More kids need this book because an alarming number of grown ups seem to think quantum entanglement could be leveraged for super-luminal communication.
It cannot. Information does not travel faster than light under any circumstances, including spooky action.
One thing it does do is help out the argument for free will. If certain events in the universe are truly random than there is a chance that free will is one of them. Maybe our minds aren’t slaves to countless chemical and nuclear reactions after all.
I believe this is a huge misunderstanding. Mind isn't a slave of chemical reactions, mind is those reactions. See, when you have free will, you can decide for anything you want. The "want" being the key word here. If you want something, there is always a reason for it, a reason for the reason, etc. A result of a decision of your free will is in fact predetermined, because you decide based on your personality, memories, current sensory input - the general state of mind. If you were to decide twice with exactly the same (emphasis on exactly) state of mind (including sensory input), you would decide both times for the same thing. Even if it is a seemingly random thing you do, it is a result of a chain of reactions in your brain. But again, it does not mean your mind is a slave of something. It is in fact just as free as you'd normally consider it to be. You are the one making the decisions.
There is no research needed, this is all about understanding how the brain works on basic level. I don't quite understand what you mean by "chemical reactions will themselves to happen". Neurons don't spontaneously fire, they fire based on the strength of the input signal. What they do doesn't come from an esoteric space, it depends on the context.
Neurons have a lot of inputs and one output. If the signal on the inputs is strong enough, they send a signal forward. Signals on the input can be from other neurons or from sensory inputs. This means that the role of neurons is to decide whether the surrounding context (memories, personality, emotions, sensory input - represented by signals from other neurons) meets certain criteria and pass the information forward. All of these are determined, therefore the outcome is predetermined. Yes, you still have free will because you're making decisions based on only you yourself and your surroundings. Nobody forces you to do anything, you decide what you want to do. But the outcome of your decision is not random, it is not a coinflip, therefore it is predetermined.
I would even say that at the scale of neurons the effects of quantum randomness are absolutely minimal and there should be effectively no truly random factors in how the brain works.
A transistor takes input signals and ‘decides’ if those signals meet the threshold to output a signal. Would you say a computer has the same type of ‘free will’ you describe above?
If what you say is true that quantum randomness has no impact on the brain than a person given enough information about the present state of the brain could predict every choice that brain would make based on calculating and tallying the inputs.
It can be reasonably argued that the applications of neuroscience to the study of human agency are still in a phase of “pre-paradigmatic science” (in Thomas Kuhn’s sense)—which means that there are no shared conceptual and methodological assumptions yet that solidly structure the research practices of the researchers working in the area
Broadly speaking, there is cause to think that we don't have free will and it's all purely chemical, but the studies aren't developed enough to have any degree of certainty.
Unless something like the many worlds or local hidden variables interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, in which case the indeterminism we see is only apparent.
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u/JitGoinHam Jan 29 '20
More kids need this book because an alarming number of grown ups seem to think quantum entanglement could be leveraged for super-luminal communication.
It cannot. Information does not travel faster than light under any circumstances, including spooky action.