Thanks. How does your description relate to Bell's experiment? I don't see any mention of such "could have been done" counter-factuals. It looks like every experiment that could be done is done on each of the two entangled particles with repeated trials under the condition:

per Wiki

PairTheBoard

Each pair produced is only measured once (and can only be meaningfully measured once). There's no contradiction with anything unless measurements of separate pairs are linked by some kind of logical implication somehow, otherwise it's just random measurements on different systems which don't implicate anything. Measurements at different offset angles are considered to be "the same" system by treating, say, all the 20-degree measurements as a proxy for what the 10-degree measurements would have shown if they had been measured at 20 degrees instead.

It might be ironic, but it wouldn't be ludicrous.

Yah, OK. It'd still all be just a joke. Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, the billiard balls bounce off of each other just right to make a speck of dust wonder about the nature of it's existence. If that's the way of it then ok but I'd rather not participate.

Guess you don't have a choice

The divine comedy.

You mean the statistics taken for those pairs measured at 20 degrees don't violate Bell's inequality but experimenters deduce that had those pairs been measured at 10 degrees the statistics implicitly would have violated Bell's inequality? That doesn't sound like the experimental result they report. My understanding is that the statistics taken for pairs at 20 degrees explicitly violate Bell's inequality - thus ruling out local realism.

PairTheBoard

I'd give the show a C-.

How's this: I've done the supermarket shopping since mom got too sick to do it. I save the plastic bags for the recycling bin they have but, time after time, I forget to bring them w/ me and end up w/ an enormous bundle. I just got back from the market but this time, on my way out of the garage door, I heard a whisper in my mind that said 'the bags.' There's a team in MY head and I feel bad for those of you who don't have one.

Howard

You better believe it that the team just got a signal from something that had nothing to do with any free will but probably some environmental connection that triggered the memory and responsibility to have bags in your car at all times like i want to do and always forget. One of these days i will get out and the last thing i will notice will be a paper bag or i will remember while still inside (instead of later) that i want to get milk or eggs or butter or paper or soap or toothpaste etc ie the main usual things that are urgent when running out kind of and occupy the brain with ferocity even when leaving quickly from home. The bags become then instantly the super theme (due to the stupid prohibition rule they initiated at safeway on free plastic bags) and grab 10 of them on my way out! And then finally my car will have always a big reserve of folded old paper bags to use when i find myself at the store randomly.

In fact all i need to do is place the bags at my door waiting for me to notice them when i go out in 1h! In fact i will do it right now. Go ahead and call this my free will but i will call it what it really is; the fact i read you because i got home (right) instead of going to the store (left) due to the fact the left traffic light was red (and the right was red too but you can turn right after stopping on red in California) when i got to the decision point. I decided to go first home then store vs first store then home. So i am here reading you hence the bags solution because of the red light. Of course there is no end to the causation link of chaos theory orgy so i blame matter antimatter asymmetry for it all lol.

This being a poker site I'll ask those of you that play:

You get dealt A-A UTG, open 4X, get 2-bet to 12X, the somebody 3 bets 50X and you shove for 300 BB, get called by 8-5o and lose. What do you think? I lost to a ****ing idiot or THE ****ING UNIVERSE DID THIS TO ME! HOW THE **** DID THE UNIVERSE, STARTING 13.7 BILLION YEARS AGO MANAGE THIS?' 'Well, I guess causality will get my money back from the drooler later on.'

For myself all I think is 'I hope they show up tomorrow.'

And what is it w/ the high stakes crushers? They put in the work, read the books, joined the training sites, studied the HH's, ran the sims, talked things over w/ friends that they feel also play well, and when playing think things over, ranges, stacks, w/e and then make a decision.....

OR

They are making plays due to causality. Now, you can say that causality is what led them to do all of that work but can you really say that causality has provided knowledge simply for a vessel that it created or is it the universe itself that is doing the playing?

Insisting that determinism is right, while knowing (if determinism even allows it) that there is an enormous amount of missing information is absurd. It's stupid to make definitive statements based on current understanding while ignoring that current understanding is woefully incomplete.

So many in a forum of smart people willing to throw in w/ the hype! Step back, determinists, take a breath, at least allow that you might be premature.

Lack of free will doesn't mean at all that determinism wins. It only means we do not understand QM and spacetime well yet. Local and non local hidden variables go off the window if geometry is an emergent thing.

