler than one thing, yes?
If you feel like that, then yes. But where is this principle situated, and how does it determine? Is there some mad Principle Puppeteer directing processes with strings?
Yes, because in my belief non-deterministic free will is an organization of unknown material in a deterministic setting. In other words, it's not actually another thing, it's a subcategory of the first thing, a clarification of things, which would make it simpler.
So it'd be like saying, do you wanna hit the target or the bullseye? I'd say the bullseye.
And now brothers and sisters, let's hold hands, pray, and worship our Divine Creator, an... oops, wrong thread!
Could determinism not incorporate non-deterministic free will?
I did arrive wanting to believe in free will.
I still do, but can't. Free will doesn't appear to have any explanatory power.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Master and slave is a co-dependent relationship. If determinism rules all, then there must be an 'all' that is ruled. If I can be ruled, it implies I could also be free.
Edit: I don't 'think it makes sense for determinism to determine itself.
Edit 2: I don't believe there are things, laws, which exist separately from phenomena. Phenomena and laws are one and the same. Therefor everything happens "freely" but without a free will.
Well like kenosha kid said, it could involve the second law of thermodynamics. I don't really know though.
That would be exactly the same. All global systems show decreasing order, and local increments. That just happens. Is the system determined by this law? Only in the eye of the beholder, though it merely expresses the feeling of not knowing what is gonna happen, to compensate for it.
"Your actions are determined... whatever you might think or do..." Yeah yeah... My foot is determined, to arrive in your... eeehh... ear.
That's it! There is will only.
I comment determined.
Something feels off though. I think there is a determinism, in the sense of a harmony and order to the way things happen. So it's free but also determined. Just not determined in a master and slave sort of way.
The will even needs determinism. Without it it can't be determined. Which doesn't make it unfree or free. The will simply is. We are not subject to natural laws like slaves to masters indeed. Only other people can limit its freedom. Master and servant.
By definition, no. Determinism covers deterministic process only.
Quoting Yohan
Ah okay,I misunderstood sorry.
Quoting Yohan
Is it? The slave might seem to depend on the master feeding him and sheltering him, but only in the context of the slave's maximally restricted liberty. Remove the master and the slave is free, including free to obtain food and shelter by other, less criminally insane means. So off-topic now... :rofl:
Quoting Raymond
The trend in scientific history is that such laws derive from fewer, more fundamental laws. The principle of least action is not fundamental according to quantum field theory, but derives from systems exploring every possible path from the initial point to the final point and the interference effects across those paths (sum over histories). The second law of thermodynamics also reduces to quantum mechanics, in particular the concept of degeneracy. Perhaps there are other simplifications to be made. If the principle of least action and the second law of thermodynamics derive from the five postulates of QM, what is making those postulates manifest in reality? And so on...
How then can determinism verify itself? A deterministic view necessitates a first cause, does it not?
Well you were kinda right though. My bias was already in place so I kinda had my mind up to find an excuse for believing in free will.
Quoting Raymond
The question is like asking if the stomach has a free will to be hungry or is it determined to be hungry. I do wonder what is the right course of action for one who feels like a victim of the universe though. Is it wise to will freedom? Or better to let it go? But this is more a question of the good life / ethics than metaphysics.
Even if we are determined sums over histories, and if bound systems could be described non-perturbatively, or if some truly fundamental particles were found, do the laws of qft govern us? From where operate operators creating, destroying, or propagating? Is it not us doing this, wrongly assuming this happens in nature?
That's another question, I think. Is the stomach driven by external will or internal will? All will evolves. Some wills have a lust for power and constrain other forms of will. I think it's that what makes will free, not if they are determined by deterministic abstract entities apart from them, like a natural law or God.
Remove the master and there is no slave. Remove the slave and there is no master. They can't exist, as slaves or masters, without each other. Good grief of course nobody NEEDS someone to enslave them!
Determinism doesn't verify anything at all, it's not in assurance.
Quoting Raymond
Or something very like them, along with general relativity or something very like it, along with the particular boundary conditions of our universe. At least, the idea hasn't been contradicted, and has been verified in all conceived and possible tests (out of-the-gaps window of opportunity).
True. I cede the point intended. Although we're all slaves of, and none of us masters to, causality! :scream: Fatuous but technically on-topic :rofl:
Ok better put, how can determinism exist without a first cause?
Here's maybe a better analogy of my thoughts:
1. determinism
2. determinism -(minus) non deterministic free will
Hence, according to occam's razor choice one is more likely to be correct.
And probably eternal in both time directions. But... does this stuff determine us? Is our will determined by it? Is there a natural law keeping us by the balls. If you consider my wife a natural law, then yes. But a real existing law, like a god? Like genes playing puppeteers of our body, as I once saw depicted? This exists in the mind only.
Determinism isn't an event though. Effects need prior causes. Determinism doesn't. It fits more into the role of characteristic of nature (although see below). In particular, it appears to be a time-independent characteristic of nature, therefore not requiring a history. There's lots of questions we could ask about that. For instance, is it really time-independent, or could effects become decreasingly correlated with causes over time? Does the possibility of determinism necessitate this particular determinism (time-independent or -dependent), or could different universes with different boundary conditions have different determinisms, or even no determinism at all? None of these necessitate a _prior_ cause of a particular determinism, although perhaps an eternal inflation type picture could allow for something like the exact conditions of a big bang to dictate causality.
An alternative to no cause at all and prior cause is underlying causes, and that's where the scientific orthodoxy lies. My background is quantum theory but I have a minority view about it so I'll take care to separate popular beliefs and my own. Most quantum theories have some kind of probabilistic collapse or branching mechanism: causes are sufficient but not necessary conditions for their effects. Copenhagen ontologists believe that nature selects from _possible_ effects in a weighted but otherwise random way. Many worlds enthusiasts believe that all possible effects co-exist independently, with the more probable ones having greater contribution to the whole. In short, whenever you do quantum theory with only one (initial) temporal boundary condition, you end up with multiple effects for every cause and therefore nature is only backwards deterministic, i.e. every effect is fully explained by it's causes, but those causes don't fully explain the effect.
