Related papers: How Free Will Could Will
Since quantum mechanics (QM) was formulated, many voices have claimed this to be the basis of free will in the human beings. Basically, they argue that free will is possible because there is an ontological indeterminism in the natural laws,…
Both deterministic and indeterministic physical laws are incompatible with control by genuine (non-illusory) free will. We propose that an indeterministic dynamics can be $weakly$ compatible with free will (FW), whereby the latter acts by…
The so-called "free will axiom" is an essential ingredient in many discussions concerning hidden variables in quantum mechanics. In this paper we argue that "free will" can be defined in different ways. The definition usually employed is…
Quantum Mechanics is generally considered to be the ultimate theory capable of explaining the emergence of randomness by virtue of the quantum measurement process. Therefore, Quantum Mechanics can be thought of as God's wonderfully…
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 issue of whether we make decisions freely has vexed philosophers for millennia, Resolving this is vital for solving a diverse range of problems, from the physiology of how the brain makes decisions (and how we assign moral…
Despite the tremendous empirical success of quantum theory there is still widespread disagreement about what it can tell us about the nature of the world. A central question is whether the theory is about our knowledge of reality, or a…
The Born rule is part of the collapse axiom in the standard version of quantum theory, as presented by standard textbooks on the subject. We show here that its signature quadratic dependence follows from a single additional physical…
Attempts to derive the Born rule, either in the Many Worlds or Copenhagen interpretation, are unsatisfactory for systems with only a finite number of degrees of freedom. In the case of Many Worlds this is a serious problem, since its goal…
In quantum gravity there is no notion of absolute time. Like all other quantities in the theory, the notion of time has to be introduced "relationally", by studying the behavior of some physical quantities in terms of others chosen as a…
Conway and Kochen have presented a "free will theorem" (Notices of the AMS 56, pgs. 226-232 (2009)) which they claim shows that "if indeed we humans have free will, then [so do] elementary particles." In a more precise fashion, they claim…
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,…
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…
Physics has long lived with a schizophrenia that desires determinism for measured systems while demanding that experimenters decide what to measure on a whim. Intriguingly, such a free will assumption for experimenters has thwarted many…
It is often claimed that the collapse of the wave function and Born's rule to interpret the square of the norm as a probability, have to be introduced as separate axioms in quantum mechanics besides the Schroedinger equation. Here we show…
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…
Quantum decision theory is introduced here, and new basis for this theory is proposed. It is first based upon the author's general arguments for the Hilbert space formalism in quantum theory, next on arguments for the Born rule, that is,…
In the present article we use the quantum formalism to describe the process of choice under rational ignorance. We consider as a basic task a question or an issue where the only answers are 0 and 1. We show that under rational ignorance the…
The before-before experiment demonstrates that quantum randomness can be controlled by influences from outside spacetime, and therefore by immaterial free will. Rather than looking at quantum physics as the model for explaining free will,…
Probability is distinguished into two kinds: physical and epistemic, also, but less accurately, called objective and subjective. Simple postulates are given for physical probability, the only novel one being a locality condition. Translated…