Related papers: Accommodating Retrocausality with Free Will
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,…
Although it may seem The Delayed Choice experiments contradict causality and one could construct an experiment which could possibly affect the past, using Many World interpretation we prove it is not possible. We also find a mathematical…
Backward causation in which future events affect the past is formalized in a way consistent with Special Relativity and shown to restore locality to nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. It can explain the correlations of the EPR paradox…
Certain approaches to quantum gravity, such as the one based on the concept of purely virtual particles (fakeons), sacrifice the cause-effect relation at very small scales to reconcile renormalizability with unitarity. Other developments…
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,…
In general relativity, the causal structure between events is dynamical, but it is definite and observer-independent; events are point-like and the membership of an event A in the future or past light-cone of an event B is an…
Discussions on indeterminism in physics focus on the possibility of an open future, i.e. the possibility of having potential alternative future events, the realisation of one of which is not fully determined by the present state of affairs.…
Wave-particle duality has become one of the flagships of quantum mechanics. This counter-intuitive concept is highlighted in a delayed choice experiment, where the experimental setup that reveals either the particle or wave nature of a…
A number of writers have been attracted to the idea that some of the peculiarities of quantum theory might be manifestations of 'backward' or 'retro' causality, underlying the quantum description. This idea has been explored in the…
Bell gave the now standard definition of a local hidden variable theory and showed that such theories cannot reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics without violating his ``free will'' criterion: experimenters' measurement choices…
It is well-known that Bell's Theorem and other No Hidden Variable theorems have a "retrocausal loophole", because they assume that the values of pre-existing hidden variables are independent of future measurement settings. (This is often…
Why is it that a ticking clock typically becomes less accurate when subject to outside noise but rarely the reverse? Here, we formalize this phenomenon by introducing process causal asymmetry - a fundamental difference in the amount of past…
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,…
Repeated unbiased measurements cause a continual application of the weak causality principle, leading to an apparent arrow of time for continuously-monitored quantum systems.
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…
Many have proposed that free will would use quantum indeterminism. Strict adherence to the Born rule, which follows from the no-signal condition, seems to block this possibility. I propose here that if state collapse really does occur then…
We explore some implications of the hypothesis that quantum mechanics (QM) is universal, i.e., that QM does not merely describe information accessible to observers, but that it also describes the observers themselves. From that point of…
In a recent paper, I argued against backward in time effects used by several authors to explain delayed choice experiments. I gave an explanation showing that there is no physical influence propagating from the present to the past and…
In a causal world the direction of the time arrow dictates how past causal events in a variable $X$ produce future effects in $Y$. $X$ is said to cause an effect in $Y$, if the predictability (uncertainty) about the future states of $Y$…
We argue that the concepts of "freedom of choice" and of "causal order" are intrinsically linked: a choice is considered "free" if it is correlated only to variables in its causal future. We discuss the implications of this to Bell-type…