One time is not enough by Petr Frish

Dear Dr. Frish,

I enjoyed your essay, especially the argument expressing the incompatibility between the supposition that, at a given time, a quantum system may have a determined state, and the violation of Bell's inequality, and the implications you develop regarding the time. This incompatibility, in a different form, intrigued me too. My solution was to admit more alternative states at a time, from which we rule out, by further measurements, some of them. This led me to an alternative view on Quantum Mechanics, which eliminates the necessity of admitting a discontinuous wavefunction collapse (sketched briefly in my essay, and with more details in Smooth Quantum Mechanics).

Sincerely,

Cristi Stoica

Flowing with a Frozen River

Hello O.C.

Thank you for your comment.

I indeed see some confluence in the two essays:

...theories like geometries in the Erlangen program.

... mind and its perception of time as flowing,

... a hypothesis about the free-will,

and a crucial experiment that can confirm

or reject it... ??

All that sounds interesting and relevant in this context.

I also see differences of opinion. E.g. my instincts have no negative reaction to computational theory of mind. Whether that mind runs on a quantum machine, as Penrose thinks, or whether we know better or worse approximation of the algorithm, seems irrelevant.

Poetic way of posing that question would be

"Can robots have soul?" ?

But why making the test so hard? If we accept Darwin's theory, we can consider Caenorhabditis elegans (round worm).

I posit that we can learn as much about(physics aspects of) mind on these simple creatures as on me.

And our computer would have easier time to simulate their 302 neurons, then all those I am trying to use ...

Dear Petr,

“I also see differences of opinion. E.g. my instincts have no negative reaction to computational theory of mind.”

Other feedbacks I received interpreted my essay as sustaining the computational theory of mind. The truth is that I did not express any preference for one side or the other. I just proposed a hypothesis, and a test that can confirm or reject it.

I agree with you that, if this experiment will be performed someday, it will start with easier subjects, for example the round worm. Yet, a negative result on this worm will not be very relevant for the human free-will.

Best regards,

Cristi Stoica

Flowing with a Frozen River

Hello again

Congratulation to 7 restricted votes. Now I can confess it is actually worse: I do not think that subjective feeling of free will has anything to do with determinism in physics:

I can build a robot,

and give it algorithm, either deterministic or stochastic

(using pseudo random numbers) to optimalize some goal, using all info it has.

It (the robot) will compute. hesitate, sleep on it, and eventually choose 'best' strategy. It will report, truthfully, that it made a choice, based on the info it had.

We know from simple physics, alfa decay, spontaneous emission of photons, etc, that there are indetermined processes in physics. The sad fact that QM is trying to describe them by unitary operators does not detract from their reality. So why messy things, such as human mind, into a simple clean question?

Dear Peter,

“I do not think that subjective feeling of free will has anything to do with determinism in physics”

I agree with you about the subjective feeling of free-will. If the feeling can be “simulated”, this will not depend on the determinism. I do not discuss the feeling (which exists), but the possibility for the real free-will (which may or may not exist).

“So why messy things, such as human mind, into a simple clean question?”

1. The QM is far from being simple and clean. 2. My approach does not use the human observer. The section about free-will in my essay is not intended to add something to the section of Smooth QM. It is an independent hypothesis.

Best wishes,

Cristi Stoica

I do appreciate your coming back here and comment on the

comments.

I looked back at the last section of your essay, and on your ref [4], and while I like the questions, I must admit that I just do not know what do you men by the ¨ free will¨.

It is not the random vs deterministic,

it is not about collapse,

it is not subjective feeling, as I thought

and you say:

Real human minds can have a strong feeling of free will.

I, as a human, have a very clear feeling that I exist, that I am a subject experiencing the processes of my mind.

It is something outside the physical universe -

whatever that means. It almost sounds like a test for

existence of ¨intelligent designer¨ behind the apparent universe. Is that what you want to test for?

