Philosophers
Mortimer Adler Rogers Albritton Alexander of Aphrodisias Samuel Alexander William Alston Anaximander G.E.M.Anscombe Anselm Louise Antony Thomas Aquinas Aristotle David Armstrong Harald Atmanspacher Robert Audi Augustine J.L.Austin A.J.Ayer Alexander Bain Mark Balaguer Jeffrey Barrett William Barrett William Belsham Henri Bergson George Berkeley Isaiah Berlin Richard J. Bernstein Bernard Berofsky Robert Bishop Max Black Susanne Bobzien Emil du Bois-Reymond Hilary Bok Laurence BonJour George Boole Émile Boutroux Daniel Boyd F.H.Bradley C.D.Broad Michael Burke Lawrence Cahoone C.A.Campbell Joseph Keim Campbell Rudolf Carnap Carneades Nancy Cartwright Gregg Caruso Ernst Cassirer David Chalmers Roderick Chisholm Chrysippus Cicero Tom Clark Randolph Clarke Samuel Clarke Anthony Collins Antonella Corradini Diodorus Cronus Jonathan Dancy Donald Davidson Mario De Caro Democritus Daniel Dennett Jacques Derrida René Descartes Richard Double Fred Dretske John Dupré John Earman Laura Waddell Ekstrom Epictetus Epicurus Austin Farrer Herbert Feigl Arthur Fine John Martin Fischer Frederic Fitch Owen Flanagan Luciano Floridi Philippa Foot Alfred Fouilleé Harry Frankfurt Richard L. Franklin Bas van Fraassen Michael Frede Gottlob Frege Peter Geach Edmund Gettier Carl Ginet Alvin Goldman Gorgias Nicholas St. John Green H.Paul Grice Ian Hacking Ishtiyaque Haji Stuart Hampshire W.F.R.Hardie Sam Harris William Hasker R.M.Hare Georg W.F. Hegel Martin Heidegger Heraclitus R.E.Hobart Thomas Hobbes David Hodgson Shadsworth Hodgson Baron d'Holbach Ted Honderich Pamela Huby David Hume Ferenc Huoranszki Frank Jackson William James Lord Kames Robert Kane Immanuel Kant Tomis Kapitan Walter Kaufmann Jaegwon Kim William King Hilary Kornblith Christine Korsgaard Saul Kripke Thomas Kuhn Andrea Lavazza Christoph Lehner Keith Lehrer Gottfried Leibniz Jules Lequyer Leucippus Michael Levin Joseph Levine George Henry Lewes C.I.Lewis David Lewis Peter Lipton C. Lloyd Morgan John Locke Michael Lockwood Arthur O. Lovejoy E. Jonathan Lowe John R. Lucas Lucretius Alasdair MacIntyre Ruth Barcan Marcus Tim Maudlin James Martineau Nicholas Maxwell Storrs McCall Hugh McCann Colin McGinn Michael McKenna Brian McLaughlin John McTaggart Paul E. Meehl Uwe Meixner Alfred Mele Trenton Merricks John Stuart Mill Dickinson Miller G.E.Moore Thomas Nagel Otto Neurath Friedrich Nietzsche John Norton P.H.Nowell-Smith Robert Nozick William of Ockham Timothy O'Connor Parmenides David F. Pears Charles Sanders Peirce Derk Pereboom Steven Pinker U.T.Place Plato Karl Popper Porphyry Huw Price H.A.Prichard Protagoras Hilary Putnam Willard van Orman Quine Frank Ramsey Ayn Rand Michael Rea Thomas Reid Charles Renouvier Nicholas Rescher C.W.Rietdijk Richard Rorty Josiah Royce Bertrand Russell Paul Russell Gilbert Ryle Jean-Paul Sartre Kenneth Sayre T.M.Scanlon Moritz Schlick John Duns Scotus Arthur Schopenhauer John Searle Wilfrid Sellars David Shiang Alan Sidelle Ted Sider Henry Sidgwick Walter Sinnott-Armstrong Peter Slezak J.J.C.Smart Saul Smilansky Michael Smith Baruch Spinoza L. Susan Stebbing Isabelle Stengers George F. Stout Galen Strawson Peter Strawson Eleonore Stump Francisco Suárez