'Annoying' is subjective. I LIKE the loud boor at the table who might be distracting the other players. So we can turn it around and say that they are not annoying, it is simply YOU that finds them annoying.

Let's try fact based: ISIS put a Jordanian pilot prisoner into a metal cage and lowered him into a fire. Shall I take a kinder view of them because I'm provided what some propose as a scientific explanation for their actions?

My question is even more basic. I expect any experiment involving people and brain activity to violate Bells inequality. But thats because i think human brains can be adequately described by classical mechanics. You dont even need 100 year old quantum mechanics, much less some new no physical theory or whatever is being proposed.

This doesn't make sense to me. As I understand it, Bell's inequality holds if local realism holds. Local realism does hold in classical mechanics so in a classical experiment Bell's inequality should hold.

Leaving human brains out of it, please describe the kind of classical experiment you have in mind whether using coin tosses or a computer where you think Bell's inequality would not hold. Frankly, I'm having a hard time imagining a classical experiment with any similarity to Bell's experiment for entangled particles nor one where Bell's inequality would even apply.


PairTheBoard

I had to renew my acquaintance w/ Bell and found this in the wiki page:

Stapp wrote a book called 'Mindful Universe' in which he claims that the math of QM as laid out by von Neumann requires choices freely made in a stream of consciousness.

You mention 'brains' but that's not what some of us, at least, are talking about. We are thinking of the mind, if it even exists. I can't recall if I've posted this talk somewhere else but here is an expert in the field. These people don't know what the mind/consciousness is and if we don't even know what it is I find it extremely objectionable that I should be told how it works.

Yeah, i got confused on which way the inequality goes. Quantum mechanics violates whats typically called Bells inequalities, not the other way. But I still don't understand what the quote in OP, which talks about violations of quantum mechanics, which in terms of Bells theorem would just be any classical system, means.

Read the wiki under Original Bells Inequality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

I agree it's a little hard to understand the OP's description of the experiment. From what I gather, the experiment is simply a Bell experiment for entangled quantum particles and so should yield the normal results of such an experiment as predicted by quantum theory and born out by previous runs of the experiment. The only difference is that rather than setting the angles of the measuring devices in the normal way they are setting them according to certain measurements of brain activity in 100 humans. I assume this is to be done according to some kind of controls that simulate the standard, classical automated setting of the angles that have worked fine in the past.

If the controls are satisfactory and the human brains are behaving like standard, classical, automated angle setting devices then the results of this quantum Bell experiment should be as predicted by quantum theory. That's what you'd expect if the brain activity is behaving classically. But the author guesses that maybe the results won't be as expected. Maybe the brain as substratum of mind will intrude on quantum effects in an unexpected way.

There's been many experiments trying to show mind over matter results at the classical level. As far as I know they've all proved negative. Certainly a repeatable positive result would be big news. The idea here is, let's try a mind over quantum experiment and see what happens. Sounds dubious to me but I think they should try it.


PairTheBoard

Though I haven't tried to prove it rigorously, it seems intuitively clear to me that anything that wonders whether it has free will, does. Said differently anything that says (and thinks) "I don't have free will" is contradicting himself.

"Could have" just means that it was possible for me to have also freely chosen not to perform action A.

Why does thinking about whether or not I have free will mean that I have free will?

Because it would be ludicrous for determinism to make you debate yourself as to whether or not you have free will.

Yes, of course values like "annoying" are subjective. I was just picking a word fairly randomly to express a person acting in a manner that I find displeasing.

It wouldn't (and I suppose shouldn't) affect your pleasure/displeasure about the behavior. Your example is fairly extreme, as burning people alive is very annoying, so I'm going to guess that the displeasure is going to drown out pretty much everything.

I would guess that you already, in real life, make allowances for when you know more about a person (i.e. can explain their behavior) or find their behavior understandable. "His father beat him severely as a child" and so on.

Determinism isn't an agent. It is just a (proposed) very general description of how the world works.

It would be equally ludicrous for determinism to make you drive to your Aunt Sally's house for Thanksgiving dinner.

You are, I think, conflating "free will" with "makes decisions" and perhaps "ponders stuff." They aren't the same thing at all.

Here is a thought experiment: If the world is deterministic, why doesn't a car being driven from California to Florida get immediately from California to Florida?

I had tacos for lunch today. Didn't see that coming.

It is what it feels like to be you.

I'm fairly sure that science won't be touching that in a meaningful way* any time soon.

*or a way that you find satisfactory.

Self consciousness or higher level consciousness once again is the rapid observation of your state of being. The baby has little to work with but you have a lot more so the world makes more sense and the available choices information triggers explode exponentially (with the proliferation of past connections) giving the illusion of freedom. Thinking is the trip created by a rapid chain of connections under a crude initial "plan". This is why when younger the thinking was harder to find interesting. You had less choices to follow.

