[coderunner]

My understanding is that it says if anyone anywhere has free will, then so do some elementary particles. It doesn't say anything about if anyone or if any elementary particles actually have free will right? Does it lend support either way to if free will exists?

[lmm]

It shows that to whatever extent an experimenter can behave nondeterministically, so can an elementary particle. So it's useful as a simple way to convince people that quantum mechanical randomness is a true fundamental phenomenon (in particular, that hidden variable theories are all inherently invalid).

I've never seen a coherent definition of "free will", but I don't see how someone whose decision is random has any more or less of it than someone whose decision is nonrandom, so IMO it doesn't really have anything to do with free will one way or another.

[Uhuhreally]

Conway distinguishes Free Will from randomness by showing that randomness is just a special case of determinism. The random numbers could have been written down before the big bang and looked up when needed, which is still predetermined. What makes Free Will free is that it's the selection of some future state independently from the information in a particle's past light cone. Only the particle determines that part of its state. One implication is that our brains, being composed of particles, derive their free will from the sum of the particles' free will. This doesn't imply that particles are conscious or aware, it only means that certain degrees of freedom evolve according to computations performed by the particles independently.

In one of the lectures Conway goes in depth into the philosophy of free will, which he believed in at a time when it was (and still is) almost universally unfashionable.

[lmm]

> Conway distinguishes Free Will from randomness by showing that randomness is just a special case of determinism. The random numbers could have been written down before the big bang and looked up when needed, which is still predetermined. What makes Free Will free is that it's the selection of some future state independently from the information in a particle's past light cone. Only the particle determines that part of its state.

That's a distinction without a difference - how would you tell whether the particle is magically looking up its results in the universe's big book of random numbers or deciding for itself? It's true that quantum-mechanical randomness is localised, in a provable sense, but there's no contradiction between that and what "randomness" is usually understood to mean.

> One implication is that our brains, being composed of particles, derive their free will from the sum of the particles' free will.

This is unfounded speculation.

[Uhuhreally]

> That's a distinction without a difference - how would you tell whether the particle is magically looking up its results in the universe's big book of random numbers or deciding for itself? It's true that quantum-mechanical randomness is localised, in a provable sense, but there's no contradiction between that and what "randomness" is usually understood to mean.

one of the points the theorem makes is that you can't get the behaviour of fundamental particles by injecting randomness into an otherwise determinstic system. Free Will is different from randomness.

Have you watched the lectures ?

[lmm]

> one of the points the theorem makes is that you can't get the behaviour of fundamental particles by injecting randomness into an otherwise determinstic system. Free Will is different from randomness.

What is the distinction you're drawing, concretely? There simply isn't one unless you're using some very non-standard definition of randomness.

> Have you watched the lectures ?

I attended the 2005 version IRL.

[Uhuhreally]

> What is the distinction you're drawing, concretely? There simply isn't one unless you're using some very non-standard definition of randomness.

AFAIUI by noting that the dice could have been thrown ahead of time and then looked up, we can treat it as a function of time and then it becomes as though another part of the information in the past light cone which doesn't explain the behaviour of particles, as exemplified by FIN, MIN & TWIN

[Uhuhreally]

maybe in that case you can help me see why Conway et al are wrong in this ? Because I'm only quoting here, and the paper is beyond me.

[hardlianotion]

> This is unfounded speculation.

Strictly speaking, the whole discussion of determinism vs free will suffers from this defect.

[gbjw]

He notes in the first lecture that he thinks it is impossible to disprove determinism. A determined determinist can always resort to the argument: all of your senses are deceiving you and you are simply experiencing some predetermined script of qualia (he uses the analogy of watching a movie a second time).

[westoncb]

I think the invulnerable argument for it is even simpler than that: whatever apparently non-determined behavior we observe may only appear that way because we don’t yet know the rules underlying it.

Any system will appear unsystematic until the precise rules governing it are known.

Since we can’t ever demonstrate that we’ve exhausted all possible theories of a system, the possibility always remains that tomorrow we would discover a perfectly effective one, and from that point the system would be as plainly deterministic as anything else.

In other words: we lack the capability to definitively distinguish between our own lacking knowledge and a system’s (potential) intrinsic non-determinism.

[ethn]

This is also the conclusion of Kant, free will is impossible to prove or disprove as it’s a question of the noumenon.

[gbjw]

Right: if you are a brain-in-a-vat observing some powerful play, what can you say about the world in which the vat is embedded? (or for that matter, how is it that you can even be made aware of the vat’s existence?)

[lidHanteyk]

We can perform some measurements [0] which show that spin exists. So, the 101 lemma used in the Kochen-Specker Theorem is related to existing laboratory experiments, and not just thought experiments. But indeed this doesn't say whether people have free will.

We might instead interpret the Free Will Theorem as demolishing a position otherwise claimed: People have free will, but people are special; most other things don't have free will, and certainly particles don't! But the Free Will Theorem explicitly contradicts this position.

In terms of philosophy, there are several nuances to consider. There's Kochen-Specker itself [1], its untestability and its applications. There's free will itself [2], including whether free will is definable, is useful for ethics, and indeed whether free will exists. I think it's interesting that [2] has no mention whatsoever of [1] or the Free Will Theorem more generally.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern%E2%80%93Gerlach_experime...

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kochen-specker/

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/

[chrisweekly]

These ideas contain echoes of Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind" ...