So then why does the macroscopic universe appear deterministic at all? The answer is... the principle of least action! Determinism is a statistically emergent quality in this sort of QM. Because each particle in the stone you throw in a vacuum has a tiny probability of being located a centimetre off its expected trajectory, the stone as a whole has a negligible probability of being found a centimetre off its expected trajectory. Effectively, when you sum over the histories for each particle being a centimetre off in the same way, most of those histories undergo destructive interference, meaning that the total probability of the stone as a whole going off course is so tiny you wouldn't expect to see it happen once in the entire history of the universe. It's not an impossibility, just an overwhelming likelihood that the principle of least action as we know it holds true.
In this way, no prior cause is needed for determinism, as it's an emergent characteristic from another, more fundamental version of the principle of least action (sum over histories, essentially the integration of action over all possible paths).
Another possibility is that final, as well as initial, boundary conditions of systems should be specified, i.e. that time flies backwards as well as forwards, in the same way that space spans left as well as right. In relativity theory, time and space are on equal footing, and thus it is my view we should solve the equations accordingly: two spatial boundaries per spatial dimension, two temporal boundaries for the time dimension. The results are more or less the same, except that determinism occurs more fundamentally.
Quoting Raymond
I have heard she's a force of nature :rofl:
A law isn't like a god, it's more like a track.
OK, but the second law of thermodynamics, is a practical view of determinism. Would then, the second law of thermodynamics necessitate a first cause?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I agree with you that determinism or this deeper fundamental law does not need a first cause in and of itself. However, It was in my belief that determinism does not determine the free will, it was the determinative aspect of the second law of thermodynamics, which does (or at least I think it does) need a supposed first cause to realize/become real. Therefore, determinism in its applicative aspect, does in some way necessitate a first cause.
Quoting Raymond
Let me separate that into two parts because a puppeteer is not only controling the puppets, it's doing so consciously, with volition and purpose. As I said before, that's a metaphor that can help but also hinder. Determinism does not suggest a godlike overseer anymore: that's what science has done for us.
So... 1) does determinism control us, dictate our decisions for us? and 2) does this determinism itself suggest some sentient higher power?
On 1), putting aside twisty exotic definitions of will designed to give a preferred answer and taking it to mean the decision to act in a particular way toward a desired end, yes, I'd say will itself necessitates determinism. Otherwise I could decide that, because I am hungry, I wish to eat the apple before me and therefore choose to chop off my right hand with an axe. It wouldn't make a lot of sense and I don't think we'd have gotten far as a species if we were apt to behave in this way. I might tell people that I want to eat the apple then choose to chop off my right hand in an extreme and misguided demonstration of my free will but then my chosen outcome is "demonstrate free will by chopping own hand off" not "sate my hunger".
I assume this is true for you, but when I make a decision it's based on various considerations. I haven't eaten many vegetables recently. I am worried about my health. So what shall I eat for dinner tonight? I really fancy a burger with pulled pork fries. But I know I need vegetables, and lots of them. I have multiple options for outcomes: joyous gluttony or healthy body, and the thing that will select between them is... me! That's a good definition of free will in my book. But is it deterministic?
Well how do I choose? Today I chose healthy: a tasty vegetable stir fry. Was this random? Would it even be will if it were? No, I chose healthy because currently I feel bad about Christmas gluttony and I knew that I'd like myself more for choosing vegetables. Also, I knew that I'd physically benefit from it. Plus, I had the vegetables, so all the barriers to making it are removed. I find I have no reason to eat unhealthily other than gluttony and that's a bad reason.
But a few days ago, I had a bacon and brie sandwich for breakfast. That's not healthy. I thought I was all about being healthy as the moment!!! But then again I had the bacon, the brie, the bread. I didn't have anything healthy for breakfast that I like eating. And I was making breakfast for three people. I'm not going to make them bacon and brie and deny myself, that's borderline martyrdom.
Both choices make sense in the light of my state and situation even though they seem practically schizophrenic, which is to say that there are reasons I whittled down my options from many to one in the particular way I did. If I had wanted burger and pulled pork fries a bit more, or if I'd been out of noodles, or if my partner had been home and said "I really fancy that burger tonight, how about you?" then the deterministic whittling would likely have gone in the other direction. Likewise if my partner had asked me to make her a caprese for breakfast the other day and we had some nice fresh basil, fat and firm beef tomatoes, and some light mozzarella, then I'd probably have eaten healthily then instead. These aren't demonstrations of non-determinism, quite the opposite: if I could have listed the important factors without actually making a decision, my decision could easily be predicted.
As for (2), no, none of this requires a puppeteer imo. I simply need to be in a particular state, which I always am, in a particular environment, which I always am, and with the mental apparatus to weigh factors and desired outcomes, which I have. A good demonstration of this is what happens when we have no basis to choose one outcome or course of action over another. Sartre writes about this in his Sketch of a Theory of Emotions. Under experimental circumstances, when subjects are forced to choose between equally unattractive options, something weird happens: they become irrationally angry. Sartre's theory, which I believe and recognise in myself, is that this sort of emotionally violent reaction is a psychological trick to get us out of rational deadlocks. If, in our current situation, there are no particularly good options, change the situation. Fuck shit up. By the end, there will typically be a least bad option (usually: clean up the mess you just made), at which point you calm down again.
I think this exemplifies the deterministic nature of will, the idea that we choose a over b because, after consideration of all factors, it is clear to us that a > b is made most evident in the edge cases where a = b.
It's difficult to imagine it. Whatever the initial conditions, whatever the strength of gravity, if you have a partioned box with gas in one side and a vacuum in the other, and you remove the partition, there are many more configurations where the gas occupies the whole box than where it stays in its original side, and one would expect this equilibrium to be attained after a while. This would suggest that it is independent of first causes.
It might be dependent on reference frame though. It's one I think about a lot and have started a thread on a while back, the relationship between the initial conditions of the universe (infinite order), the second law, and determinism. It's possible that thermodynamics is a hangover from the initial state of the universe (infinite order).
