Conway and the Free Will Theorem (The limitations of science)

by dhw, Thursday, September 05, 2013, 17:57 (4095 days ago) @ George Jelliss

GEORGE: This is a fascinating article (with two preceding parts) though I think I need to read it several time more to get a better idea of what it really means:-http://plus.maths.org/content/john-conway-discovering-free-will-part-iii-It uses purely mathematics and physics assumptions but ends up with a conclusion about free will being ubiquitous, and distinguishes free will from indeterminacy or randomness. 
I can't help but feel there must be an error of reasoning somewhere, 
but if anyone is capable of correct logic it must be Conway.-I've read it twice, and still find it confusing. This may be because I haven't read the first two parts, but without a definition of free will, any discussion is a non-starter. We had a very long debate on this under "Free Will, Consciousness, Identity" (starting on 8 July 2012), and for me those three factors are inseparable. At the time, I offered the following definition of free will: "an entity's conscious ability to control its decision-making process within given constraints." The constraints are:
1) Nature and/or the situation.
2) Factors connected with the decision-making process itself, which include genetic make-up, family influence, education, chance/accident, illness.-As regards 1), the constraints are insurmountable (I can't decide to fly, or be 10 feet tall; if I owe you $1000,000 or am in prison, I can't decide to be debt-free or to run around outside). As regards 2), no-one can draw clear borderlines between conscious decisions and unconscious influences, and so until we know the nature and source of consciousness/will/identity, no-one can know the extent to which our decisions are or are not free from these influences.-The only hint Conway gives us is: "I know what I mean by humans having free will," says Conway, picking up one of two pens lying on the table before us. "I believe, and you don't have to, that I just picked up this pen and it wasn't determined at the start of the Big Bang; it's not a function of the past history of the Universe. I think I just did that in the last few seconds and before then, there was nothing in the world that you could have analysed to tell you that I would do that."-We don't have to go back to the Big Bang, but we do need to know why he picked up the pen, and why he chose one and not the other. It sounds as if he's done so just to prove a point. Anyone who knows him really well could probably predict that he would find a concrete example to illustrate his general thesis. He's that kind of man. Question: why is he that kind of man? One pen was red, the other blue, and he's always liked red so of course that's the pen he chose. Question: What makes him prefer red to blue?
 
It's a trivial example, but it again raises the point of where to draw the line between conscious and unconscious decisions. Conway might just have picked the pen up without thinking, in which case I'd hesitate to call it free will by my definition. The point I'm really making, though, is that we humans may not be able to predict situations, but theoretically we might have enough information to predict the decisions taken in those situations. The same principle works the other way round: sometimes we can look back and work out what made us decide the way we did. That is the principle behind many law cases: to what extent was the individual responsible for his actions? "M'lud, my client is schizophrenic." So is he responsible? Does he have free will? -The question also arises as to levels and degrees of consciousness: there may be genetic constraints, but to what extent are we aware of them and able to overcome them? What actually gives us the ability to overcome them?-I don't see the relevance of particles here, since for me free will entails conscious decisions, which Conway says they can't make: "You mustn't misread it, we're not asserting these particles make decisions, we're not saying they have any consciousness. What happens is they act, they indubitably act, and which action the particle does is free in this sense, it is not a predetermined function of the past. And that's not the same as randomness, oh dear me no!"-I would not even consider randomness in a discussion of free will, since conscious decisions can't be random. Situations may appear to arise by chance (I'm caught in a thunderstorm), and then I must make a conscious choice: I can hurry home / take shelter / stand out in the open and cry Lear-like, "Thunder thy bellyful!" My decision might be predictable to someone who knows me really well, so is it foreordained by who I am? What makes me who I am?-Just for the record, like Conway I certainly feel that I have free will, and that I am responsible for my own decisions and actions. But I do not know the extent to which my decisions are made freely or made because of my second list of constraints. And so, as I maintained earlier, I don't know whether we have free will, and I'd suggest that until we understand the true nature of consciousness (which we may never do), none of us can know.