Notions of Everything and Nothing

I can not escape this topic. Days after my last post, a recent paper entitled The Strong Free Will Theorm fell into my lap. It mathematically proves that free will exists, based on relativity and quantum mechanics. Here I will explain how this paper fits in with my own ideas. (As well it should, since it is a specific statement within my general notions. If something contradicts my notions, I must revise my notions.)

Before any comparison can be made, we must first understand what they mean by “free will”. They define it thus:

To say that A’s choice…is free means more precisely that it is not determined by (i.e., is not a function of) what has happened at earlier times.

They prove this by showing that the information available to A is not enough to determine A’s response. (I am not going to review or critique the paper here, so read it yourself to find answers to your questions and objections.) A, by the way, is a particle “choosing” to move.

Unlike the memory, processing, and information constraints I placed upon the actor in my last free will post, the particle in their proof has perfect information and enough time to make a decision. And yet its decision is still not deterministic. So basically, it looks like everything I’ve said on free will does not apply.

Except it does. One problem with deterministic systems is deadlock; presented with two or more equivalent options, how is a choice made? Injecting some non-deterministic element–”free will”–gets the job done.

I would even say that in the example of indecision I gave, such non-deterministic involvement is even more necessary. After all, deadlocks are just one form of indecision, and indecision creeps up in many ways as you increase the constraints and complexity of the system. It helps to have undetermined nudges to cut down on processing time so that life can go on; it’s worth the risk of acting prematurely rather than die of starvation before reaching a decision.

The particle’s action is not entirely free. It is just not completely determined. Likewise, I have not advocated that the will of any thing is entirely free or entirely determined, but rather lies on a spectrum of freedom.

I admit that up until now, I was not allowing for a non-deterministic element, as I did not find it necessary. However, it is easy to plug one in. A particle is a thing with a tiny measure of free will, and we are collections of particles with, well, more free will, in the absolute sense.

True, we may be the same “percent free” as a single particle, relatively-speaking, if you broke it down that way. Or maybe we wouldn’t be. It doesn’t matter, because more importantly, we are also more complex. Our actions are both more determined and more free on an absolute scale. One does not cancel out the other. Both are required to provide a thing with the will and the means to continue to persist.

All wills are free. Just some are stronger than others. And that is what I’ve really been trying to say this whole time, that the spectrum of “free will”–as I talk about it–is not a measure of how much of our behavior is caused or uncaused, but rather a measure of our relative capacity to (correctly) evaluate options, choose one, and act on it, no matter the duration we are allotted to do so.

Tags: action, choice, determinism, free will, indecision, philosophy, science, spectrum

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 10:49 pm and is filed under General Notions, Specific Statements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.