Consciousness: a physicist believes in free will (General)

by David Turell , Monday, May 20, 2019, 20:01 (2012 days ago) @ David Turell

No reductionism or chance:

https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/rob-sheldon-offers-a-physics-perspective...

" I will develop two streams, in that both reductionism and emergence are just wrong, as is the philosophical denial of free will based on them.

"Speaking philosophically, reductionism and atomism are necessary assumptions if one believes in chance and emergence. The idea is that progress cannot be obtained by purpose and vision, or the whole concept of chance is destroyed.

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" “directed” evolution will always be so much faster than “random”, it will always win the race. This is the inverse of Behe’s argument that devolution (breaking things) is always faster than evolution (fixing things),

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"emergence says that there is a size dependence–when there are enough neurons, suddenly consciousness arrives and if we take one out, we lose consciousness. We cannot pinpoint a cause when everything depends on everything else. This “anti-reductionism” is the curse of physics, because we cannot isolate our system from outside disturbances, we cannot make any predictions about individual atoms. That’s why all of physics is reductionist.

" we can plot bacterial motion on a plate of agar and know that it is not going to be explained by chance. Since we have some hope of simulating a bacterium on a computer, we do not attribute this non-Gaussian behavior to consciousness, but rather to design. That is, something conscious designed the bacterium to behave in a fractal way. Since we are at least as alive as the bacterium, it is almost trivial to claim that we too are designed.

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"we’ve cleared the hurdle that observed reductionism necessarily demands the loss of free will. But I have another argument against reductionism applied to causality....Just like the CO2 example, everything depends on everything, so the reductionist ends up needing the entire universe to cause the effect, which is either absurd or makes the universe conscious.

"When we get down to say electrons or protons, we discover that they cannot be regarded as point particles but as wavefunctions. When we plug in the math for wavefunctions, we immediately discover they are not local, but extend over large regions of space. In order to get back classical physics and locality, we have to argue for some mechanism to eliminate this non-locality....Therefore we must face the very real possibility that “locality” is a fiction for physics, and therefore “local causation” is a fiction. Every electron in the universe is a wavefunction, and the electrons in our brain are potentially entangled with every one of them. Then everything depends on everything and finding “the cause” for our free-will is hopeless.

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"because every experiment involves both local and non-local effects. But once-in-a-while the system stubbornly refuses to decouple from the environment, and then we have to take it into account.... you will notice that each experiment takes into account a larger and larger portion of the universe so as to incorporate these “long-range” forces. So just as fractals were the observation that proved Gaussian-reductionism wrong, so also long-range forces are the observation that proves emergent-reductionism wrong.

"As an aside, special relativity connected space and time with a speed–light-velocity X time = space. Therefore “long-range” forces are also “long-time” correlations divided by light-speed. If we have “long-range” forces, then we also have “prediction” and “teleology”. If spatial correlation is a characteristic of long-range forces, then temporal correlation is the logical extension. If “irreducible complexity” is a spatial correlation, then “functional design” is the necessary temporal correlation. Accordingly, just as gravity waves are distortions of space-time occurring mega-parsecs away, it may be necessary to explain free will as a teleological product of society and history and the mind of the Designer.

"Finally, let me bring the two anti-reductionist threads together. The peculiar thing about QM and electrons is that just when we have got that electron squeezed into a tiny box, the wavefunction gets bigger and bigger and escapes our boundaries. At the very smallest scales, the effects become more global. When we look at the neurons in our brain, we discover that they are distributed like French lace in a fractal pattern. The “reason” is quite simple, they are optimized to collect signals from the entire brain while using the smallest amount of material, which turns out to be a fractal. Likewise, tree trunks are fractal for exactly the same reason, they are optimized to collect the most sunlight with the least amount of wood. This optimization is proof that they are designed rather than diffused by chance.

"But when we turn our telescopes to the heavens and map out the galaxies in three dimensions, we find that they are likewise fractally distributed. In fact, when we overlay the neural map of our brain, and the galaxy map of the universe, they are disturbingly alike. Like the electron, the microcosm reflects the macrocosm. Whether we extrapolate to infinity or 1/infinity in time or space, we find fractals, showing that this Gaussian world we idealize for physics lies at the crossroads of design in space-time.

Comment: Reduced as much as possible. Read the entire article for clarity from skipped examples.