I do not for a moment think/recall that at age 5 i had very elaborate thinking. The mass was not critical yet for it. The system was simpler.

AI will get there very soon and the computer will start behaving with amusement. You train yourself to recognize yourself and the world over time. The sense of self emerges as the originator of actions so it feels as if you are guiding the game. In a way you are guiding the game because you observe accessing parts of your brain so it appears what comes next is partially originating from your system. But your system has been built over time by the rest of the universe. The version of you that thinks is guiding the action is the long term effort/gift of time. It was built by your past history.

Basically part of the observation starts to include you also with time. This is why the baby has no sense of self yet. External information dominates the system. At some point you start recognizing the battle over what comes next gets a ton of input from inside. Especially if you are at rest and do not engage actively other fluid situation systems. This is the point you become a thinker and not a reactor. You start observing the inner database because you have nothing else to do with such vast trained system available. But you better believe it you are still a very elaborate reactor. You have trained the brain to recognize itself and now its party time!

Notice how observant babies are of the world. Why is that? Because accumulating information and making connections is still the focus at this point. Very few things make sense at this point. It has not reached party time yet.

Please have patience for another long but necessary post.

Allow a computer to have access to vast information and "senses" and offer statements about what is going on that constantly update and it will appear to have will too but it wont be any more free than ours because it is the product of all past history that created that state.

Because of quantum mechanics a part of that history is originating in terms of its "luck" from the system itself (us or the computer) because clearly what we define "us" is the region of space occupied by what we call our body which is a collection of whatever 10^28 particles. Obviously these 10^28 interact with the rest of the world but they weren't always our particles!!! They gradually got accumulated in that system by physical processes where no sense of inner self was thoroughly responsible for, especially because that self didnt even exist for a great part of that game (eg embryo etc DNA type sequence) and because we do not control what happens to the food we eat or the oxygen and water we obtain from outside for example etc, DNA and chemical reactions do.

Also Determinism is a crude part of the picture not the locally detailed part but the statistical averaging part. For example a stone falls to the ground always. It doesnt go upwards first if left to drop because it has super-unreal low chance for that as a mega system unlike eg an electron released that doesnt have to follow classical perfectly determined trajectory. As it falls the stone breaks things in its path offering a chain of causation (eg the stone did it) but the tiny super-tiny details of all its particles are not as destined as the crude average result each time. We simply do not care to observe all the details in such huge system of eg 10^26 atoms. Ie we do not observe the 10^26 "coin flips", we observe the average outcome of them flipped together that is of course statistical (that plus or minus above some avg however can affect local "decisions" in an unpredictable sense eg see how radioactivity as an easy example can trigger behavior at microscopic level -eg mutations- that eventually becomes macroscopically important - eg affect health in a person- hence deciding/determining the future in a way including among other things what he will eat next etc moreover it appears "he" decided that meal's details). So luck plays a great role too locally and globally. So the system becomes inherently unpredictable (plus chaos theory in interactions with other systems etc) and therefore all is not set or destined (only in some crude macroscopic sense, eg the planet will still keep rotating, have weather for a long time etc).

Imagine how your entire future is changed by whether "you" "decided" to brake or accelerate in that yellow light. But isnt the timing affected eventually by random process at the turning point? Well there are endless turning points affected by microscopic luck in everything we do. However crude behavior appears to be unavoidable, eg "you" -lol hell no- "decided" to go to your home driving and no light or traffic will prevent you from this typically. But it will determine whether you miss that life changing phone call at home because your arrival time is affected (eg she has to decide if you are free to go out with her or not and if not she will do something else). It will determine if you got into a traffic accident or if your delay allowed you to "meet" a truck carrying a pizza ad that triggered a desire to visit the local pizza store first (where you met an old friend etc). What exactly in all this was decided by you alone in some totally clean and free sense??? Some quantum particle that decayed allowed in some advanced ramdomizer casino system the river card to be an ace, the guy to win the hand, cash in and get out happy, drive to his home a bit earlier and find himself just ahead of you driving slow enough, while calling his friends to come party, for you to miss the yellow light "go for it" window, just in time, affecting all your future forever.


So no free will from some ethereal spirit, just an endless application of natural law in interactions that forms a sense of will (mostly forced). But at the same time we "own" the luck locally produced in our own system as it interacts with other systems. We do not "own" the past history that took us to that system though.

This is a participatory universe. We are all together responsible for everything.

