Silk: Oh really? Aren't you forgetting something...?
The second law of thermo...... Ya know a little education is a dangerous thing in the wrong hands.. Look at the whole picture.....
Everything gravitates towards chaos..ferchrisakes.. You are american right?
No offense intended but it figures.......Ever hear of the 2012 concept.....
Ever hear of Occams Rayzor?
imstreamer < imstreamer%40hotmail.co.uk">imstreamer
hotmail.co.uk> wrote: Win,
the randomness in quantum physics cannot help with free will,
as free will cannot emerge out of something purely random.
The classical and quantum chaos resulting from evolution
of complex systems is (hard) deterministic, hence also cannot help
with free will. To reframe your belief along the lines of the theorem
by Conway and Kochen ( http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604079 ),
your belief is that elementary particles say at the Planck scale have free
will, and they all conspire to act together to give us free will.
This belief cannot be refuted scientifically at present, and I will have to leave
you to it. However, please consider that this belief is a bit like Ptolemaic
cosmology: you have to add more and ever more circles to explain the
motion of planets, which could much more easily be understood in terms
of ellipses.
My belief is that it is much much easier to understand the world by assuming that
it is deterministic (perhaps with a bit of randomness though I believe
eventually we'll get to understand that in deterministic terms too, but here
the facts speak against my belief). Thus I will offer myself a challenge: I claim that
I can explain anything deterministically (except some little bits at the microscopic
level which show true randomness). Could please anyone on the list send me
puzzles, i.e. examples that to them appear to be examples of free will, and I will
strive to explain them deterministically. [In case you've gathered this is an important
matter for me, I'd love to be proven wrong on free will!]
To begin, I'll take Scott's example: shooting for the moon. The deterministic
explanation here is very simple: you have a president who is told by his advisors
that landing a man on the moon would convincingly show American superiority
over the Russians. It looks like a big stretch on the budget, but the president
has excellent popular support, and beating the Russians is a worthy enough goal.
The economy has been booming for some years, so he's got the resources, which could
be allocated in any number of ways. But that's before social rights movements take hold,
so people aren't giong to the streets to have more money spent on social programs.
So he commits the resources to the project. Forty years later, another president tries to
do the same, land a man on mars or if it's too hard, on the moon. But the political
climate is quite different, a few space shuttles have exploded in the past, landing on the
moon has already been done, the rocks on mars are not that cute and, well, they're just
rocks, so there's not much of a convincing argument for going, with all the costs
involved. There's absolutely no free will in there: it's a battle for resources, fame, exploring
the unknown, the stuff that genes have been up to for a billion years.
> An argument for free will: Heisenberg, and a greater and greater degree of
> uncertainty as we probe toward quantum levels. Also, the infinite
> susceptibility to subtle influences both in quantum physics and at the boundaries of the
> fractal, the former all the way down to the supposed limits of small in the
> universe so even quantum butterflies stomping around from beyond that boundary of
> the universe work effects here and not just messing up predictions.
---------------------------------
Building a website is a piece of cake.
Yahoo! Small Business gives you all the tools to get online.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
.
