[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

[lmm]

Right, so if you had a fixed dice roll in the past and translated that into the measurement results on each axis in a static way, that wouldn't work. You have to make a fresh random dice roll after the experimenter chooses which axis to measure - or you have to translate the past dice role into the result for the axis in a way that depends on which other axes the experimenter chose to measure.

I assert that this is not terribly surprising, and Conway is actually just doing a sleight of hand around the definition of "random". We would normally expect a truly random event to be (by definition) uncorrelated with anything else, in this case including counterfactual versions of itself - the random measurement you get from a given axis must not be correlated with the measurement you would have got if you'd measured a different combination of axes. That's maybe a little odd, but I don't think it contradicts people's normal notion of "randomness", particularly in a QM context. It's like how in early online poker games people would cheat by figuring out the "random seed" and know all the cards - because that's not real randomness.

[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.