Sure we may want to claim all people are responsible for their actions and hold the murderer responsible for the last action but what about all prior actions that took them there? We cannot examine in detail all of them (lazy, unable etc) so we conveniently avoid the questions and raise the maximum blame at the very last action (in our laws etc). We have to do that because it works as incentive! It introduces a very strong resistance against behaving "poorly". But all this is the large scale wisdom built over time in our civilization.

It is necessary to live and produce that wisdom by existing and interacting (large biological systems produce a lot of collective "wisdom" by playing the game) so although there is no free will and we all play a game we cannot control in any isolated clean sense, we are not at all destined or pointless (or puppets etc). We have to exist in order for wisdom to be created and the system to evolve to a higher state of complexity and awareness. The world (civilization etc) is the product of all of us having existed. Life is very meaningful in that sense. The system would be significantly different in its details if someone that has existed didn't for instance.

Isn't this a circular situation, essentially paradoxical?

This is a key issue when defining what we mean by free will.

Black Box: Humans seem to vary their actions in a way that suggest they have some control of their actions. Some of us humans claim that our actions are free and that when we make decisions there is a real element of choice involved.

This is what I think of as free will. It can apply to the sense of "choice" we have when we "decided" to do something. It can also refer to the semi-random nature of many of our actions.

White Box: However, once we try to construct a model that encompasses the effect of black box free will things can get confused.

My view is that free will is entirely a biological phenomenon. Semi randomness is just complexity along the lines of chaos theory. The sensation of "choice" is just in the same domain as the sense of colour, hunger, hate, love etc... A sufficient understanding of the brain is all that's really needed.

However, some people seem to have the view that there is some actual randomness involved in the choices that higher animals make. This seems needlessly complicated to me. Why invent magic to explain how a computer works when science works fine?

Is the definition of free will from a black box or white box perspective?

I need an expert on the Bell Test to explain something I can't find explained in the Wiki on it. If you set up A and B in parallel you get perfect correlation as you would expect from local realism or even classical mechanics. But if you set up A and B at an angle, local realism predicts correlation that varies at most linearly with the angle (Bell's inequality) while quantum theory without local realism predicts correlation that varies as the cosine of the angle, thus violating Bell's inequality in both theory and experimental results.

Nowhere do I see there being a restriction on how the decision on setting up the angle is managed. Suppose someone sets up A and then travels to the other location and sets up B at a 45 degree angle. Then the test is run and statistics taken to determine the correlation at 45 degrees. What happens? Does the correlation violate Bell's inequality as normally reported in the Bell Test? Or have A and B been set up improperly so that Bell's inequality fails to get violated.


PairTheBoard

Much of brain development is the pruning of connections.

It is important to distinguish between awareness and cognition.

Not sure i get the question. Are you asking whether setting the B angle after the measurement of A makes a difference?

No, although that sounds like another good question. If you read my post carefully I think my example is already fully described. I don't see the point in repeating the description. But more generally I'm asking what exactly are the restrictions on the procedure by which A and B are set when the test is normally done?

I'm especially puzzled by this from the Wiki on Bell's theorem.

PairTheBoard

Suppose this altered version of Bell's experiment is done. The devices A and B are set normally at the distant location at the 45 degree angle. The entangled particles are generated at the center. But between the center and the two distant locations there are two devices K and K' set in parallel. The particles pass through K and K' where they are measured in perfect correlation. They then travel on to the two distant locations where A and B measure their correlation at the 45 degree angle. What happens?

I think the correlation at A and B must be as predicted by local realism thus failing to violate Bell's inequality. The particles should no longer be in an indeterminate state after being measured at K and K'. I'm wondering if this is the kind of effect the OP expects from putting human brains in charge of setting the angle of A and B. That somehow the human brains determine the state of the particles before they reach A and B.


PairTheBoard

Ok, maybe somebody else can chime in since i still don't understand what you are asking. I'm sure the answer will be quantum mechanics is confirmed, given we are restricted to systems where quantum effects dominate. But somebody else can explain what that means for your specific question.

I would advise to completely ignore the superdeterminism sections. Don't worry about the crazy loopholes until you have a good grasp of the theorem itself.

QM basically says, and has been confirmed in every test, that if you measure X system, you'll get Y distribution of results. Then if you start talking about other measurements that could have been done instead, you get problems with local realism because the sets of predicted correlations in the unperformed experiments don't jive with one underlying value of any variable. So you're basically left with a couple of options of what to reject to make things "make sense".

1) Allow instantaneous communication over any distance. Then a measurement really could change the underlying value of the other particle.

2) Deny realism- there really is no underlying value, so any counterfactual experiments aren't in contradiction with a real underlying value because those don't exist.

3) Deny the possibility of having performed counterfactual experiments altogether (superdeterminism). The correlation problem doesn't conflict with an underlying reality if it's literally impossible for it to manifest in reality.