Richard Taylor Kevin Timpe Mark Twain Peter Unger Peter van Inwagen Manuel Vargas John Venn Kadri Vihvelin Voltaire G.H. von Wright David Foster Wallace R. Jay Wallace W.G.Ward Ted Warfield Roy Weatherford C.F. von Weizsäcker William Whewell Alfred North Whitehead David Widerker David Wiggins Bernard Williams Timothy Williamson Ludwig Wittgenstein Susan Wolf Scientists David Albert Michael Arbib Walter Baade Bernard Baars Jeffrey Bada Leslie Ballentine Marcello Barbieri Gregory Bateson Horace Barlow John S. Bell Mara Beller Charles Bennett Ludwig von Bertalanffy Susan Blackmore Margaret Boden David Bohm Niels Bohr Ludwig Boltzmann Emile Borel Max Born Satyendra Nath Bose Walther Bothe Jean Bricmont Hans Briegel Leon Brillouin Stephen Brush Henry Thomas Buckle S. H. Burbury Melvin Calvin Donald Campbell Sadi Carnot Anthony Cashmore Eric Chaisson Gregory Chaitin Jean-Pierre Changeux Rudolf Clausius Arthur Holly Compton John Conway Jerry Coyne John Cramer Francis Crick E. P. Culverwell Antonio Damasio Olivier Darrigol Charles Darwin Richard Dawkins Terrence Deacon Lüder Deecke Richard Dedekind Louis de Broglie Stanislas Dehaene Max Delbrück Abraham de Moivre Bernard d'Espagnat Paul Dirac Hans Driesch John Eccles Arthur Stanley Eddington Gerald Edelman Paul Ehrenfest Manfred Eigen Albert Einstein George F. R. Ellis Hugh Everett, III Franz Exner Richard Feynman R. A. Fisher David Foster Joseph Fourier Philipp Frank Steven Frautschi Edward Fredkin Benjamin Gal-Or Howard Gardner Lila Gatlin Michael Gazzaniga Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen GianCarlo Ghirardi J. Willard Gibbs James J. Gibson Nicolas Gisin Paul Glimcher Thomas Gold A. O. Gomes Brian Goodwin Joshua Greene Dirk ter Haar Jacques Hadamard Mark Hadley Patrick Haggard J. B. S. Haldane Stuart Hameroff Augustin Hamon Sam Harris Ralph Hartley Hyman Hartman Jeff Hawkins John-Dylan Haynes Donald Hebb Martin Heisenberg Werner Heisenberg John Herschel Basil Hiley Art Hobson Jesper Hoffmeyer Don Howard John H. Jackson William Stanley Jevons Roman Jakobson E. T. Jaynes Pascual Jordan Eric Kandel Ruth E. Kastner Stuart Kauffman Martin J. Klein William R. Klemm Christof Koch Simon Kochen Hans Kornhuber Stephen Kosslyn Daniel Koshland Ladislav Kovàč Leopold Kronecker Rolf Landauer Alfred Landé Pierre-Simon Laplace Karl Lashley David Layzer Joseph LeDoux Gerald Lettvin Gilbert Lewis Benjamin Libet David Lindley Seth Lloyd Werner Loewenstein Hendrik Lorentz Josef Loschmidt Alfred Lotka Ernst Mach Donald MacKay Henry Margenau Owen Maroney David Marr Humberto Maturana James Clerk Maxwell Ernst Mayr John McCarthy Warren McCulloch N. David Mermin George Miller Stanley Miller Ulrich Mohrhoff Jacques Monod Vernon Mountcastle Emmy Noether Donald Norman Alexander Oparin Abraham Pais Howard Pattee Wolfgang Pauli Massimo Pauri Wilder Penfield Roger Penrose Steven Pinker Colin Pittendrigh Walter Pitts Max Planck Susan Pockett Henri Poincaré Daniel Pollen Ilya Prigogine Hans Primas Zenon Pylyshyn Henry Quastler Adolphe Quételet Pasco Rakic Nicolas Rashevsky Lord Rayleigh Frederick Reif Jürgen Renn Giacomo Rizzolati A.A. Roback Emil Roduner Juan Roederer Jerome Rothstein David