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CCC comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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I certainly agree that it's debatable, and that there are some very strong arguments for the side I'm arguing against.
I think so. Life is at the very least a necessary precondition (I think), but I need to ignore that particular complexity lest I fall victim to the anthropic principle. Taking intelligent life as a precondition may be inadvisable, as I suspect that free will may be a necessary precondition for intelligence - which would mean that intelligent life always has free will, by definition of intelligence.
But the main reason why I think that free will must be a fairly complicated thing is because it runs completely contrary to the idea that particle physics is perfectly predictable, if we could but solve the necessary calculations. Life is compatible with the idea that the behaviour of the individual electrons, protons, neutrons is predictable, and that therefore a closed set of such particles is predictable, and that therefore the system as a whole is predictable. Free will requires a closed set of particles that are able to do different things in the same situation. I have no idea what the physics of free will looks like at a particle level, but I don't see how it can possibly be anything simple.
But that idea is false.
While there are perhaps circumstances where physical theories fail to predict the future accurately (someone earlier in this thread posted a paper to that effect - was that you?), in general, the failure requires very specific circumstances which do not apply to human decision-making.
For example, Newtonian physics was described as having a failure condition that, at any point, a particle could enter the area under consideration from pretty much infinitely far away, moving at several billion times the speed of light. This requires that the area under contemplation be an open system ; that it, it permits the entry of distant particles. Yet, enclose a human inside a forcefield, prevent any such distant-particle interactions, and Newtonian physics does become predictable; and, at the same time, the human does not lose his free will.
Newtonian physics is not a good model of particle physics. The best model is quantum mechanics which is not usually regarded as determistic.
True enough, the applicability of quantum indeterminism to neurons is a difficult and unclear subject .... but you didn't say brains are deterministic, you said particles were.
It's deterministic enough to make extremely accurate predictions of the measured results of experiments. Even if there's plenty of room for debate about whether or not a given particle was here or there when its position can't be measured.
Let me phrase it this way, then. If free will exists, then brains must be at least partially non-deterministic (or, just for completeness, the decision must somehow originate somewhere else). Brains consist of neutrons, electrons, and protons, which must obey the laws of physics.
Of some experiments.
That's the wrong way round. You are asuming that underlying determinism is the default option, and that quantum indeterminism is a weird minority position, that needs to make its case. But actually, it is quantum determinism which is fighting the rearguard action, after Bells theorem and the Aspect experiment.
That's not a complete argument....you need to add the premise that obeying the laws of physics entails determinism.
You're right, that's missing. I'm no longer certain that it's warranted... I don't know enough about quantum physics to be completely certain one way or the other.