That the world is unpredictable because the initial conditions are unknown and this is
different from probabilistically unpredicability, aka randomness, because you don't even
know a probability distribution. He speculates that chaotic amplification might allow
this to account for what he calls "Knightian freedom" (after Frank Knight) as a component
of what is usually called "free will" and which Aronson says can mean no more than
"unpredictable in principle".
Brent
On 8/16/2013 8:53 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
What new perspectives would you say are revealed in the paper? Can you sum them
up?
Craig
On Friday, August 16, 2013 1:50:04 AM UTC-4, Brent wrote:
Here's a fascinating essay by Scott Aronson that is a really scientific,
operational
exposition on the question of 'free will'; one which takes my idea that if
you solve
the engineering problem you may solve the philosophical problem along the
way and
does much more with it than I could.
He also discusses how the entanglement of the brain with the environment
affects
personal identity as in Bruno Marchal's duplication thought experiments.
He also discusses Stenger's idea of the source of the arrow of time (secton
5.4) and
Boltzmann brains.
Brent
The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine
Scott Aaronson
(Submitted on 2 Jun 2013 (v1), last revised 7 Jun 2013 (this version, v2))
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
freedom":
a certain kind of in-principle physical unpredictability that goes beyond
probabilistic unpredictability. Other, more metaphysical aspects of free
will I
regard as possibly outside the scope of science. I examine a viewpoint,
suggested
independently by Carl Hoefer, Cristi Stoica, and even Turing himself, that
tries to
find scope for "freedom" in the universe's boundary conditions rather than
in the
dynamical laws. Taking this viewpoint seriously leads to many interesting
conceptual
problems. I investigate how far one can go toward solving those problems,
and along
the way, encounter (among other things) the No-Cloning Theorem, the
measurement
problem, decoherence, chaos, the arrow of time, the holographic principle,
Newcomb's
paradox, Boltzmann brains, algorithmic information theory, and the Common
Prior
Assumption. I also compare the viewpoint explored here to the more radical
speculations of Roger Penrose. The result of all this is an unusual
perspective on
time, quantum mechanics, and causation, of which I myself remain skeptical,
but
which has several appealing features. Among other things, it suggests
interesting
empirical questions in neuroscience, physics, and cosmology; and takes a
millennia-old philosophical debate into some underexplored territory.
Comments: 85 pages (more a short book than a long essay!), 2 figures.
To appear
in "The Once and Future Turing: Computing the World," a collection edited
by S.
Barry Cooper and Andrew Hodges. And yes, I know Turing is 101 by now. v2:
Corrected
typos
Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); General Literature (cs.GL);
History and
Philosophy of Physics (physics.hist-ph)
Cite as: arXiv:1306.0159 [quant-ph]
(or arXiv:1306.0159v2 [quant-ph] for this version)
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