Related papers: Free Will and Quantum Mechanics: Much Ado about No…
In honor of Alan Turing's hundredth birthday, I unwisely set out some thoughts about one of Turing's obsessions throughout his life, the question of physics and free will. I focus relatively narrowly on a notion that I call "Knightian…
In the area of the foundations of quantum mechanics a true industry appears to have developed in the last decades, with the aim of proving as many results as possible concerning what there cannot be in the quantum realm. In principle, the…
In a recent paper [quant-ph/0604079], Conway and Kochen claim to have established that theories of the GRW type, i.e., of spontaneous wave function collapse, cannot be made relativistic. On the other hand, relativistic GRW-type theories…
Recently, it has been argued that quantum mechanics is a complete theory, and that different quantum states do necessarily correspond to different elements of reality, under the assumptions that quantum mechanics is correct and that…
Defects occasioned by the advent of quantum mechanics are described in detail of recent arguments by John Searle and by Jaegwon Kim pertaining to the question of the complete reducibility to the physical of the apparent capacity of a…
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…
For a particle travelling through an interferometer, the trade-off between the available which-way information and the interference visibility provides a lucid manifestation of the quantum mechanical wave-particle duality. Here we analyze…
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,…
Von Neumann's statistical theory of quantum measurement interprets the instantaneous quantum state and derives instantaneous classical variables. In realty, quantum states and classical variables coexist and can influence each other in a…
Free will is an old philosophical enigma that has been recently revived by neuropsychology. We restrict ourselves to the problem that determinism seems to allow only an illusion of freedom but random decissions do not contain any freedom…
A simple example is provided showing that violation of free will allows to reproduce the quantum mechanical predictions, and that the Clauser-Horne parameter can take the maximum value 4 for a proper choice.
In Bell inequality tests, the evolution of the wavefunction is not covariant, i.e. not invariant under velocity boost that change the time ordering of events, but the laws that govern the probability distribution of possible results are. In…
Starting with a down to earth interpretation of quantum mechanics for a free particle, the disappearance and reappearance of interference in the 2 slit problem with a detector behind one are treated in detail. A partial interpretation of…
Free will is fundamental to morality, intuition of self, and normal functioning of the society. However, science does not provide a clear logical foundation for this idea. This paper considers the fundamental scientific argument against…
An interpretation and re-formulation of modern physics which removes the presumption of the space-time continuum, and bases physical theory on a small number of rational and empirical principles. After briefly describing the philosophical…
The claim of the freedom of the will (understood as an individual who is transcendent to Nature) in the name of XXth century scientific knowledge, against the perspective of XVIIIth-XIXth century scientific materialism, is analysed and…
Recently, Roger Colbeck and Renato Renner (C&R) have claimed that '[n]o extension of quantum theory can have improved predictive power'. If correct, this is a spectacular impossibility theorem for hidden variable theories, which is more…
Quantum physics, which describes the strange behavior of light and matter at the smallest scales, is one of the most successful descriptions of reality, yet it is notoriously inaccessible. Here we provide an approachable explanation of…
Elementary particles are found in two different situations: (i) bound to metastable states of matter, for which angular momentum is quantized, and (ii) free, for which, due to their high energy-momentum and leaving aside inner a.m. or spin,…
I describe a constructive foundation for Quantum Mechanics, based on the discreteness of the degrees of freedom of quantum objects and on the Principle of Relativity. Taking Einstein's historical construction of Special Relativity as a…