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NarroNow t1_irnjk7n wrote

Reply to comment by SunnyNickname in Quantum philosophy: 4 ways physics will challenge your reality by ADefiniteDescription

Apologies up front for a wall of text.

Yup. Love the rabbit hole.

So many good sources of info.

Sabine H. explained observation so my brain could grasp it... fascinating stuff.

We humans somehow distinguish ourselves from the universe... but we're all the same stuff.

I wrote this a while back. Help me refine it, if you want. Poke holes as you see fit. All good.

So, to be fair to Dr. Harry V. Cliff, here is the full quote: "Based on the laws of physics, I don't see how there can be free will. To be clear, the universe doesn't appear to be deterministic - quantum mechanics tells us that the future is unknowable - we can only ascribe probabilities to outcomes. But that doesn't mean there's any room for free will. There is no way to decide the outcome of a quantum event, it just happens according to probabilities, so how could you ever make a genuine choice?"

Other thoughts re: free will which are rolling in my head (my glib guesstimations) on the topic, with quantum mechanics floating around in the back of my mind...

I think it is fair to view having free will as a 1 or a 0. You have it, or you don't. There's no in-between. Even if you have only a tiny bit of free will, the switch is flipped and the free will light turns on, albeit possibly burning very dimly. 1 or a 0.

Can we assume that with free will, that there arrives a point where your brain makes a choice?

For example. two cups are placed in front of you, under a veil. One is a color you like (red), and one is a color you hate (yellow). You get to make a choice and pick up the one you prefer when the veil is lifted. So, when the veil is lifted, you see the cups, process which one you like, and reach for the red cup. Free will, right?

But, barring about a thousand other logical reasons/discussions discussed on the web related to free will's why/why not, I like to focus more on a quantum aspect.

Think you and I agree that we, with our free will, have zero control over the probablistic outcomes of subatomic particles. Nothing we can do about it.

Earlier, /u/DoodDoes stated: Quantum particles are the silt, Subatomic particles are the sand, atoms are the pebbles, molecules are the stones, you are the riverbed in which they lie. Quantum mechanics dictate everything about you, because you are made of quantum particles. If something like quantum tunneling or entanglement does impact our consciousness, the impact is either unnoticeable or is incorporated into the intended function of us. Atoms having charges and being effected by waves of all sorts in the electromagnetic spectrum are both things that impact our ability to think and also our proclivity to age. but atoms only do things because subatomic particles do things, and subatomic particles only do things because quantum particles do things. (love it).

We've got roughly 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms in a human body, all doing what they do as a result of quantum interactions, and the interactions can result in ungodly energy state changes (the typical vibrational frequencies range from less than 1013 Hz to approximately 1014 Hz), per second. All of which we have zero control.

The sheer amount of subatomic interactions, atomic vibrations, etc is so fast that if we were to view human activity from a subatomic perspective of time, humans would appear frozen for years.

So, while you may see your snap decision to pick the red cup as free will, changing that 0 to a 1, in that fraction of a second (to you), an incalculable amount of matter interactions has occurred over which you possess zero control.

You are never in control of these interactions. Never.

"you" aren't even you.

the amalgamation of gray matter you call a brain is telling you that you are "you", and it is just a part of everything, doing what it does. quantum particles doing things.

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DoodDoes t1_irnvo2h wrote

I’m not sure if there are holes to poke so much as this is currently a field where unfalsifiable hypotheses are easy (for theoretical physicists) to come up with. I don’t think the probabilistic nature of quantum particles excludes the possibility of either free will existing or not existing. For example: either you placed your chips on the wrong bet in roulette or the ball landed in the wrong slot on the board. Both are based in probability and it’s really impossible to tell if the ball was always going to land there, or if you were always going to put your chips there, or both, or neither. That however is where I would disagree with the “‘you’ aren’t even you” sentiment, because at the very least you were there to observe it. It doesn’t matter that in actuality it’s just a bunch of oxygen and nitrogen atoms moving along a temperature gradient, it’s still the wind. And it doesn’t matter if on a quantum scale you are just a flow of quantum particles that are bottlenecked at what you call a mouth only to be temporarily stored and expelled, you are still you.

I like to think of it like sailing: you can’t control the direction of the wind, but you can move the sails. On a certain level that is not an entirely random event because you are making decisions that will benefit yourself, but on another level even with free will you only reacted to the wind because you knew what to do based on what the wind was doing. Even still I would consider self preservation and altruism to be “proofs” of free will, because in a situation where the two choices are to fight for life or blindly accept death nearly everyone chooses to fight. And if serving yourself was just a probabilistic likelihood then that would be a cascade of factors leading to apparent decision making. Maybe you didn’t have any options other than fight the wind or be swept out to sea, but either way you can still choose to do the Macarena while reciting Shakespeare. And if that’s not free will then it doesn’t matter much, because the universe just so happened to make it likely which is good enough for me

Also I didn’t state the silt, sand, pebbles thing just today, just to say. This must have been copy and pasted from a while back. Iirc the original post was about how quantum particles change what we think

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NarroNow t1_iroh1kx wrote

Thanks for this. Your insight very much appreciated!

Sorry, the "just today" was from an earlier post I made (correct the time time).

I'll fix it.

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