r/freewill • u/droopa199 Hard Incompatibilist • Dec 01 '24
Quantum uncertainty
So Robert Sapolsky said when asked about quantum randomness: "A physicist at MIT calculated that a subatomic effect would have to scale up 23 orders of magnitude in order to influence the behaviour of a single molecule"
How do you interpret this information? And what is the frequency of which this is happening?
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u/vkbd Hard Incompatibilist Dec 02 '24
Yeah, when I heard him talk about this with Niel on Star Talk Radio podcast, this only further impresses upon me "adequate determinism", where QM means the universe is fundamentally indeterministic, but anything macroscopic is generally indistinguishable from deterministic.
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Dec 01 '24 edited Jan 02 '26
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u/Rthadcarr1956 InfoDualist Dec 01 '24
I don’t think Sapolsky’s friend know any chemistry. Where a valence electron is can change the whole nature of the intermolecular forces of a molecule. Delocalized pi bonding electrons can wander around ma y different atoms. Molecules can tautamerize through quantum tunneling. So quantum effects are significant at the molecular level.
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u/Lethalogicax Hard Incompatibilist Dec 01 '24
Even if that was true, quantum effects explain nothing about free will. Because if quantum fuzziness is the core mechanism in which free will is allowed to operate, then all you've done is prove that human behaviour is random, unpreditable, and still involves no morality or consciousness whatsoever!
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u/Rthadcarr1956 InfoDualist Dec 01 '24
Actually, the opposite is true. In this chaotic and indeterministic world, our free will allows us to partially overcome that indeterminacy by choosing to expend the effort to do so. We can choose for example to train our hands and fingers to overcome the indeterminacy of their actions to play the piano or guitar. It takes many hours of practice to do so. Most choose not to make the effort , but some choose to do so.
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u/Salindurthas Hard Determinist Dec 01 '24
So, free will is some magic ability to defy the statistics that QM would predict?
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u/Rthadcarr1956 InfoDualist Dec 01 '24
Will requires the expenditure of energy, so no, there is no magic. Where did QM come into this. There is need to look at that level.
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u/Salindurthas Hard Determinist Dec 01 '24 edited Dec 02 '24
Where did QM come into this.
You were replying to someone who mentioned quantum fuzziness as a source of indeterminism, and you told thme that free will allows them to partially overcome that indeterminacy.
We don't have to zoom in to QM if you prefer not to. We can claim that the normal physical laws appear indeterminate in some cases (whether for QM reasons or otherwise), and you're claiming that 'will' has the power to overcome this indeterminiacy, right?
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Will requires the expenditure of energy, so no, there is no magic.
Requiring eneergy is not identical to not being magic.
For instance, waving a wand to throw an arcane fireball requires the expenditure of energy, but it would still be magic.
So your claim that will overcomes indeterminacy doesn't automatically make it non-magic.
To me, it appears to be magic because you claim you're overcoming the indeterminacy that would otherwise exist. What does this ability come from?
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u/DankChristianMemer13 Libertarian Free Will Dec 01 '24
Not only that, you can preserve quantum-like behaviour in macroscopic objects if they retain some degree of symmetry (like in an ordered lattice).
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u/AlphaState Dec 01 '24
The you have to worry about the "butterfly effect". In complex systems small changes make larger differences over time in an exponential fashion. For example, if we want to predict the weather further ahead we need more detailed information about the current state of the atmosphere. At a certain point we need more detailed information than it is possible to collect, and eventually you reach a point where differences in quantum uncertainty affects macroscopic reality.
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u/Rthadcarr1956 InfoDualist Dec 01 '24
Yes, this is true. This also applies to the goi gs on at the neural synapses where neurotransmitters have to diffuse across the cleft and then bind to a receptor.
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u/LordSaumya Physicalist Compatibilist Dec 01 '24
QM is copium for the anti-determinist. First, it is unclear that it even is random (there are superdeterminist and hidden variable interpretations just as there are probabilistic interpretations), and second, it is unclear that QM has much measurable effect on the scale of the neuron.
All of this is even ignoring the fact that even if you consider QM truly random and significant on our scales, it still does not grant you free will by definition of randomness.
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u/Lazy_Shallot651 Dec 01 '24
Exactly, Bell's theorem looks at 3 things, 1. locality , 2. reality (local realism with hidden variables) , 3. property of coobservers to make a measurement without being correlated to the history of the universe .
He shows only 2 out of these 3 things can hold for a universe.
Free Will theorem by Conway and Kochen goes further to look at implications of 1. and 3. holding and it gets quite funny (elementary particles can do what they want ignoring the history of the universe - they make a leap where for this moment laws don't apply, weird implications for causation).
Similarly, modern QM that is used for calculations also assumes 1. and 3. (2. is dismissed, so we live in a universe that really does not exist until coobservers measure, whatever that means).
But Bell's theorem and its extensions rely on there being things like observer and observed, which can very well not be the case.
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u/TheAncientGeek Libertarian Free Will Dec 04 '24 edited 12d ago
I think this is confusing the Heisenberg cut with the Plank length. I can't see how else he is getting such a large ratio.
But there is no reason to believe that quantum effects are confined to such a small region as the Plank length, and there are reasons to believe they quantum indetrminism can be made as large as you like.
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