Ruelle David Rumelhart Robert Sapolsky Tilman Sauer Ferdinand de Saussure Jürgen Schmidhuber Erwin Schrödinger Aaron Schurger Sebastian Seung Thomas Sebeok Franco Selleri Claude Shannon Charles Sherrington Abner Shimony Herbert Simon Dean Keith Simonton Edmund Sinnott B. F. Skinner Lee Smolin Ray Solomonoff Roger Sperry John Stachel Henry Stapp Tom Stonier Antoine Suarez Leo Szilard Max Tegmark Teilhard de Chardin Libb Thims William Thomson (Kelvin) Richard Tolman Giulio Tononi Peter Tse Alan Turing C. S. Unnikrishnan Francisco Varela Vlatko Vedral Vladimir Vernadsky Mikhail Volkenstein Heinz von Foerster Richard von Mises John von Neumann Jakob von Uexküll C. H. Waddington John B. Watson Daniel Wegner Steven Weinberg Paul A. Weiss Herman Weyl John Wheeler Jeffrey Wicken Wilhelm Wien Norbert Wiener Eugene Wigner E. O. Wilson Günther Witzany Stephen Wolfram H. Dieter Zeh Semir Zeki Ernst Zermelo Wojciech Zurek Konrad Zuse Fritz Zwicky Presentations Biosemiotics Free Will Mental Causation James Symposium |
Seth Lloyd
Seth Lloyd is a theoretical physicist and computer scientist at MIT with a strong background in mechanical engineering. He calls himself a "quantum mechanic" and is one of the designers of quantum computing systems.
Lloyd's most provocative idea is that the universe is a giant computer. Everything in it, including all living systems, are running one enormous program. This seems to be an extreme form of determinism, with the program an example of the super-intelligence of a Laplace Demon, who can see the complete past and future. But Lloyd is no determinist, he sees that quantum mechanics introduces probabilities and uncertainty.
Lloyd worked with Rolf Landauer at IBM, who extended the ideas of John von Neumann and Leo Szilard, who, along with many other physicists, had connected a physical measurement with thermodynamical irreversibility, that is to say a dissipation of energy and increase in entropy.
The increase in entropy (or decrease in available negentropy, as Leon Brillouin put it), must equal or exceed the increase in information acquired in the measurement, in order to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics. There is an intimate connection of physical things and information, captured in John Wheeler's famous dictum, "It from bit."
Seth Lloyd is quite correct that information ("bits") is physical ("its"). However, unlike things, which are concrete and material. Information is abstract and immaterial. To be sure, bits in a computer are embodied in the logical switches that represent 1's and 0's.
Free Will
In his proposed "Turing Test" for free will, Lloyd says because "quantum mechanics implies that events are intrinsically unpredictable, the ‘pure stochasticity’ of quantum mechanics adds only randomness to decision making processes, not freedom." This is the second part of the standard argument against free will.
By contrast, he says that the theory of computation provides an "intrinsic computational unpredictability" that gives "rise to our impression that we possess free will."
Unpredictability is not freedom, just the inability for anyone, including ourselves, to predict what we are going to do.