Dear Peter,

Thank you for the interest you show to our discussion, and for showing me that there are points that I have not clarified enough. I am sorry that I say sometimes that "I don't know" or "I don't claim"; I am not trying to be esoteric, nor to intrigue, but only to maintain at minimum the number of hypotheses.

Perhaps Wigner is right when he said that the success of the modern Physics is due to the "irrational effectiveness of mathematics". Maybe the entire Universe is just a mathematical structure, or maybe just some levels of it, as I also said in the introduction of my World theory eprint. In my opinion, we cannot say yet whether the Universe is mathematical in totality, or only partial. Maybe we will know the answer when we will have a Theory of Everything.

If we will have this ToE, and we will see that what we know about the Universe can be described by a mathematical structure, perhaps it will be a special case of the mathematical structure I named World. In this type of ToE, the mind should also be completely described mathematically (this is why it is a ToE). If that World structure is deterministic, with given initial conditions, then the mind processes are forced by the laws and initial conditions, and there is no freedom. If the World structure is indeterministic, then it allows random inputs from time to time, but nor the randomness is freedom. Randomness means only unpredictable choices, but not free choices. This means that both determinism and indeterminism are incompatible with the free-will, if the initial conditions (in order to simplify, I will also name the indeterministic inputs initial conditions, although they start to apply at the moment when the input occurs) are totally random. Assuming that the evolution laws are already given, the only freedom can be in the initial conditions/random inputs. I claim that, if the Universe is mathematical, then the only freedom we may have is to choose the initial conditions. But how can we choose them, since they already are established?

The answer is in the delayed choice experiments: the choice of what observable to measure applies for past events as well as for future ones. In the Smooth version of Quantum Mechanics, I apply a similar idea to propose an approach to explain what seems to be wavefunction collapse, without using discontinuities. The Smooth QM is deterministic, but the initial conditions are chosen with a delay. I think that in both smooth and discontinuous versions of QM, it is present a mechanism that permeates to postpone the choice of initial conditions. The convergence experiment for the free-will is intended to verify if we use this freedom when we make choices.

This is why I said that the randomness is not better than the determinism for the free-will. The determinism and the free-will are independent hypotheses.

Moreover, the Smooth QM is independent of the free-will hypothesis: 1. Smooth QM does not use the observer to explain the collapse. 2. The free-will hypothesis can work as well with the indeterministic QM. The reason why I related them is because in the Smooth QM is contained a mechanism of delayed initial conditions, which helps understanding the idea of the free-will hypothesis, and supports it.

I don't know whether the free-will exists, but the question is important for many of us, because of the feeling of free-will we have. I don't exclude the possibility that science may show someday that there is no free-will, and that it will explain the feeling of free-will as an illusion. This is why I said that the feeling is independent of the free-will.

Let's suppose that the ToE described above will be eventually discovered, and that the free-will experiment will be performed, and the result will be positive. This will mean that there is a "player" outside the part of the Universe described by our mathematical structure. I already mentioned an important shortcoming of this "player" hypothesis, since it seems to imply a circular reasoning, but I consider important to verify its existence. To continue the analogy, if a computer program realizes that its world is a game, and that there is a player "outside", this does not mean that that player is immaterial, or that he is God. Perhaps the part we haven't contained in our mathematical structure is made of a different type of matter, perhaps is describable by a larger mathematical structure, who knows. It is even less justified to infer, from the existence of the "player", that this "player" is the "Intelligent Designer", because the player is concerned with decisions localized in the brain of the person which is tested, and not to the global fate of the Universe. Nevertheless, such a positive result may increase the chances, or at least the hopes, for a "bigger Player" to exist, but I think that its existence does not follow with necessity.

Sorry for the length of this post, I hope that at least I clarified some questions.

Best wishes,

Cristi

Yes. That was helpful. Thanks.

You did clarified the concept. This 'mind' does not have to be

Intelligent or panning a particular outcome.

It is a very abstract concepy,

and yes, possible.

Pf