All that proves that external factors play a role, a big role, in your decisions.
I am thinking of it like a dance. Our dance partner influences our dancing. As does the music, dance floor, aesthetics of dance hall, etc. However, who chose all the stuff that makes up the dance hall? Whoever runs the place. But what influenced them to make all the choices? To a large extent, whatever is popular at the time. And who determines what is popular at the time? Is that not a collective "decision"? Eventually we can trace all factors back to the supposed big bang where everything supposedly came from. If that is the case, then we are all equally victims of the first cause. No external factor in the environment is necessarily stronger then the influence we contribute to the collective. Life is a co-creative process.
Huh.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
What's reference frame?
Dang. I want a refund. I don't remember reading being a slave to causality in the terms and conditions.:broken:
I'm not getting what you are saying makes will free. That it evolves? Sounds interesting.
It sounds about right, to me. Combine this with the fact that no other force, being, or object can be shown to cause or direct a person’s decisions but the person himself.
This is exactly what is done in the LAP. Two fixed positions in spacetime. It seems teleological in the sense that a particle seems to know the right path to choose. But it's us who vary the path, it's us who determine the track. It's not that the particle chooses it beforehand. more paths are in fact possible. With varying probabilities. The actual path in classical mechanics is one real history based on calculating the one with least action. For qft, all histories are actually existing, with various probabilities. But in both cases, for an actual situation, you calculate the histories a priori. Then afterwards you say the actual present history (yeah, right..., alas!), is determined by the principle, while it's actually determined by us.
Does determinism need a first cause? I think it does. At the BB singularity particles needed a first push to come in existence. Without such a first push, nothing could have come into existence.The initial pushes determined the subsequent development, which would result in life for a wide, maybe continuous and infinite set of initial conditions. Maybe these pushes were even determined by a previous big bang, where time has reached infinity (I tend to think that once the universe has accelerated away to infinity, this triggers a new big bang behind us). That's why, the initial conditions for a time reversed universe have to be infinitely precise, while these for the forward direction can be pretty carbitrary.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Dunno. The overseer seems necessary for the actual existence of the universe. If he oversees or determines initial conditions, or even intervenes is an open question, with different people having different answers.
Science has no answers and basically does the same as placing a god behind it, but in seemingly objective language. There simply are no principles governing us or the universe.
Processes are not isolated, and a stone thrown seems to move reversibly, without one being able to say which direction time goes. In reality, there exist practically no reversible processes. Is there really a track leading us? There is only one path! That's the path given to us by our Divine Creator! Praise His Name, and, brothers and sisters of the holy sanctuary, let's hold hands and pray rejoicefully to the Rightful and Wise, blissfully acknowledging to be grateful of the Golden Light He allows us to bathe in!
0Quoting Kenosha Kid
True random choices are impossible to make, I think, though I have a vague recollection of someone who claimed he had found a mental procedure, though I doubt now he was right.
The will is a determined one. Will can't exist without determination. Determination doesn't rob the will from its freedom. The determined action of a will can impair the will of fellow men though. It's in this context that we can speak of a free will, or a free wont.
Follow the same procedure. Ask them what their options and restrictions where, what factors were overwhelming at the time, how they justified choosing one option over another... Likely they'll know the answers, which is to say that, while they were the ones who had to whittle down all possibilities to a single course of action (what will does), there were reasons for the particular choices they made. On which:
Quoting Yohan
I am certain I have power over my life. I am the thing that deterministically does that whittling. I'm in the equation, making myself known. It wouldn't help my ego one iota to know that there was anything non-deterministic involved. I wouldn't be able to describe that and claim it for my own. It's essential to me that my decisions are as rational as possible or, if irrational, I can at least explain them in retrospect. This has all the qualities of free will I'd want to preserve, the bits that matter. The whole "could do otherwise" thing is just a nonsense that was never on the table in the first place. One can never "do otherwise". One can only "do". Do the do. Doop doop dewoop.
:rofl:
Quoting john27
So it might be the case that the thermodynamic arrow of time is local and appears to point in one particular direction from a particular point of view, specifically the point of view of intelligent creatures who need the second law in order to learn things (including the second law). This is a homocentric bias: we believe that the thermodynamic arrow of time is privileged because we have a psychological arrow of time derived from it.
Getting out of our own egos, there's no particular reason why the psychological arrow of time should privilege anything. It's just as reasonable to say that order increases with time, but we're just seeing it back to front. This is a frame of reference: we point the time arrow in a particular direction, but it could just as well be in the opposite direction (constituting a different frame of reference). We can already do the same thing with space. Your forward is not my forward.
I wrote about it at length here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/9506/cosmology-and-determinism
Note that this is merely illustrative, I'm not championing it, nor is it orthodox. The TL;DR version is that, yes, thermodynamics could be a consequence of the geometry of the universe, i.e.its initial and final conditions. In this curved space-time with time symmetry picture, there's no privileged ordering to events: an initial condition from one reference frame could be a final condition in another. As such, one could imagine many such boundaries, not just two.
But yes, essentially, thermodynamics could be caused by boundary conditions.
Quoting Agent Smith
The shortest route between A and B is not always the most efficient. There may be other factors that can be applied to evaluate efficiency. One of them is "cost". If we travel from Italy directly to London by plane may cost more than through Germany. The direct way can be called "time-efficient" and the indirect one "cost-efficient". So, if we mind more about the cost of travel than how long it takes, its more efficient to take the indirect route. Other criteria can be "quality", "pleasure", etc.
So, if I am not wrong, you tried to prove the existence of free will based on human inefficiency. Yet, the above examples I gave are better, I think, than inefficiency. The willingness to apply personal criteria of efficiency and decide on a different way than the default, easiest or shorter way to a destination or end purpose, is a better proof of free will than following the shorter, easier, safer, more comfortable or common path.
