I did not get that impression from the article. I think that they mentioned science in their indoctrination of the subjects merely to reinforce in them the conviction that free will does not exist. It does not matter which statement is actually true, since what they intended to study was how beviour is influenced by what people believe.

And they may well have tried to control for "indoctrination effects" by making similar claims about the falsehood of determinism when they spoke to the "free will" group, although the term "double-blind", which I used above, is not the best for this sort of control. Mea culpa.

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That second part is reassuring, even if the first is disturbing. We already know the concept of free will is useful, perhaps even indispensible, in dealing with human affairs. Not only would science be reactionary to deny that, it might be hoped that science could be a great tool for learning more about the value of the concept of free will. I know you don't disagree.
Note that finding a way to apply hidden variables to QM would restore determinism to that theory, but would still not prove the universe was deterministic. That would be making the Newtonian mistake all over again. The point is, theories don't tell us about the fundamental nature of the universe, they tell us a good way to understand certain aspects of the universe, perhaps even profoundly important aspects-- but the universe is still quite the onion to peel. Again that's the confusion between what we can say about effective theories and what that tells us about the real universe, a distinction that normally can be glossed over but not when addressing deeply philosophical issues like whether or not the universe can be said to be fundamentally deterministic.

Determinism in science is a bit like classical physics. The 20th century kicked it out of the picture -- except that it didn't, really.

Even if we have compelling evidence that determinism is not valid in an absolute sense, it nevertheless remains a useful framework to study the world in many circumstances. Don't forget that the "crisis of determinism" (borrowing a term from the history of mathematics) is a rather localised situation. You'll find it in physics and a few closely related sciences, but nowhere else. Though perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the other sciences never had any deterministic illusions to begin with.

Nevertheless, I suspect that most sciences are still trying to understand the world in more or less deterministic terms. I would bet that most phychologists -- the study we're discussing was made by psychologists, was it not? -- still think of the human mind as something which produces the same responses when presented with the same stimuli, under the same circumstances.

Is it not a curious thing that it was physics, the most exact of all sciences, to stumble upon randomness?

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Ken G,

"Note that finding a way to apply hidden variables to QM would restore determinism to that theory, but would still not prove the universe was deterministic. That would be making the Newtonian mistake all over again."

Yes. Though i think a lot of the search for a hidden variable underneath HUP has been an effort to maintain the status quo from a classical perspective concerning our ability to accurately predict all outcomes.

What do you think the discovery of a hidden variable would tell us? Would it just relate to a better ability to predict the position or spin of a particle? And would it affect the "free-will" involved in making a measurement of a quantum state?

"The point is, theories don't tell us about the fundamental nature of the universe, they tell us a good way to understand certain aspects of the universe, perhaps even profoundly important aspects-- but the universe is still quite the onion to peel."

Yes agreed. Anyway i really hope we dont explain everything or there would be no need for ATM forums. What would we all do...

Exactly, it is a vastly useful tool of science. Yes, that's just the point-- and they will continue to do so even in the presence of a "GUT" or "TOE" from physics. If determinism is of no value to them, they won't use it.
It is part of the scientific approach to look for the effects of causes. That is what I would call a "projection" of reality onto science-- with no guarantee that nothing is "lost in translation".

If they do think that, they are not basing it on science, for science cannot define those terms. What you can say scientifically is that the human mind may be something that will usually produce a similar response to a similar stimulus-- and then study very closely both when that is true, and when it is not, in an effort to find useful meanings for "same stimulus" and "same response". That's what science would do-- the rest is philosophy that does not inform science.
Yes that is interesting. It's kind of like, when you've exhausted all other possibilities, you must resort to randomness-- but less exact sciences don't yet know where the other possibilities give out.

Agreed, if the goal is prediction, then determinism will be milked for all it's worth.
I think it would lead to better predictions, but nothing more fundamental. We are still quite far from a "physics of free will", and I'm not even sure the language and approaches of physics will ever do more than give us a look from one angle at what we might want to call free will. Personally, I don't think "free will" is meaningfully defined as anything more than the ability to make a decision based on the naturally and internally developed preferences of the individual, and in the absence of external coercion. In other words, it is a decision based on choice, and just how "free" it is requires looking at the circumstances leading up to that choice, not the process of making the choice (the latter being what you might apply cognitive science to learn about). It really gets to the question of, can we ever understand human biology well enough that we could recover a complete understanding of that person just by looking at a current snapshot of their physical state, or do the inherent limitations in analyzing a "current physical state" require that we will always get more knowledge by considering the history of the creation of that person's mind? For example, will we better predict which candidate they would vote for based on an MRI of their brain (hard science), or based on their answers to a personality questionnaire (soft science)? Could either ever be 100% reliable, even in principle?

Interesting post. It reminds me of the FAPP arguments in relation to the "measurement problem" in QM in some respects. I think a FAPP attitude is taken in QM because as a working methodology there is no need to take any philosophical implications into the interpretation.

