Free Will: required by quantum theories (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, November 29, 2018, 01:13 (1974 days ago) @ David Turell

Supported by quasars:

https://mindmatters.ai/2018/11/do-quasars-provide-evidence-for-free-will/

"The question of whether everything is fated is science as well as a philosophy. In physics, a debate has raged for over a century: Can unpredictable things really happen, as quantum mechanics (think, the Uncertainty Principle), demonstrates? Or is there, at bottom, a hidden set of laws that determine everything that happens (determinism), including what you decide to do?

***

"Quantum particles appear to behave randomly when measured. But what if there is no free will? In that case, the physicists were fated, so to speak, to set up the experiment to achieve a certain set of results which might appear to them to be random. But that was fated too.

"Koberlein explains, “It’s often said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but it’s really information that can’t travel faster than light. We can send each other telegrams or text messages, but never faster than the time it takes for light to travel between us. In a small lab, light has plenty of time to travel back and forth across the room while the experiment is being set up, so perhaps small bits of information bias the “random” aspect of experiment before it’s even done.”

"That explanation might not seem very convincing if the random results appear time after time. But it would be a good thing to take the physicists out of the picture, so we can be surer.

"As Koberlein points out, that can be done using quasars, which are the brightest objects in the Universe, “thought to be powered by supermassive black holes (black holes with a mass of more than one billion solar masses) which lie at the center of massive galaxies” Physicists cannot influence what quasars do; they can only observe it.

"So what happened when fluctuations from quasars were used instead of a lab’s random number generator?

"The team used random fluctuations in the light from quasars to determine how the photons were measured. Since the light from a quasar has to travel for billions of years to reach us, the fluctuations in brightness happened billions of years before the experiment was done—billions of years before humans even walked the Earth. So, there is absolutely no way for it to be entangled with the experiment.

"The result was just what quantum theory predicts. Thus, it looks like there really are no deterministic hidden variables, and randomness is still possible throughout the cosmos.

"Koberlein cautions, “randomness isn’t the only thing necessary for free will. But it does mean that your fate is not necessarily sealed.”

"For sure. A Darwinian can argue, for example, that our consciousness is an evolved illusion. It enables us to survive and pass on our genes, perhaps in part by “seeing” a randomness that isn’t there. Most of us will conclude from the research, with Koberlein, that free will is at least a possibility and that the principal question is, what factors describe, promote, or hinder its operations?"

Comment: I've mentioned this quasar study before. I sure there is free will on its basis.