I see what you're saying, but it's not like a hydrogen atom is figuring out the frequency it should oscillate at: it is constrained to aim toward a particular frequency by purely physical behaviour. That said, the best computer you could design for modelling the universe exactly would be... the universe. You could think of it that way.
More to the point, hydrogen is (not) figuring out what frequency to oscillate at whether we know what that frequency is our not, whether anything figures it out or not. I detect a desire here to see teleology in everything, but it's simply not justified. In the case of specifying initial and final boundaries, it's not like one is actualised and the system has to know how to reach the other. Rather there is a 4D worldline that is actualised as a whole, and we just experience one before the other. The system doesn't need to "know" either boundary, rather it's entire history is predicated on both.
Quoting Raymond
But again what you're describing here is sequences of events related by an overarching character of determinism, not the birth of determinism per se. In our local view, there's no 'before' the big bang to cause determinism. We'd need to be able to look at other universes to get a picture of whether determinism is optional or variable and we can't. It's not only perfectly viable but very likely that determinism is the same in all universes (if there are multiple) and even a characteristic of the multiverse, putting it well outside of time's domain, whether that's the statistically emergent determinism of QM or some harder, fixed version as per my view.
Quoting Raymond
In reality, almost all elementary processes are reversible. That was the point of departure for the thread I linked to in my previous post.
Quoting Raymond
:up: :lol: I like free won't.
If you are honest, then I wonder how the hell you determined going to a philosophy forum is "as rational as possible."
That's like someone saying they care about good hygiene while covered in trash.
Or like someone who claims they want to know God while at the same time being religious.
That's exactly what I say. It's us trying to figure out what history occurs by trying to calculate them all and assign them probabilities according to a principle. I don't think the universe computes all these different histories, assigns them complex probabilities, and ?ets these interfere. All these procedures are human inventions, not truly present in nature. That's only what we project. You could think of it that way, and that leads to the idea of a track being present.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Well, in theory all processes are time reversible. Just reverse all motion present in the system... in practice this needs quite some effort, and the means you reverse all motion with go forward in time. You can mentally reverse all motion, but in practice this is not possible, and it's the reason time is irreversible. Processes could run in reverse though. If all motion would be magically reversed (evolution of the wavefunctions, collapses, expansion of space, spin), a time reversed universe is seen. Wavefunction evolution is not reversible in time though, and collapse would still occur, so even if the reversed process is possible, the reversed evolution of the wavefunction is not, as collapses are not reversed in superpositions. In practice, reversed processes can only occur if the momenta are reversed, and this can only be done in the bigger context of larger irrerversible processes, and an accidental reversal can also only occur in such a larger process, because else the whole had to reverse in its entirety, which obviously cannot happen.The funny thing is though that it are fundamental processes that are asymmetric in time. The weak force is involved here, as the weak force is left right asymmetric. Some particles (quark anti quarks) are CP asymmetric and thus T reversal shows a different partice, and time reversal can be identified. Somehow, space asymmetry necessitates a form of time asymmetry.
Quoting Yohan
I'll give it a try. The academic approach to free will or wont is that their freedom is taken away by reference to a natural law, be it a statistical one, like QM, or a deterministic variant of it. In both cases the will seems to be "a victim" of determinism, be it a determined wave function with associated probabilistic collapse, or even a deeper deterministic substrate. It is claimed that the will is somehow the slave of deterministic or probabilistic processes, which denies the notion of a free will.
But how can an evolving process be "determined" by initial and boundary conditions or natural laws? Only if we litterally impose boundary or initial conditions, and project a natural law into it, it makes some sense to say the process is determined. But we can't impose these conditions into the inside of the process. Mentally we can project forces into the process and call these forces the determining entity. These forces though are caused by internal charges. These charges and forces are part of the process and the only thing really determining the process is the will inside it. There is a will even in two charged particles interacting, though I'm stepping her off the beaten track. The dynamics of charged particle fields is not determined by gauge fields but by the will particles have to interact. Physicists call this will charge. Because of this charge (its nature is not understood, not even by string theory, which shifts the problem of charge to vibrational modes of strings, which makes one wonder what causes this vibration) interaction occurs. The charge in a sense pushes the the particle fields, by means of gauge fields. Which is to say, we view it that way. We consider gauge fields the fields causing the dynamics of particle aggregates but can say just as well that the will, the mental, or however you call it, the cause of the dynamics. Two magnets pushing or pulling one another somehow seem to have a will.
Larger, more complicated processes, with complex structured charges moving, like charges running around on the neurons of our brain, involve more complex forms of will inside the body, like charge and colored charges in quarks and leptons or two even more fundamental particles. These charged contents constitute the will and consciousness and the freedom of this will can be constrained by other forms of will.
The will, or consciousness or charge, are not caused, nor do they cause. The will is an inherent property of nature, and so are charge and consciousness. The will can influence other processes. People have a will with eyes to see, ears to hear and mouths to scream. They have the great, and at the same time scary possibility to reign over the will of other people, the will to power. The will simply is, not determined but determined, not caused but causing.
So we are just charged bodies with faces, arms and legs to excercise our will, and an uncanny ability to direct our fellow beings in thought, action and story.
Great story...That's all it is, a bedtime lullaby... :cool:
:up: And...
Quoting Kenosha Kid
You mentioned the 2[sup]nd[/sup] law of thermodynamics
Quoting NOS4A2
It's just a vague idea of mine. I'm glad that it made sense ro you, assuming you weren't being sarcastic.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
As you can see, it all depends on keeping one of the many variables involved at a minimum. In your example, either time or cost, if possible both, must be kept as low as possible. That's why I used the principle of least action to make the case for free will. The point is we can take an unreasonable course of action - prolong our journey and pay a hefty sum - and that's what I feel is free will at work.
It's not unreasonable if it's what I feel (determined) I really want. We are not going to take a vote on what I "should" choose. I can be "determined" by influences that you don't approve of.
Why isn't it unreasonable? Do you mean everything is reasonable?
They are determined not to follow and suffer the resistance anymore. The path they followed in life was one of maximum resistance, not least.