On the other hand the traditional bias physics has towards deterministic outcomes is based on the need for objectivity. Which i think is fair enough, because science certainly needs to discover all those fixed/set rules and forces, through which the universe acts.

Would there be anything contradictory about a universe which contains a mixture of Determinism, randomness and biological free-will/choice?

It seems that Determinism and randomness can co-exist in physics, spread across various fundamental forces. I think the hard one for physicalists or materialists to accept is the idea of free-will because it would apparently not exist in a universe which did not evolve biology. So biology = free-will, or just the concept if its a mirage :-)

Ken G,

" In other words, it is a decision based on choice, and just how "free" it is requires looking at the circumstances leading up to that choice, not the process of making the choice (the latter being what you might apply cognitive science to learn about). It really gets to the question of, can we ever understand human biology well enough that we could recover a complete understanding of that person just by looking at a current snapshot of their physical state, or do the inherent limitations in analyzing a "current physical state" require that we will always get more knowledge by considering the history of the creation of that person's mind? For example, will we better predict which candidate they would vote for based on an MRI of their brain (hard science), or based on their answers to a personality questionnaire (soft science)? Could either ever be 100% reliable, even in principle?"

Funny you mention it:

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/...the-genes.html

I havent read the whole thing but i think it just suggests a predisposition towards ideology and they are'nt actually saying genes will predict whether one votes for a particular political party. That would be kind of strange. Like that film "Boys from Brazil" where they try to clone a bunch of Hitlers.

But anyways i agree that even if we can get really close to nailing down all the deterministic rules whether in physics or biology there will likely always be some uncertainty.

In everyday speech, I think that determinism and randomness, or free will and predestination, are understood as mutually exclusive.

But I understand your suggestion, and I think it's a sensible point of view, at a time when it's clearer than ever that the world is neither 100% predictable nor 100% unpredictable. I dare say that, while our collective ignorance can be big and sometimes fatal, no subject general enough to be interesting to mankind as a whole is completely unpredictable.

I'm not sure I follow you here. Why do you say that free will would not exist in a universe without biology? I've seen more than one materialist attack the idea of free will because of our biological roots. (A few local examples.) And why should free will be a mere matter of biology, anyway?

__________________
"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Tying that thread into this one is, I think, an excellent example.

I had argued against determinism in that thread due to many of my own misconceptions and lack of certain knowledge- But also because I found the idea that determinism seemed to reduce personal responsibility and seemed to claim that it was like fate was appalling to me. Once I was more properly educated in what determinism means, I realized my errors.
Antonisebs first post in the thread really hits well.

Now if the study questioned folks whose knowledge of determinism, like mine was in that thread, was slight, then it is understandable how they could reach their conclusion. The participants did not understand determinism.

I think you're right in everyday speech, and isn't that a shame. A more nuanced, and useful, interpretation is that all of those things are merely aspects of reality, like a left arm and a right arm. For example, a classic example of using "deterministic theories" to make statistical predictions involving randomness is the recent flap about the asteroid that narrowly missed Mars. One might counter that with better observational data, a better prediction could have been made, but of course all that would do is narrow down the statistical range of possibilities-- it would not replace the randomness completely.

The point is, it's all a matter of what question you are asking-- if you want to know if it's going to hit Mars with our available data, it's just a statistical probability. You might get a clearer idea with better data, but then you might want to know where on Mars it will hit-- and be right back to the statistical realm once again. This is the crucial lesson: the universe is neither deterministic nor random, but either approach has its place depending on what question we want the answer to. People always think quantum mechanics is "weird" because the type of answer you get depends on the type of question you ask, but I see that as quite a common attribute of all of science-- it comes from our heads, not from some fundamental truth about tiny particles.

I would say that it comes from both of them. Our heads supply the feeling of weirdness, and the dissonance tells us something about particles.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

The "weirdness" comes from the fact that our usual sensory perceptions operate on the classical/mechanical level, as do all the things our senses interact with. It's what our instincts are hardwired to, as well as what we're used to. Trying to "think around" the assumptions we grow up with isn't always easy.

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I agree, I don't mean it is equivalent to the ravings of an insane person-- merely that the home of the "weirdness" is in our minds, not in the reality, similar to the way someone who doesn't really "get" calculus might say "calculus is really weird", while someone else might think it is perfectly normal.

That's definitely the key issue, but note it is only true to a point. Water waves operate on the classical/mechanical level too, yet their behavior is much more like quantum mechanics than like particle trajectories. This is my point-- we decide what we want to call weird. A baseball player might say particle trajectories make perfect sense, while waves are weird, but a surfer might think waves make lots of sense, and particle trajectories are weird. So it is related to what our senses are used to, but not necessarily the "classical" vs "quantum" domains.