Bell goes out of the window if Geometry is in question ladies and gentlemen.

PS: Arrange the axes to be the "same" (haha) by the way when the other particle is at the other side of the universe of at just space-like separations even. Nobody has done this perfectly well in all possible ways that are worthy yet in my opinion because earth is a small system.

Also what is beautiful is to realize that the lack of free will is what makes the world the most magnificent kind of world better than all the others deterministic and religious people imagined. What is better than a world where all are responsible where every little thing matters eventually. It belongs to everybody. All is important. All becomes vastly more important.

Ethics is even better without free will. It doesnt mean you start behaving recklessly. Go ahead and behave as your wisdom suggests in your current system how to behave and if you do "poorly chosen things" there will be consequences and more wisdom created by the experiment. Can you deal with the consequences? Go for it. I am not the one pushing you, its the entire situation you find yourself at right now. Our ethics and civilization becomes the collective gift of time, the wisdom accumulated in ages of many thousands of generations. It reflects their collective immortality. It is impossible that exact way without each one of them in the deep past. Lacking free will makes you even more interesting of a system. It doesn't mean that taking you as a being from a time point arbitrarily chosen and forward we cannot assign a value to your brain or your memories or your being as an agent of change. You own the consequences of you being in that state past that point. It is just that you do not own the past that took you to that point. So no true ethereal freedom. But precisely because luck is "generated" by interactions that take place inside what you define that body (10^28 quantum particles) you may lack free will but you do not lack participation in the endgame, the creation of the future. It matters that you existed. It changes everything.

Here's an interesting aside in the Metaphysics section of the Wiki on Bell's Theorem:
--------------------------
A recent flurry of activity about implications for determinism arose with the paper: The Free Will Theorem[27] which stated "the response of a spin 1 particle to a triple experiment is free—that is to say, is not a function of properties of that part of the universe that is earlier than this response with respect to any given inertial frame."[28] This theorem raised awareness of a tension between determinism fully governing an experiment (on the one hand) and Alice and Bob being free to choose any settings they like for their observations (on the other).[29][30] The philosopher David Hodgson supports this theorem as showing that determinism is unscientific, and that quantum mechanics allows observers (at least in some instances) the freedom to make observations of their choosing, thereby leaving the door open for free will.[31]
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PairTheBoard

Why be optimistic about anything when the good is not as good and the bad is not as bad? Determinism nulls the experience of life. To forgive myself next time I treat someone poorly; to attribute it to unchangeable decisions; to null the self-judgement and pain I may otherwise go through, is to equally null myself of the pleasures yet to be experienced.

You've been sold by charlatans and sophists and you now believe in what opposes what you know most intimately: your own subjective experience. In an attempt to define yourself, you have defined yourself out of existence.

P.s. Thank you PairTheBoard and TomCowley for explaining to us the experiment a little more clearly.

Would you rather live in a world where you might not have decided to take care of your mom?!? Like what odds would you have liked to have that you'd have kicked her to the curb when she started losing her health? That is what you are wanting when you want things to be indeterminate or have free will.

We all have those thought thingamajigs that you had today about plastic bags. I mean, not the specific thought about the plastic bags, just thoughts.

On the other hand, there is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensemble_interpretation

In the proposed experiment, do they have many Bob's and Alice's with perfectly known and controlled preconditions so they can actually run it twice? As far as I can tell, their experiment is the equivalent of asking a particular Bob on a particular day to "pick a number between 1 and 100" and thinking that since all Bobs (and Alices) don't pick 23 every time, that they have evidence of free will.

Basically, "well, not everyone is writing the sentence that Brian is currently writing means that people have free will." As additional evidence, we noticed that Brian occasionally doesn't write "Basically, "well, not everyone is writing the sentence that Brian is currently writing means that people have free will.""*

*Brian is consistent with his inattention to getting all the quotation remarks correct. He is fairly certain that many more quotation marks were needed, but he is tired.

A sharp stick to the eye is still pretty bad and sex is still (usually) pretty good.

You should still feel bad if you are a prick. Being a prick is bad. It is also not a permanent condition. Given that you don't like being a prick (a cause), you should try to avoid (a process) being a prick in the future (an effect).

Brian, I have a simple argument.