Right, as far as time and cost are concerned. But we may want the opposite --increase the criterion to a maximum-- as in the example of "quality" and "pleasure". However, maximums can certainly create problems. E.g. drinking. That's why they also require setting llimits, whereas minimums don't.
Quoting Agent Smith
Right. That's why I mentioned setting "limits". Anyway, the essential point is that acting based on setting, deciding on and applying any criterion for any action is enough to prove the existence of free will.
That's why I can't see how can a large part of "thinking" people maintain that there's no free will!
More than that I'm afraid. Nature, I was told, is lazy.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Limits are restrictions, restrictions are imposed, imposed implies absence of, not presence of, freedom.
Easy. The desired outcome was: discuss philosophy with people more knowledgeable about it than me. The chosen course of action -- to visit a philosophy forum -- was the optimal one.
Quoting Raymond
Well it's still all to play for, but by my reckoning, if it diffracts like a wave and it interferes like a wave, it's a wave. That's not to say the science is exact, but it would be weird if it was far from the truth given the sheer amount of testing it's undergone.
Quoting Raymond
At a macroscopic scale it's nigh on impossible because of pesky thermodynamics. But elementary processes are almost all reversible. A thing moving from A to B is a physical process. Reverse the footage: it moves from B to A, also a physical process. Atom A emits a photon which is absorbed by atom B. Reverse the footage: atom B emits a photon which is absorbed by atom A, an identical physical process. Throw a ball in a vacuum from point A, it follows a parabolic trajectory and lands at point B. Reverse the footage, and it follows a parabolic trajectory from point B to A. Same goes for strong and most weak forces.
The only weird one is particle decay. Most are reversible: neutron decay and electron capture, proton decay and positron capture, pair creation and annihilation.
Quoting Agent Smith
You think that the 2nd law is antiscientific new age guff? Or was a rofl emoji warranted there?
What I meant to say was that the so-called laws of nature are such that they always tend to keep one/two variables at a minimum - nature's lazy. Humans, though sloth is sin we're all guilty of, can be, let's just say, extravagant to a point that makes zero sense in re the laws of nature (laziness).
I don't get that ... Example?
Quoting Agent Smith
No, no. I am referring to the limits/restictions selected and applied by ourselves. Hence, free will.
Example: I set a limit for time of 2 hrs, a limit for cost of 1,000 euros. I decide that freelly and willingly.
Quoting Agent Smith
Oops.
OK
Of course. The physicist wants his quarks and leptons (or subs within them, to which muon g2 anomaly seems to hint) to be real. What's thought real or not varies and there is, especially nowadays, no consensus, not even for the fundamental, what the right picture is.
Yes. If you reverse basic processes, you can't tell if time goes forward or backward. I don't think though that the absorption of a photon is the reversed process of absorption. The absorption involves a different photon state as the emitted photon. So one can see the difference. Or not?
What about the evolution of the wave function? Reversing motion will still produce collapse. Collapse is insensitive to time reversal. Still, if you reverse the movie of a collapse, a superposition magically appears.
I'd say the delay in finishing the project is not due to not taking the shortest route most directly and efficiently. It is because the man, the person, the mind, is taking care of more than one project at any given time. These projects compete for the attention of the individual. Much like as if there were several rivers, and one had to run between all of them, lifting gates to let the flow go, and then putting the gate back before running over to another river to lift ITS gate.
The person must prioratize his projects. Random events also thwart him. I think his responses to the priority-building and attending to unplanned activities necessary to attend to will make him get delayed in the project of the main, but it's not due to lack of efficiency, but due to lack of available attention.
My explanation does not exclude or include postively the determnistic approach or else the religious one. My explanation just shows you why the river gets to flow uninterruptedly, and why the project is still under deterministic build, despite the stoppages on the work of the protject.
This thought experiment here is ill conceived because causality is NOT derived from physics. It is presupposed by physics. The principle of least action is just a variant of the principle of sufficient cause, which is apodictic.
If you want to go after freedom, you have to look at how the things work: long story short, we live most of our lives unfree, that is, bound to the processes of living that are part of our existence's structure: the working, cooking, driving, making plans, and so on--these are not "freely" done. They are done without any second order of thought at all, robotically, if you will, automatically, no more free than my finger hitting the right key while typing. Invisibly done, as an act of instinct: it occurs independently of a free will, even if there is such a thing.
But stop typing, because there is a disfunction, and now you have to attend to this, and now you are "free" of the automatic process. Now pull back from the entire living process of rote activities, allow none to possess your attention. Now you are in a rare state of mind, open, and when a thought does occur, you dismiss it, for thoughts are agencies of control.
You are free, are you not?
I'll agree that there are hierarchies of ontology. I don't _believe_ in quarks the way I believe in houses. But it's not just a case of wanting. By that logic, it's equally sensible that something that diffracts and interferes isn't a way, which is linguistically incoherent.
Quoting Raymond
Absorption backward is emission, and vice versa.
Quoting Raymond
Collapse is irreversible, for sure. But probably not real. (Fight! Fight! Fight!) Another aspect is the thermodynamics of the evolution of the wavefunction: its dispersion. If you measure a particle, it has a very localised wavefunction. As time progresses, it spreads out. It never does the opposite.
I can always say that you see quarks because you only belive in them (personally I believe in two even smaller particles and find the believe in elementary quarks and leptons contrived but justified). The believe system of sciences is based on the existence of one objective reality to be explored by us interacting and theorizing. The reality is usually defended by stating that it's a succesful approach. Throw your notion of success and of one reality only overboard and quarks dissappear from the scene. Usually it is replied then that quarks still exist but you just close your eyes to them by. Here I disagree. That's the same as saying God exists no matter if you believe or not. Of course, for people believing in quarks (like me, but not as basic entities), quarks are real. Though the are pretty far removed from daily existence and they show themselves under pretty strict experimental conditions. When quarks were introduced in the sixties it took another 10 years to prove their existence and Feynman didn't believe in them, though he believed in partons. The pre-quark world of hadrons and mesons was completely different from the world of quarks, with a different experimental practice.
