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0 pointsTheLoneWolfling11y ago0 comments

> It's just determinism all the way down - the laws of neurology, which are built on the laws of biochemistry, which are built on the laws of atomic physics. At no level is there a place for a free will.

Why? Quantum mechanics has randomness all over the place - and we already know that human brains are chaotic in that small amounts of noise are amplified. It is not unreasonable to posit that QM noise effects us on the macroscopic scale.

Or, to put it another way, materialism does not imply determinism, unlike what you said.

Personally, my pet theory is that human brains are quantum noise feedback loops. Or to put it another way, the bit that makes us sentient is quantum noise, and our brains are "just" IO / amplifiers / etc.

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AnimalMuppet11y ago

I said "determinism" in contrast to "free will" or "ability to choose", not in contrast to "random". It may not be the perfect word, but I don't at the moment know a better one.

Quantum noise does not give you the ability to choose, because you don't control or choose the quantum noise. So in terms of free will, there's no possibility of help from quantum noise. And once you're above that level, then it's determinism, not just in the sense of "not free will", but also in the sense of "not random".

Ascribing human intelligence to quantum noise seems to me like physics woo - we can't figure out where else it comes from, so we'll say "quantum" and hope that that somehow explains the inexplicable. Or did you have an actual mechanism in mind, rather than just a fond hope?

TheLoneWolflingOP11y ago

Hence the reason why I call it a pet theory. That being said, there are potential mechanisms. Take, for example, shot noise at low light levels. The sensitivity of the human eye is ~5-9 photons within a 100ms period - well, actually, down to a single photon, before filtering[1], but 5-9 before a signal is sent. That is well within the realm of shot noise being significant. Or, for another mechanism, we know that triggering individual neurons can have specific macro-scale effects[2]. Although I haven't found anything on the minimal random fluctuations to trigger a neuron (15mV? But I do not know the capacitance, and as such that value is meaningless to me), and I suspect it is far above the scale at which quantum effects are significant, we do suspect[3] that neurons employ temporal encoding, and we know that neurons fire relatively often (often 10-100 Hz). As such, "edge" effects, where a neuron is or isn't pushed over the edge into firing are a potential mechanism.

But as for the rest of it - "in the materialist view, you cannot have any free will or any kind of ability to make a non-determined choice". This is what I disagree with. Non-determinism arises through (for example) shot noise, and as for free will... The effects of randomness on a system and the effects of "free will" on a system are equivalent. There is no way to tell if a particular decision was randomly decided or if it was the result of a decision by a sentience. Entropy of a signal is at its maximum either when something is random noise or if it is perfectly compressed data - and perfectly compressed data is indistinguishable from noise.

[1] http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.h...

[2] http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/123485-mit-discovers-the-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_coding#Temporal_coding

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