I am worried that some of what I have always believed to be my freely made
decisions may actually result from physical processes in my brain which are
either, on the one hand, completely random, or on the other hand, entirely
deterministic (even if intractably complex). I don't think it is fair that I
should be held accountable for such decisions! Can someone please explain
how I can tell when I am exercising *genuine* free will, as opposed to this
pseudo-free variety, which clearly I have no control over?
--Stathis Papaioannou
>From: Pete Carlton <pmcarlton.domain.name.hidden>
>To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
>Subject: John Conway, "Free Will Theorem"
>Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 01:30:00 -0700
>
>Greetings,
>
>I recently attended a talk here in Berkeley, California given by John
>Conway (of 'Game of Life' fame), in which he discussed some of his results
>with Simon Kochen, extending the Kochen-Specker paradox. He presents this
>as the "Free Will Theorem", saying basically that particles must have as
>much "free will" as the experimenters who are deciding which directions to
>measure the |spin| of a spin-1 particle in.
> --I would replace his words "free will" with "indeterminacy", but there
>is still an interesting paradox lurking there.
>
>A good online writeup is here:
>http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~jas/one/freewill-theorem.html
>
>I wrote up my brief take on it, necessarily from a more philosophical
>angle, here:
>http://homepage.mac.com/pmcarlton/iblog/C1074759898/E263558720/ index.html
>and here:
>http://homepage.mac.com/pmcarlton/iblog/C1074759898/E688049825/ index.html.
>
>I have the intuition that a multiverse approach very readily dissolves his
>mystery, but am not quite sure how to formally work it out. I thought
>some people on this list might be interested, or have a ready answer in
>hand - in particular, I'd like to know if this 'paradox' really is a
>paradox in one or more of the multiverse conceptions discussed here.
>
>thanks and best regards,
>Pete
>
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Received on Fri Apr 08 2005 - 08:25:28 PDT