Every time you don't check yourself for feeling proud or regretful of some important decision you made, you're being inconsistent. If you're at the point that you don't even need to check yourself anymore, and your good decisions arent accompanied by feelings of pride or your bad decisions by feelings of regret, then you're in an even worse position than the inconsistent determinist.

Consistent determinism and prolonged determinism nulls the experience of positive and negative affect; of life.

But if youre a prick shouldn't you just embrace it instead? Why is being a prick bad if you were always going to be a prick? And if you enjoying being a prick? What it you're a determinist that enjoys being a prick?

I'm pretty darn consistent about it, and have suffered none of the effects you mention.

The problem that you are seeing is that certain types of depressed people tend to write books about futility. These are fairly popular with fellow depressed people. Determinism isn't at all the same thing as fatalism: I'm not destined to have a cavity regardless of whether I brush or don't brush my teeth.

That is a silly line of JAQing. Why would a free will advocate advocate* feeling or acting any differently?

*polysemes are cool. Not sure if that qualifies.

Arriving at the conclusion that being and ahole is a terrible thing and needs modifying is not evidence of free will. It simply means you have arrived at the conclusion with substantial evidence that it doesnt look like a good idea anymore. It means you have reached the turning point possibly as a system. If you say no i havent, i double dare you, my response is you haven't reached the point yet you need to screw up even more to get there, so go for it, but know that the others that have experimented for thousands of years have concluded statistically through their own mistakes and examples of others that it is a bad idea and maybe the lesson for you soon will be even harder. Nobody in that line needed to have any free will to get to that wisdom. All they needed was to live and register the interactions and their consequences and propagate the information to others.

Damn it, we are a big neural net planet size system soon to be galactic that is learning over time by experimenting.

Haha. You are free to play the game thats all. Just as long as you realize that playing the game makes new rules all the time due to luck generated in your body and in its interactions with other systems. No wisdom without interactions.

The best freedom possible is the freedom to exist as a universe with substantial opportunities for higher complexity (ie good rich structure physics that is not super complicated to make acquiring wisdom impossibly difficult by neural nets).

You seem to believe in the freedom of interpretation, although not in the freedom of action or decision-making. This is somewhat at odds to me and at least somewhat disingenuous with yourself.

I mean you appear to believe that you can be a determinist and optimist (in the wider sense of the word) simultaneously. And perhaps you are BECAUSE you have chosen this interpretation of your situation, rather than choosing an opposing interpretation. In other words, you have the free will to interpret your situation however you want, although not the free will to make the choices that put you into that situation.

Is that correct? Or does your view also preclude the freedom to choose amongst interpretations?

Sometimes the world loses a great mind too early.

Lets see what it was to watch him in lectures speak about these topics.

Short video



More detailed 1990 lecture/interview




A few simpler explanation videos





A university lecture



Also more https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/...ecture-videos/

Maybe start here and then the next lecture too if you have the time to study the whole thing properly;







I suggest also the books "Quantum theory and measurement" and "Speakable and unspeakable in quantum mechanics" where the Bell papers and much more can be found.

Do you disagree that, according to standard interpretations of "could have", free choice is common?

Edit: I would say yours is a standard interpretation. My point is that it appears useful to distinguish between free and non-free choices, e.g. those made under coercion, so free choices exist.

But the term coercion here is not the same as that understood by human interactions that are seen as abusive or restricting the superficial concept of freedom as that recognized by most people. Of course right now i dont have anyone with a gun in my head typing this. Same for you etc likely (lol). We are not in prison etc.

The idea is that all choices are coerced by the laws of nature and endless constant interactions with other systems (including the noises in the streets or the exhaling of your neighborhood girl that will soon lead her to open her window to refresh air allowing you to see her and say hi etc ). Basically the rest of the universe that conspired to bring the person to that state they find themselves at. It is not some imprisonment by other people, its some "imprisonment" by the entire universe that will never allow you to be totally isolated as an individual receiving sole influence in every decision by your own 10^28 particles and nothing else. Plus even then how did those 10^28 got there in the way they are organized? You didn't own that sequence of organization did you? But it does affect the state of your brain. Eg if you have a problem with the rest of the body the brain is not willing to do math but think of the pain, etc, you get the picture.

I'm questioning whether that idea has anything to do with what it means to freely choose something.