[P2P-F] Do you believe in free will??

Thu Dec 29 23:19:15 CET 2011

> On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 5:34 AM, robert searle <dharao4 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>> The materialist Christopher Hitchins who died very recently was asked the
>> following question (ref source Richard Dawkins/Radio Four).
>>
>> Do you believe in free will?
>>
>> Yes, I have no choice!
>>
>> The following is a somewhat long bio on  CH
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens

On 29 December 2011 19:58, Paul Hughes <psidoc at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have argued that the answer is ultimately yes:
>
> http://www.realitysandwich.com/super_free_will

FYI: The Strong Free Will Theorem

"[...] our theorem asserts that if experimenters have a certain
freedom, then particles have exactly the same kind of freedom. Indeed,
it is natural to suppose that this latter freedom is the ultimate
explanation of our own.
[...] It may well be true that classically stochastic processes such
as tossing a (true) coin do not help in explaining free will, but
[...] adding randomness also does not explain the quantum mechanical
eﬀects described in our theorem. It is precisely the “semi-free”
nature of twinned particles, and more generally of entanglement, that
shows that something very diﬀerent from classical stochasticism is at
play here.
Although the FWT [Free Will Theorem] suggests to us that determinism
is not a viable option, it nevertheless enables us to agree with
Einstein that “God does not play dice with the Universe.” In the
present state of knowledge, it is certainly beyond our capabilities to
understand the connection between the free decisions of particles and
humans, but the free will of neither of these is accounted for by mere
randomness.
[...] determinism may formally be shown to be consistent, there is no
longer any evidence that supports it, in view of the fact that
classical physics has been superseded by quantum mechanics, a
non-deterministic theory. The import of the free will theorem is that
it is not only current quantum theory, but the world itself that is
non-deterministic, so that no future theory can return us to a
clockwork universe."

http://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200226p.pdf

Cf. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/35391/title/Math_Trek__Do_subatomic_particles_have_free_will
P.