But what spreads out? If it spreads out it can collapse.
I'm not sure I understand. Something isn't a way? And why is it a bad thing that something is linguistically incoherent? I can say that I see, interact, with quarks, make triplets and duals of them collide and still say they are not real, however incoherent that might be. The incoherency stems from your concept of reality. If you base that on being able to grab it, then it's incoherent, if not, then it's coherent.
All I can say at the moment is this:
[quote=Albert Einstein]The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible.[/quote]
[quote=Neil deGrasse Tyson]The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.[/quote]
Whatever Tyson was talking about, it's obvious that the universe, save quantum physics, makes sense as in it behaves in ways that a sensible, intelligent being would: It not only does things - a pebble being smoothened in a river bed to galactic revolutions - it does it elegantly...as if the universe were itself a being of genius intellect (pantheism).
Humans though can be and, sometimes, are idiots!
Therein lies the rub.
The quark model (and it is just a model) is based on empiricism, not belief. Believing the model to be a high-fidelity representation of reality is, yes, a belief. But the word itself is a label for a hypothetical set of values of conserved properties. The credibility of that model is based on its predictions matching empirical data. We do not "see quarks". We see the world acting as if it is partly comprised of quarks. So the utility you wish to "throw overboard" is empiricism, which is a call to ignore facts in favour of... what? How we'd like the world to be?
Quoting Raymond
Beliefs are irrelevant, beyond that manifest in the requisite confidence that an experiment is worth paying for. Newton didn't believe in quarks either, nor did Einstein, because the concept didn't exist. Ad hominem has no place here. The only questions are: 1) does this predict new or previously unexplained phenomena?, 2) does this contradict empirical facts? Beliefs come _after_, not before.
Quoting Raymond
Assuming collapse is a thing. But to answer your question, the spatial distribution of the wavefunction spreads out over time. It's just thermodynamics again: if you put the wavefunction in a highly ordered state (measure its position), it will tend toward a less ordered state (spread out).
Quoting Raymond
Autocorrect, sorry. "... isn't a wave". A wave by definition is a thing that interferes and diffracts. Electrons interfere and diffract. Positing that electrons aren't waves is therefore gibberish (unless you reject the empirical fact that electrons interfere and diffract).
I see what you mean. I think though, that the scientific approach, the empirical approach involving setting up experiments, watch what's going on, report the fidings, and theorize about it is a belief an Sich. If I don't believe in this approach (I do though), then one can say whatever they want about quarks and leptons, they existing whatever I think about them, but if I don't belief in the approach, or if I don't value it, the quarks will be non-existing for me.
About absorption and emission. Isn't the emitted photon different from the absorbed? A creation and destruction operator are applied in asymptotically free perturbative approach, and can't be applied to a bound system like an atom. The photon absorbed is a different one than the emitted one. Only in Compton scattering they can be interchanged, so it looks. Do you agree with this?
Or rather ought to say nothing. Conserved quantities themselves are in fact just statements about the apparent behaviour of the world (empiricism). Quarks are just sets of these quantities. Throwing out empiricism and therefore science ought to delete the concept altogether.
Quoting Raymond
No, I've never heard the idea before nor know how to make sense of it. In fact, I tend to go the other, more phenomenological, way. The _least_ we can say about the photon is that it is the transfer of a set of conserved quantities from one system to another, in this case energy, momentum, and angular momentum. Whether it exists in the space-time between those events is debatable (photons are clicks in photon detectors). But if it does, as it is assumed to do, it's a worldline (or rather many worldlines: sum over histories) between its creation and destruction (plus a load of other worldlines that disappear if you believe in collapse, which I don't).
Compton scattering is a destruction of a photon that necessitates the creation of a different photon by a charge that is excited but must immediately de-excite. So on the contrary that's a description of two different photons, not the same one.
Quoting Agent Smith
The obvious counterexample comes from Einstein himself. One can understand relativity, which is what Einstein meant, but there's nothing intuitive about light having the same speed regardless of whether and how fast you're moving toward or away from it, or that one twin could be years older than another. These are not phenomena that manifest in the day-to-day world and most people (who aren't Einstein) have great difficulty wrapping their heads around it. This is why equations and diagrams are essentially, but they are still abstract to intuition, building upon lots of simpler knowledge via analogy.
Common sense, intuition, and generally what our brains are equipped to deal with, is extremely limited to what happens or appears to happen here on Earth where we live and evolved. It is not equipped to understand what happens on the cosmological scale or the subatomic scale, inside black holes or outside spacetime itself.
Nutso theories that turn out to be true, like molecular theory, germ theory, atomic theory, are things that are already long-accepted in the world we, our parents, and our grandparents were already born into. They are, in that sense, normalised. Relativity is (ahem) relatively normalised, though you'll still find plenty of people on here who think it's pseudoscientific gibberish. We lack a way of explaining quantum theory to lay people as youngsters that would normalised it in the same way.
When Feynman says "You don't understand quantum theory, you just get used to it," he doesn't mean the lay person, he means quantum theorists. Lay people are still far from being "used to" quantum theory in the way they are "used to" atomism. Neither are intuitive, but one of them had a good story. If and when quantum theory has a good story, people will get "used to" it, and think they "understand it". Quantum theorists may get to actually "understand it" in the way they understand relativity (a prerequisite of coming up with a good story to normalise it). (Btw, before the inevitable accusations of elitism and knowledge siloing, there's no barrier to a lay person becoming a quantum theorist beyond putting in the reading time.)
Brains aren't magic or divine. They evolved on Earth to solve problems on Earth. The notion of setting a gold standard for theory on the basis of amenability to intuitive understanding is extremely myopic and has nothing to do with how we really (claim to) understand science beyond the mundane. Layers of analogy down to intuitive ideas are key, not intuitive ideas themselves.