True-- not easy, but always valuable. That's why we should resist this widespread consensus that "quantum mechanics is weird"-- it's surrendering to what comes easily but is not necessarily logical. If you think about it, I'd say the concept of a particle that "remembers" its own speed from moment to moment, with no other means to describe why it has that speed, is weird. In wave mechanics, the speed is encoded into the properties of the wave, there's nothing to "remember" because it's embedded right into the current spatial configuration of the wave.

I think I would tend to say that most people would see waves as normal and particle trajectories as normal. Both can be tied into how we see the world, for example, in terms of dropping a stone into a pond and shooting a pellet through that pond. What quantum mechanics shows us is that such "common sense" macroscopic notions may not appear to be all that they seem.

As an example this is a summary of a page taken from Bernard d'Espagnat ("On Physics and Philosophy"):

"Take a container of fluid that will produce bubbles if cosmic radiation from outer space interacts with it. The bubble traces that will be seen will be thought of as implying that cosmic radiation consists of trails of particles, and that these particles had a definite trajectory, the continuation of which generated the trace. But quantum mechanics says there are no trajectories. When some radiation interacts with one atom of the liquid there is a certain probability, whose value quantum mechanics yields, that this atom will appear as being exited and cause bubbles to appear in the vicinity of the atom. The probability of two atoms of the liquid being simultaneously exited is extremely small when the atoms are not aligned in the direction along which the radiation is propagated, and it is quite appreciable when they are. In other words, in an overwhelming majority of cases the simultaneously excited atoms will lie along a vertical line and therefore a vertical trace will be observed. Quantum mechanics correctly accounts for the observed phenomena of bubbles but without referring to any classical view that the incident "particle" had at any time a well defined position and thus traveled along a definite trajectory."

So quantum mechanics brings into a sharp focus assumptions that we make in the classical domain, but that classical domain is our reality, and those assumptions are also our reality. It takes the weirdness of quantum mechanics to tell us that what we perceive as our macroscopic reality may not be the nature that is "out there", but we are not about to change our perception of the world to suit, I mean we are not going to start questioning in an everyday sense what we really mean about the trajectory of a thrown ball. The objective models that science classically constructs is also our reality, we can predict where the ball is going with certainty and we can say that prior to the ball landing, it was in a real state just before that point. I agree entirely with you that such classical notions present difficulties when deeply analyzed, but macroscopically our brains seem, by default, to make such a model work for us in a consistent manner. I don't know - perhaps the way we can macroscopically objectively make sense of nature as existing "out there" comes down to being hardwired to see nature in that light.

The point is, for whatever reason, we are able to macroscopically conceive of our reality as existing independently of us being present, but importantly, we are able to conceive of this in a practical sense. In other words, when a ball is thrown, it is not an essential requirement to define a person as being present, we can describe the trajectory as consisting of a real ball at any point in time with no regard to any observer.

At the quantum level, those aspects of observer independence, in my understanding, do not hold. Whatever I read about quantum mechanics I keep on coming up against the notion of a particle not having any meaning until it is measured. If an electron is emitted from some device, it has a probability of landing in any number of locations, we will only know which one when we actually make a measurement. But we cannot say that just prior to that measurement the electron existed as a particle with intrinsic properties waiting to hit the screen. If that were the case the electron would consists of a multitude of direct paths, each path being the trace of a real particle. So at this quantum level, we cannot separate the observer from the whole, we cannot describe the electron as existing at any point on a trajectory - there is no trajectory. And I think what Bernard d'Espagnat is saying, is that there are two levels of objectivity at work here, one, the strong, is at work macroscopically, but this doesn't mean that such objectivity implies an access to a reality that is "really out there", it is just the way we macroscopically model our reality as not requiring the notion of an observer. The other level of objectivity is weak in nature, it implies that at the quantum level, the observer is required to define any state, we cannot define a location of the electron until we decide to measure it. This distinction between the two levels of objectivity for me is not one of differing perspectives, it is fundamental in that it gives rise to the notion of a mind independent reality that is not apparent from our macroscopic reality (and I mean by that, the way we interact with nature on a day to day basis). So (for me at any rate) the weirdness of quantum mechanics is a weirdness that shows up our "hardwired" thinking for what it is, it brings into focus our ability, macroscopically, that allows us to think of, and work successfully with, nature as if it is detached from us as observers. But weirder than all of this, quantum mechanics, with its required notion of an observer, suggests that our macroscopic reality is not what is "out there", rather, what is "out there" is a reality that is mind independent and inaccessible.

I appreciate that you consider such a notion is in fact self evident from within classical science itself and quantum mechanics just reinforces the point. From that perspective I agree that quantum mechanics is not as weird as I make out, and perhaps we are just talking about differing perspectives - I don't know. But I do think that d'Espagnat's primary focus on quantum mechanics in terms of weak and strong objectivity (and by the way, the terms "weak" and "strong" are not the issue, it is the distinction that he emphasizes) is of interest and (for me) worth pursuing, I just hope what I