Neuroscience and free will

I was struggling with the casual way "random" was being tossed around.  Max's recently distinction (with or without understanding) resonates with me.

I have a much harder time with the notion of "random" than I do with free will.

Well it's all random for materialists/physicalists, since there's no explanation at the level of events - namely, why for any event does an alternative not happen.

Really "determinism" just means expectation that our confidence is 100% for a singular outcome, "random" just means our expectation is distributed across a set of possibilities. It has nothing to do with the actual nature of causation, mental or otherwise. A good example of this distinction comes from Feynman discussing in QED  the reflection of 4 [out of 100] photons on average [bounce] off a reflected surface:

"Try as we might to invent a reasonable theory that can explain how a photon “makes up its mind” whether to go through glass or bounce back, it is impossible to predict which way a given photon will go.

I am not going to explain how the photons actually “decide” whether to bounce back or go through; that is not known. (Probably the question has no meaning.)"

Of course I'd contend the question not only has meaning, but is among the most central questions re: the topic of mental causation. See also my prior post quoting Penrose on the decision made to go from superposition to a singular position.

I'll just requote for convenience, the original source can be found here:

As we probed the deeper implications of Penrose’s theory about consciousness, it wasn’t always clear where to draw the line between the scientific and philosophical dimensions of his thinking. Consider, for example, superposition in quantum theory. How could Schrödinger’s cat be both dead and alive before we open the box? “An element of proto-consciousness takes place whenever a decision is made in the universe,” he said. “I’m not talking about the brain. I’m talking about an object which is put into a superposition of two places. Say it’s a speck of dust that you put into two locations at once. Now, in a small fraction of a second, it will become one or the other. Which does it become? Well, that’s a choice. Is it a choice made by the universe? Does the speck of dust make this choice? Maybe it’s a free choice. I have no idea.”

The entangled particle pairs don’t have values before they a measured, their information is undetermined, they have no value... period... because they are entangled. Once they are measured they have values, and are no longer entangled. It’s nutty to say the entangled partical pairs have any sort of value before they are measured. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of quantum mechanics to make such a statement.

Right, which is why I said "just not specific values." They are correlated before measurement: that's what entanglement is.

~~ Paul

Really "determinism" just means expectation that our confidence is 100% for a singular outcome, "random" just means our expectation is distributed across a set of possibilities. It has nothing to do with the actual nature of causation, mental or otherwise.

Understood in at least this is how a materialist, scientist-oriented perspective would be described.

Still, is the concept of an "expected distribution across a set of possibilities" just a fancy way to say.... we really don't understand the root cause?  Seems to me there has been a long history of our thinking some things are "random" in the way you described only to find out later we simply didn't understand the phenomena.

So back to Paul's quandary: Why is it so hard to imagine "free will" and yet so easy to understand "random"?  Seems neither has a very satisfactory "description" so to speak.

Understood in at least this is how a materialist, scientist-oriented perspective would be described.

Still, is the concept of an "expected distribution across a set of possibilities" just a fancy way to say.... we really don't understand the root cause?  Seems to me there has been a long history of our thinking some things are "random" in the way you described only to find out later we simply didn't understand the phenomena.

So back to Paul's quandary: Why is it so hard to imagine "free will" and yet so easy to understand "random"?  Seems neither has a very satisfactory "description" so to speak.

I'd be inclined to agree that "random" makes no sense, and merely denotes our ignorance. And I'd say determinism merely denotes our confidence.

Since neither determinism nor randomness exist in themselves save as mental abstraction, they only become hard to imagine when mistakenly taken for real aspects of nature.

What is it about free will that you see as having an unsatisfying description? (I'd say determinism is as unsatisfying as random, really just randomness of a special kind, unless there's a God holding the causal chain as something perfectly predictable...)

Which does not matter to my example - a 5 cent coin is a 5 cent coin is a 5 cent coin, regardless of whatever it can be traded for from second to second. It could have been a marble and a toothbrush.


I gave you real-time physical examples of fixed conditions.


An electron is a real thing. You're the one who tried to say something about it which was false - that its charge fluctuates. Yes, the explanation for why its charge does not fluctuate is an abstraction.

Why are you bringing up junk which is not relevant? If you don't have an answer to my or Paul's question, then just don't answer.

Linda

I stand ready to post articles describing the fluctuation of point charges in single electron boxes and in tunneling as previously said.

Do you have a single quote that says what you believe?

Charge Fluctuations in the Single Electron Box

Charge fluctuations in single-electron tunneling oscillations
https://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4080

I stand ready to post articles describing the fluctuation of point charges in single electron boxes and in tunneling as previously said.

Do you have a single quote that says what you believe?

Charge Fluctuations in the Single Electron Box

Charge fluctuations in single-electron tunneling oscillations
https://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4080

I'm not sure why, when I said "electrons have identical charge", you thought I was referring to highly contrived situations, like Single Electron Boxes. I wasn't.

It's from my physics references. For something online, there's a Wikipedia article on the Born Rule (that the square of the amplitude of the wave function is the probability density of finding the particle at a particular point), which points out it is one of the key principles of quantum mechanics. The Wikipedia article on the electron says "electrons have an electric charge of −1.602×10−19 coulombs,[65] which is used as a standard unit of charge for subatomic particles, and is also called the elementary charge."

Linda