What I meant was that the emission of a photon produces a different photon field configuration as the field used for for exciting an atom. If you excite the electron around the nucleus you use the same photon, of course, but the field emitted looks different than that of a photon coming from it. The photon emitted has a different probability wave associated with it than an incoming photon we shoot at it or that is just impinging with the right frequency and right angular momentum. You can distinguish between the two photon fields. Only in, say, Compton scattering (real photon and electron mediated by virtual electron), the proces is symmetric wrt to time). So it's is simply because the real photon in absorption is not the same as in emission. The both have inversed effect. Energy taken away and given. The excited atom is the same before emission and after absorption. But a ground state absorbing a photon and getting excited is a different process than an excited state emitting a photon and getting silent. The processes are each other reverses, off course. But if you would measure all emitted photons of spontaneous emission of a single atom fixed in space, the distribution would be different from the distribution of photons you use to excite. You can use wavepackets to excite, but wavepackets are not emitted (the photon emitted is spherical symmetric). Well, it's difficult to imagine what really happens, but the state of the emitted photon is different from an absorbed one. A transition of an electron from an excited state to a lower one gives rise to a dipole state. This state can be used again to excite other electron states, but generally the exciting photon does not find itself in such a neat state. The emitted photon has the same energy and angular momentum as the absorbed one. But energy states are degenerate, and both states are energy degenerate but different. As long as the energy and angular momentum are as wished, the atom will get excited. If only it were that easy with my wife... :smile:
Dunno. Isn't light exactly the kind of thing you can't imagine to stand still?
You can't see though what direction time goes. For absorltion/,emission both photons have the same energy and angular momentum but their states differ. In CS, both photons have different momenta but these can be interchanged.
You can tell by looking at absorption or emission what direction light goes, by looking at CS you can't.
I don't know what you're trying to say (and I have read on). What is the difference here between a "photon" and a "photon field configuration"? If they mean the same thing, you can just say "photon". Or if you mean the wavefunction, just say "wavefunction". If you mean the state of the EM field, there's only one field, not different fields for emission and absorption.
You say:
Quoting Raymond
What's emitted is a photon, an excitation of the EM field caused by the de-excitation of the atom, in particular a self-sustaining one (as opposed to virtual photons also excited in the EM field by the presence of electric charges). What's absorbed is that same photon in the example I gave. I'm not following your terminology well enough to be more surgical in my response.
Quoting Raymond
Yes, it too is a reversible process.
Quoting Raymond
What does this mean? State is what is described by the wavefunction. This can be cast as a sum of eigenstates of some measurement operator like the Hamiltonian (the energy operator). Different states can have the same energy, but they have different other properties: momentum (positive and negative have same energy), and angular momentum. But the momentum and angular momentum absorbed are also the same as that emitted. It's the same photon.
The _wavefunction_ will be different at absorption to emission, but that doesn't mean it's a different photon: wavefunction are time-dependent.
Again, I'm not following your terminology well enough to know exactly what to say.
THe state of the emitted photon, the superposition of fixed momenta fields in Fock space, is a different one that the superposition of states for the absorbed photin. The proces just isn't a proces like that in two interacting assymptotically free states as in QFT, where the incoming and outgoing photons are free. And as you said, the basic interactiins in QFT are time reversible. Absorption and emission are not.
You just can't produce the same photon to use for absorption as the one created by emission. The emitted photon and absorbed one might have the same energy and angular momentum though. The emitted photon has a unique state, while the absorbed can have a wide variety. In CS, both photons are unique and can be interchanged.
We are doomed! But the wavefunction emitted has a different form as the one impinging. Try to construct a wavefunction of a photon that gets absorbed so it looks the same as the emitted one but time reversed, and direct it to the atom...you can't. Sorry... :razz:
Thanks sir. Its hard for me to read though. I am impatient to read longwinded explanations.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Fair enough good sir
It seems basically to reduce to charge inside matter.
Indeed. But the wavefunction coming of an electron orbital has a different shape as a localized wavepacket. If we consider the case of an atom in an excited state which emits a photon by jumping to a lower energy state, most often it will be an electric dipole transition. The impinging wf is a localized wavepacket, in general. Both have the same average energy. But they are different and not each other's image reversed in time. Both states in CS have different energies but are the same under time inversion.
In reciprocal space (momentum space) the wavefunction does not disperse but converge. Momentum values converge to a well-defined value, while position gets more and more dispersed. If the wavefunction has dispersed all over space, the uncertainty in momentum is zero. The space derivative of the wavefunction is zero everywhere, if fully dispersed. So the uncertainty in momentum goes to zero.
In general when thinking about free will it is helpful to consider robots. You can program a robot to always move up hill. Does this constitute a proof of free will of the robot?
The will of the robot is not free. You have subjected its will to the will of the programmer, who pushes a structure of ones and zeroes through a structured circuit by means of a programmed sequence of stored ones and zeros at the rhythm of a the computer clock. The robot is then pushed up by means of basic will processes, which means, electrically charged processes that cause motion. So the will of the robot is in fact directed by the will of the programmer. It is a determined will, like all will, but not free, like unforced determined will, because the will is determined by the programmer.
If you ask logical sensible answers the universe will answer accordingly. At the same time it can make no sense at all. No law to be discovered. How can the universe be "goverened" by laws? That's merely a way of us to objectivize our knowledge and arises from our longing to govern. By saying that the laws govern, it's actually us who want to govern, by knowledge of these so-called laws. Knowledge is power. Like God was thought to govern and the chosen ones close to Him claimed power in His name. It can't be denied that both God and laws of nature exist. But they don't govern. That happens only in our minds.
I'm not sure I get what you mean here. At absorption to emission? What do you mean? The wavefunction at absorption is a different wavefunction than emission, yes. And a photon is a photon, yes. Both have the same energy yes. The proces of absorption, excitation, and emission is asymmetric in time though. The photon that's absorbed has a different accompanying wavefunction than the emitted one. So if you reverse the "scene" you will be able to see in which direction time flows, as the shapes of both wavefunctions are different. For example, if the wavefunction of the absorbed phòton is a wavepacket localized in space, and the emitted one has a dipole pattern, the process is asymmetric. You can't reverse the dipole configuration (shape) of the wavefunction. So, leaving dispersion aside (which is asymmetric in time) you can actually see if time goes forward or backwards, which means absorption and subsequent emission is an irreversible process (of course you can use a new photon to excite the atom again). Which doesn't mean that absorption and emission don't share a photon with the same energy. And off course, emission can be reversed by absorption or absorption by emission, like an open door can closed and opened. But it's asymmetric in time and the very process is not reversible.
