Summary: Mathematicians John Conway and Simon Kochen claim mathematical proof that show the problem of free will is all or nothing.
Worthy quote in article from Gerard ’t Hooft, Nobel Prize in physics in 1999:
As a determined determinist I would say that yes, you bet, an experimenter's choice what to measure was fixed from the dawn of time, and so were the properties of the thing he decided to call a photon ... If you believe in determinism, you have to believe it all the way. No escape possible. Conway and Kochen have shown here in a beautiful way that a half-hearted belief in pseudo-determinism is impossible to sustain.
The Buddhas of old really shine even as time goes on. No advanced mathematics or physics and yet nature still could not hide from their gaze. I think it was the trees that gave it away.
A fruitful question I think is to ask whether a person such as Gerard ’t Hooft, the scientist I quoted in the article, is enlightened. I think I can't ultimately say until I see the person in action, but I can speculate. His thoughts on determinism may just be localized to his scientific life, that is, he doesn't ponder about it much outside of his professional capacity, and if even if he does it doesn't guarantee he'll apply the knowledge to himself and become conscious of all the implications.
I also think the word determinism does not effectively capture the nature of reality; it still allows a small safety zone for the illusion of the persona. One might very well say, "Everything is determined. I need not concern myself with it further." however determinism implies a determiner and the determined. If reality is indeed cause and effect in all directions then any determinism is merely an arbitrary finite start and end point with a finite view in a field of infinite, thus determinism itself does not and simply cannot capture the entire movement of reality. Determinism also belies the appearance that you can affect nothing, which is untrue because through pondering of the limitations of determinism your neural circuitry is reworked, and thus so is your ability to determine.
The theorem is not too surprising, all it says is that if the constituents of a system are deterministic, then the system is deterministic.
It has nothing to say about determinism. Ultimately determinism is an article of faith. Most QM physicists believe in indeterminism, in fact from the same article
The finding won’t give many physicists a moment’s worry, because traditional interpretations of quantum mechanics embrace unpredictability already. The best anyone can hope to do, quantum theory says, is predict the probability that a particle will behave in a certain way.
Empirically determinism seems to be plausible, however it leads to a rigid universe.
I think the author of the article shows his misunderstanding in that paragraph, as unpredictability does not imply non-deterministic. You also seem to share that misunderstanding. If things were truly non-deterministic then reality would have broken down long before man created the theory of quantum mechanics. The very fact that it is possible to measure the properties of subatomic particles time and time again and come up with consistent answers is a case for determinism. The fact that quantum particles show the same statistical behavior in test after test also make the case for determinism. The only fundamental unknown in quantum mechanics is knowing what any particular quantum particle will do. The mathematical proof says that if the observer is taken as a deterministic system then the whole waveform collapse or many-worlds theories used to keep the agent of free-will alive simply vanishes. It has everything to do with determinism; you either have it or you don't.
the key paragraph:
Kochen and Conway say the best way out of this paradox is to accept that the particle’s spin doesn’t exist until it’s measured. But there’s one way to escape their noose: Suppose for a moment that Alice and Bob’s choice of axis to measure is not a free choice. Then Nature could be conspiring to prevent them from choosing the axes that will reveal the violation of the rule. Kochen and Conway can’t rule that possibility out entirely, but Kochen says, “A man on the street would say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ A natural feeling is, of course, that what we do, we do of our own free will. Not completely, but certainly to the point of knowing we can choose what button to push in an experiment.”
maestro wrote:Empirically determinism seems to be plausible, however it leads to a rigid universe.
A big mistake many people make is to think that indeterminism is the opposite of determinism. It isn't.
Indeterminism has nothing whatsoever to do with determinism. Determinism says that all things have causes, while indeterminism says that we can't determine the current state of the universe, and therefore we can't predict the future.
These are two completely different things, and shouldn't be confused with each other.
A "rigid universe" doesn't really mean anything when everything is rigid, since there's nothing to compare it to.
