On 5/19/2011 4:31 PM, Stephen Paul King wrote:
Hi Scerir and Friends,
Thank you for posting this link to N. Gisin’s paper. In it Gisin
makes a very eloquent and forceful argument against MWI based on the
experience of free will.
Doesn't seem very forceful to me. There's a contradiction between the
MWI and free will because the MWI assumes deterministic evolution of the
wave function. But that doesn't show that there is a contradiction
between MWI and the *experience* of free-will. You could as well say
that the feeling to time passage is a forceful argument for physical time.
Brent
You can find a talk that he gave on the subject here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WnV7zUR9UA
I think that Gisin's argument is stunted by the fact that he does
not consider the effects of multiple entities having free will and
instead only considers a single entity having free will in the MWI
picture. His point in the paper that "if a specific interaction with
one possible state of affair produce a desired effect, this very same
specific interaction with most of the other - equally real according
to many-worlds - state of affairs would produce uncontrolled random
effects. Hence, it seems that there is no way to maintain a possible
window for free will in the many-worlds view" is correct but the
"uncontrolled randomness" is only random because we can only resort to
an equiprobable ensemble to do calculations of the effects of the
interaction in that context.
If we consider multiple observers within the MWI, it seems to me
that in order for some measure of coherent communications to obtain
between them there must be something like a super-selection rule on
the branches of the superpositions such that only those mutually
compatible observables are able to form a set of mutually true (in the
bivalent Boolean sense) in the sense of relative commutativity of
observables on each time-like (not just space-like) hypersurface of a
foliation of space-time for those observers. I think that this is
something that decoherence is pointing toward.
Free will follows from the lack of a priori determinateness of the
members of that set of observables. Just as we cannot demonstrate a
computation that can compute whether or not a given computation will
halt, we can similarly not demonstrate a finite Cauchy hypersurface of
initial conditions that can uniquely determine both the order of
measurements nor the mutual results of those measurements. Free Will
is the freedom to chose the basis of a measurement.
Onward!
Stephen
-----Original Message-----
From: scerir
Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2011 2:15 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: FREE WILL--is it really free?
Are There Quantum Effects Coming from Outside Space-time?
Nonlocality, free will and "no many-worlds"
-Nicolas Gisin
http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3440
Abstract: Observing the violation of Bell's inequality tells us
something about all
possible future theories: they must all predict nonlocal correlations.
Hence Nature is
nonlocal. After an elementary introduction to nonlocality and a brief
review of some
recent experiments, I argue that Nature's nonlocality together with
the existence of free
will is incompatible with the many-worlds view of quantum physics.
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