Lloyd writes,
The primary scientific issue in the debate over free will is traditionally taken to be the question of whether the world is deterministic or probabilistic in nature . (Whether or not this is indeed the proper question to ask will be discussed in detail below.) In a deterministic world, events in the past fully determine the outcomes of all events in the present and future. Conversely, if the world is probabilistic, then at least some outcomes of current events are neither determined nor caused by events in the past. Determinism is evidently a problem for free will: more than two thousand years ago, Epicurus felt obliged to emend the determinism of Democritus’s atomic picture by adding an occasional probabilistic ‘swerve’ to the motion of atoms, in part to preserve freedom of will. From the seventeenth until the twentieth century, by contrast, most scientists believed that the world was deterministic, for the simple reason that all known physical laws, from Newton’s laws to Maxwell’s equations, were expressed in terms of deterministic differential equations. In such theories, apparently probabilistic behavior arises from lack of knowledge combined with sensitive dependence on initial conditions (‘chaos’) [2]. In a deterministic physical world, an hypothetical being (Laplace’s ‘demon’) that possesses exact knowledge of the past could in principle use the laws of physics to predict the entire future. From Newton up to the twentieth century, the philosophical debate over free will by and large assumed that the world is deterministic. In such a deterministic world, there are two antagonistic philosophical positions [3]. Incompatibilism claims that free will is incompatible with a deterministic world: since all events, including our decisions, were determined long ago, there is no space for freedom in our choices. Compatibilism, by contrast, asserts that free will is compatible with a derministic world. In contrast to classical mechanics, the theory of quantum mechanics that emerged as the fundamental physical framework at the beginning of the twentieth cnetury predicts that the world is intrinsically probabilistic. Despite Einstein’s opinion that ‘God does not play dice,’ experiment and theory have repeatedly confirmed the probabilistic nature of events in quantum mechanics. For example, the Kochen-Specher theorem [18] shows that certain types of deterministic hidden-variable theories are incompatible with the predictions of quantum mechanics, a result extended by the Conway-Kochen ‘free will theorem’ [19]. (Despite the presence of the phrase ‘free will’ in its title, and the authors’ whimsical assertion that ‘if indeed we humans have free will, then elementary particles already have their own small share of this valuable commodity,’ this theorem is less a statement about free will in the sense discussed in the current paper, and more a statement about the incompatibility of deterministic models of quantum mechanics with special relativity.) At first, it might seem that the probabilistic nature of the underlying physics of the universe implies renders the compatibilism–incompatibilism debate moot. Indeed, when it became clear starting in the mid-nineteen twenties that quantum mechanics was necessarily probabilistic, scientists began to invoke the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics to supply the freedom in free will. In 1928 Arthur Eddington stated [4] that with the ‘advent of the quantum theory . . . physics is no longer pledged to a scheme of deterministic law.’ Consequently, ‘science thereby withdraws its moral opposition to free will.’ Eddington’s book inspired Turing to investigate the connection between quantum mechanics and free will [1]. The way in which quantum mechanics injects chance into the world was analyzed by A.H. Compton [5], whose work on photo-electric cells formed the basis for his notion of a ‘massive switch amplifier’ that could amplify tiny quantum fluctuations to at scale accessible to the brain. Such purely random information resulting from the amplification of quantum fluctuations, Eddington and Compton argued, could then supply the seeds for probabilistic decisions. The Conway-Kochen theorem is the latest in a long line of works that identifies free will with the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. But are decisions ‘free’ simply because they are probabilistic? Flipping a coin to make a decision is typically used as a last resort by deciders who are unable to make the decision themselves: the outcome of the coin toss determines the decision, not you. As the twentieth century wended on, it became clear that merely adding randomness did not obvously solve the problem posed by incompatibilism. After all, as the philosopher Karl Popper noted [6], one of they key features of a decision arrived at by the process of free will is that it is NOT random. Eddington and Compton backtracked. By the end of the twentieth century, Steven Pinker could declare confidently [7] that ‘a random event does not fit the concept of free will any more than a lawful one does.’ If determinism robs us of agency, then so does randomness. For many contemporary scientific opponents of free will, it seems that the problem with free will is not so much the question of determinism vs. probability, but rather the existence of a mechanistic description of the system that is making the decision.The idea of "naturalism" treats human beings as machines, as purely material things subject to the "laws of nature." Naturalism is a materialism, indeed an eliminative materialism. This is the idea that there are no ideas and no minds. The immaterial mind is identical to the material brain. Philosophers who have attempted to explain free will in terms of event causation (for example, Robert Kane, assume that everything is the result of a causal chain of events, some of which are determined, others are probabilistic, uncaused, or "self-caused." There is nowhere in this picture for a mind that can generate alternative possibilities for action and then evaluate all those possibilities, holding them all in a mind before a deliberation process evaluates them all and selects one. This is the two-stage model of free will. Lloyd is a member of a group of scientists and philosophers pursuing "digital philosophy," They include Gregory Chaitin, Edward Fredkin, Rudy Rucker, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Stephen Wolfram, and Konrad Zuse.
References
The Universe as a Quantum ComputerA Turing Test for Free Will For Teachers
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