Talk:Free will theorem

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Physics, which collaborates on articles related to physics.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the assessment scale. [FAQ]
???	This article has not yet received an importance rating within physics.
Help with this template Please rate this article, and then leave comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify its strengths and weaknesses.

[edit] Free will?

Although it's interesting, the theorem this article describes doesn't seem to have much to do with free will. If it's valid, all it demonstrates is that if indeterminacy is involved in human choices, it's involved in the actions of particles at the quantum level too. But indeterminacy isn't free will - to have free will in the sense that's important to us, we need to be able to act ourselves, not to act in an unpredictable way. Cheers, Sam Clark 11:03, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. This has to do with information theory and particle physics. It in no way addresses the anthropomorphic issue of free will. --Vector4F 20:23, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Also agreed. Using "Free Will" in this sense is very 18th Century :) sidd 07:36, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Not agreed. The theorem makes logical room, within physics, for anthropomorphic consciousness to arise -- it just makes that cocommitant with other forms of consciousness such as "electron consciousness". It fixes the boundary problem that arises when people try to assert that human consciousness just emerges from a jumble of nerves. It predicts that the circuits of the brain produce an entangled functor the state of which integrates a lot of the information content of our perceptive apparatus -- the unity of qualia. Douglas Adams made the joke that "and then God disappeared in a poof of logic" and, interestingly, this theorem is pretty much the opposite -- deniers of a metaphysics beyond determinism disappear when they trace out their best models of determinism. I'm not a theist in the slightest degree but, in this theorem -- well, there's god, the soul, etc. -- if you catch my drift. -t

This article is just interesting enough to be frustrating. I badly want somebody who understands the theorem to explain the indigestible bits. The first indigestible bit: "The Kochen-Specker theorem shows that the results of probing the particle can't be determined ahead of time, if the questions aren't." What questions? The article on the K-S theorem doesn't mention any "questions". Rick Norwood 18:14, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Pseudometric space

I'm not sure I get the argument about the universe not necessarily being a metric space. There's a step between the math and the physics that's missing for me; is it really conceivable that the universe has such a nature that a suitable metric could not be supplied to make it a metric space? Probably just as importantly, the only external reference this article gives is Conway and Kochen's article, and that doesn't mention metric spaces as far as I could find. Which means this is probably prohibited original research and should be deleted in whole. Otherwise, this really needs a cite.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:29, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Contrapositive

I attended a talk where Conway also discussed this rule the other way around. "An experimenter has no more 'free will' (what ever we choose to mean by that) than does an electron". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.194.171.29 (talk) 04:43, 28 February 2008 (UTC)