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ANNOTATION:
Thought experiment on free will
In my mind it is still not obvious that free will is the correct
answer, and that determinism does not exist.
Is a decision taken by a person an act of free will, or a neurological
mechanism? Obviously when a decision is taken, a neurological
process takes place. But does the neurological process trigger
the decision, or does the decision create the neurological process?
Let's do a thought experiment. Let's say that I will ask you to
chose either A or B at exactly the moment T. When your clock marks T,
you make a decision, and chose B. OK, so your decision, in the
time coordinate T, was B. So now let's pretend we can "rewind" time.
We go back in time to T. Everything in the Universe is again in
the same condition it was during the original T insant, including
the neurological and quantum state of your brain. We release the
flow of time, T is reached, and you make your decision again. What will you
decide this time? Would it be B again? Or perhaps A this time?
If free will exists, then if we repeat this experiment a thousand
times, 50 f the time you will chose A and 50 ou will chose B when
the insant T arrives. On the other hand, if the Universe is
deterministic, you will always chose B in the insant T.
I'd really like to believe we have free will, but I just don't
understand how it originates. As far as I see it, every time
we return to the instant T in time, you will chose B, because
your neurons will be firing in a certain way that makes you chose
B.
The key unaswered question is: what IS the origin of a decision?
Author: Bruce Edmonds (b.edmonds[ at ]mmu.ac.uk)
Date: Dec 2, 1999REPLY: Free will could *evolve* in the brain from tiny quantum indeterminism
To see that this sort of argument does not prove that free will
is impossible, apply its structure to life.
Assumption 1: Living entities come from living entities (i.e. at every
moment T a condition for life is that there was life just before
that)
Assumption 2: At one stage there was no life
==>
(wrong) Conclusion: there is no such thing as life
This has exactly the same structure as the previous argument, but
comes to the wrong conclusion. Obviously we know that assumption (1) is wrong
- there was an origin of life. Your argument is based upon the
assumption that there can be no origin of decision. One might say
"but what allowed the first decision?" but then you could equally
say "but what allowed the first life?".
To make this more plausible consider free will as a matter of
*degree* (just as we consider primitive life forms like viruses
not completely alive). The brain could be such that free will
*evolves* in it from infinitessimal amounts up to significant
decisions! The (well established) non-determinism of quantum
mechanics could provide the infitessimal origin and the brain
work on this to develop and amplify it into practical free will.
(the brain itself might well have evolved this way so as to be
effectively non-deterministic from the point of view of outsiders
- such as predetors - but follow an coherent plan inside)
If one assumes that the tiny transition to very weak free will is
not possible then you have already assumed your conclusion so
the above is not an argument for that conclusion but
merely a restatement of it. If the argument rests upon the
implausibility of the transition to free will (which I think is
what is intended) then the evolutionary picture I have painted
counters it.
This goes all the way back to Zeno's paradoxes which seemed to
prove using similar arguments that motion was impossible.
Copyright© 1998 Principia Cybernetica -
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