Related papers: Free will and quantum mechanics
Before Alan Turing made his crucial contributions to the theory of computation, he studied the question of whether quantum mechanics could throw light on the nature of free will. This article investigates the roles of quantum mechanics and…
The basic question in the long-standing debate about free will (FW) is not whether FW can be demonstrated to exist nor even whether it exists, but instead how to define it scientifically. If FW is not dismissed as an illusion nor identified…
The abstract concept of indeterministic free will is distinguished from the phenomenon of free will. Evidence for the abstract concept is examined and critically compared with various designs of automata. It is concluded that there is no…
We give a purely logical proof of the J. Conway and S. Kochen Free Will theorem concerning undeterminacy in Quantum Mechanics (Notices of the AMS, February 2009, Vol. 56/2, p. 226). The logical method seems to be very powerful.
It is often argued that bottom-up causation under a physicalist, reductionist worldview precludes free will in the libertarian sense. On the one hand, the paradigm of classical mechanics makes determinism inescapable, while on the other,…
We strengthen "The Free Will Theorem" [1] in several ways, by replacing the axiom FIN by a weaker axiom MIN, and also by allowing the particles' responses to depend on past half-spaces rather than on on past light cones. This change allows…
Bell test is one of the most important tools in quantum information science. On the one hand, it enables fundamental test for the physics laws of nature, and on the other hand, it can be also applied in varieties of device independent tasks…
Capacity of conscious agents to perform genuine choices among future alternatives is a prerequisite for moral responsibility. Determinism that pervades classical physics, however, forbids free will, undermines the foundations of ethics, and…
Fault-tolerant schemes can use error correction to make a quantum computation arbitrarily ac- curate, provided that errors per physical component are smaller than a certain threshold and in- dependent of the computer size. However in…
The experimental violation of Bell inequality establishes necessary but not sufficient conditions that any theory must obey. Namely, a theory compatible with the experimental observations can satisfy at most two of the three hypotheses at…
The basic problem posed by free will (FW) for physics appears to be not the \textit{physical} one of whether it is compatible with the laws of physics, but the \textit{logical} one of how to consistently define it, since it incorporates the…
A deterministic model with a large number of continuous and discrete degrees of freedom is described, and a statistical treatment is proposed. The model exactly obeys a Schrodinger equation, which has to be interpreted exactly according to…
We study the concept of free will by defining a mathematical model that extends Newton's laws of motion, in such a way that bodies are replaced with agents endowed with free will. In our model the free will of agents is not entirely free,…
Free will is sometimes summarised in the philosophical literature as the subjective impression felt by an individual that he or she is the ultimate source or cause of his or her own choices. The two most common arguments for denying the…
Quantum and classical mechanics are derived using four natural physical principles: (1) the laws of nature are invariant under time evolution, (2) the laws of nature are invariant under tensor composition, (3) the laws of nature are…
In a previous paper (arXiv:1008.3661v1[quant-ph] 21 Aug 2010), we have given a purely logical proof of the Conway and Kochen Free Will theorem in QM: the freedom of the observer implies the freedom of the observed particle. Here we show…
When a conscious observer is part of a quantum mechanical system, rule (4) cuts off solutions to the Schrodinger equation. It is important to show that this interruption of the Hamiltonian dynamics does not effect the statistical…
According to the widely accepted opinion, classical (statistical) physics does not support objective indeterminism, since the statistical laws of classical physics allow a deterministic hidden background, while --- as Arthur Fine writes…
In the event in which a quantum mechanical particle can pass from an initial state to a final state along two possible paths, the duality principle states that "the simultaneous observation of wave and particle behavior is prohibited". [M.…
The paper starts with the proposal that the cause of the apparent insolubility of the free-will problem are several popular but strongly metaphysical notions and hypotheses. To reduce the metaphysics, some ideas are borrowed from physics. A…