free will is fucking silly, either the universe is deterministic, which is nightmarish, or things happen for no reason, which is even more nightmarish
It's a reduction to /quantum mechanics/ of free (will|whim). Absurdity is your adjective.
-
-
well... no? people are consistently talking about it as if it demonstrates the existence of free will. it doesn't; if you take free will *as a postulate* it demonstrates consequences of that. Conway then demonstrates free will by handwaving.
-
t h e a x i om o f c h o i c e i s a x i o m a t i c
-
i'm trying to think of something that has less factual illustrative power than choice of axioms and it's damned hard unless all you want illustrated is what axioms somebody likes
-
This started with "The only way free will can work is if the Many worlds theorem of quantum mechanics is true", which is refuted by the Strong Free Will Theorem.
-
oh, i have no investment in that position and don't think it's the case, but Conway here doesn't refute it either, in the whole thing free will is just a black box hypothetical causal phenomenon whose provenance isn't raised as a question
-
Conway explicitly provides a model of free will which doesn't rely on Many Worlds.
-
he provides a model of necessary derivation of free will of collections of particles from free will of particles, he doesn't provide a model of free will at all; his fully baseless axiom of free will could rely on many-worlds or not, the question isn't asked
-
As the person who brought up many worlds in the first place. It's not necessary for a "Non deterministic universe" but is necessary for the chaos of quantum mechanics to contain something humans would recognize as choice.
- 1 more reply
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.