And, again, only the process of a photon scattering with an electron is one of the few processes that actually can be reversed without being able to see in what direction time goes.
If the evolution of the wavefunction in space is a dispersive process then doesn't that mean that that evolution can't be reversed in time?
Right, which also holds for quantum theory, a thoroughly logical, mathematical theory but that is intractable for macroscopic systems, hence why a) people don't get it, and b) we can't answer macroscopic questions with it. Quantum theory doesn't want for mathematical foundations: it wants for a compelling narrative for human minds.
Well said! :up:
Now I lost my train of thought. Anyway, the point is humans can do idiotic stuff, there's nothing remotely stupid about the universe. Between these two (human folly & nature's genius), there's room enough for free will (determinism is intelligent but humans aren't; we try to be, but we aren't)
There are patterns, which suggest determinism, in human thought but these are not all-encompassing i.e. there are exceptions. Most do this or that but some don't fit in - it seems our free will is, in some sense, a matter of how odd, how unique, how noncomformist, how contrarian we are.
Even your oddness, uniqueness, non-conformity, and contrariness, are completely determined. Is it your desire to be unique that doesn't like determinism?
That's one of issues I've been troubled by: heads you win, tails I lose.
Even the heads and tails are determined. Unpredictable maybe but determined.
Then what's the problem?
They don't have much free will. We don't want them to have much free will -- they can cause enough trouble just by following certain determined behaviors, like their need to chew. Like their ability to win at "Catch me if you can", as one chases them when they have gotten off the leash.
What is true of dogs is true for cats, chickens, cows. crows, et al. Not too much invented behavior.
The BIG question is "How much of this characterization of animals applies to us, as well?"
Some, for sure. We do have at least a substantial range of behavior autonomy and invention. But we also have more determined behaviors (like the cartoon). The many truisms or adages about human behavior that we say, like "Be careful how you talk to yourself when you are dealing with a big problem. You can make things better or worse by feeding yourself the right or wrong messages."
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." (Leo Tolstoy). Social workers see the same bad results from bad habits, bad behaviors, bad choices, etc. all the time.
In my opinion, people are more alike than they are different. That's not about free will; it's about how we predictably respond to certain stimuli, even if we do have free will.
Animals are slaves to their drives - on occasion I've seen dogs hesitate (almost as if they were asking "should I take that?") when offered a treat, but, invariably, they eat anything dog-edible dangled in front of them.
Humans, distinctively, can say "no" (it looks painful, it must be) to even a million dollars, offered no strings attached. This unqiue ability of humans to refuse/reject even the most attractive of deals is, to me, a marker of some degree of freedom of will. Dogs can't do that; we, on the other hand, can (resist our deeply-ingrained instincts)!
Schopenhauer claimed that though we can do what we want, we can't want our wants; true as that may be, we can, at the very least, refuse to comply to our unchosen wants.
Some might claim that this means nothing at all and that instances of denial of our deepest urges is simply one irresistable compulsion getting the better of another. That's possible of course, but imagine that such urges/wants/instincts are arranged in such a way that none of them wield absolute power (think rock-paper-scissors) over us. We're free so long as our instincts/urges/wants are at odds with each other (think of ourselves as people free to the extent our so-called leaders are bickering about who gets to sit on the throne).
After a walk with the dog I tried to leash her for the walk home. She didn't wanted me to do so and ran towards a guy on the footpath. She barked fully-fledged at the poor man. I tried to divert her with yelling and throwing a stick, but she was determined to scare the hell out of him. I know she barks only but the guy didn't agree. A dog should always be kept on a leash. Whatever. Doggy continued her murder spree and attacked a small child on a bike, on the bikepath along the foothpath. Instinctively, the child kept static. I tried in vain to keep the dog away, while the child's father arrived on the scene, riding a bike with two children in a bin on the front. Of course he got as mad as the dog, trying to protect his child. I think the dog did exactly the same. She is young and wanted to show her protective nature towards me. More bikers arrived. Cursing, complaining, and yelling they would return with their vicious dogs to teach doggy a lesson or put her down. I got damned emotional, yelled at doggy and smashed a stick on the stone path. Father even told me not to beat! That made me even more emotional and I yelled at him to not even suggest I beat doggy. Doggy continued barking and only when I threw a stick and ran back on the field we came from, she left the scene behind me.
An exemplary situation of free will. No doubt the word gets spread that an aggressive dog accompanies an equally aggressive guy! Luckily it's barking only. It took me about an hour to leash doggy. Typical case of barking free will.
I think this is somewhat overly linear thinking. The brain, the unconscious side of it, is teachable. It's not a blank slate, but it can relearn priorities and associations. What is a heroin addiction if not an acquired want (that is, contrary to Schopenhauer, very easily chosen and very difficult to say no to)? But less extreme, habit is an acquired want. I don't care about football and don't want to know who has acquired who for what price with what merit, but it's very easy to imagine making myself care, to the point where I feel I must find out. Nerds are bundles of acquired wants.
Now that I think of it, it's actually the other way round.
We had/have free will (our ancestors were inefficiency personified - expending more energy than necessary was the usual deal, and so on).
With the advent of science, and its attempts to emulate nature's efficiency, we're becoming, in a sense, as mindlessly efficient as nature herself i.e. we're losing our freedom to waste energy. We've become calculating machines, figuring out the shortest path, one of least resistance, between two points, very much what an inanimate object would do if left to its own devices.
We want to become machines/robots. Taoism (go with the flow) i.e. the world is becoming sinicized.
Art - superfluous, unnecessary, and extravagant, add stupid to that list, in terms of energy - is an expression of our free will.
How so?
You know how so.