isaac Mao's Library tagged FreeWill → View Popular

08 May 09

The team's work points to two brain areas involved in the decision to move a limb and then execute the action. Sirigu speculates that the parietal cortex makes predictions about future movements and sends instructions to the premotor cortex, which returns the outcome of the movement to the parietal cortex.

"We must believe in free will, we have no choice," the novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer once said. He might as well have said, "We must believe in quantum mechanics, we have no choice," if two new studies are anything to go by.
Quantum mechanics is widely accepted by physicists, but is full of apparent paradoxes, which made Einstein deeply uncomfortable and have never been resolved. For instance, you cannot ask what the spin of a particle was before you made an observation of it - quantum mechanics says the spin was undetermined. And you cannot predict the outcome of an experiment; you can only estimate the probability of getting a certain result.
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- For more than a decade now, 't Hooft has been working on the idea that there is a hidden layer of reality at scales smaller than the so-called Planck length of 10^-35 metres. 't Hooft has developed a mathematical model to support this notion. At this deeper level, he says, we cannot talk of particles or waves to describe reality, so he defines entities called "states" that have energy. In his model, these states behave predictably according to deterministic laws, so it is theoretically possible to keep tabs on them.

17 Apr 09

05 Oct 08

It is claimed by some that quantum indeterminism is confined to microscopic phenomena.^[54] The claim that events at the atomic or particulate level are unknowable can be challenged experimentally and even technologically: for instance, some hardware random number generators work by amplifying quantum effects into practically usable signals. However, this only amounts to macroscopic indeterminism if it can be shown that microscopic events really are indeterministic.

04 Oct 08

People who had written about a situation in which they were not in control were more likely to draw non-existent connections between the coincidences, the researchers found.

22 Aug 08

“If the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new
movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and
effect—what is the source of the free will possessed by living things
throughout the earth?”—Titus Lucretius Carus, Roman philosopher and poet, 99–55
BC.
Human free will might seem like the squishiest of
philosophical subjects, way beyond the realm of mathematical demonstration. But
two highly regarded Princeton mathematicians,
John Conway and Simon Kochen, claim to have proven that if humans have even the
tiniest amount of free will, then atoms themselves must also behave
unpredictably.
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- claim to have proven that if humans have even the
  tiniest amount of free will, then atoms themselves must also behave
  unpredictably.
- That’s
  certainly what we ordinarily assume in life. We don’t imagine, say, that a
  fence turned white just because we looked at it — we figure it was white all
  along.
- This means that the particle cannot have a definite spin in
  every direction before it’s measured, Kochen and Specker concluded. If it did,
  physicists would be able to occasionally observe it breaking the 1-0-1 rule,
  which never happens. Instead, it must “decide” which spin to have on the fly.

这可以解释为什么在一个极权国家，人们趋向于不负责任

In this light, it’s not surprising that people behave less morally as they become skeptical of free will. Further, the Vohs and Schooler result fits with the idea that people will behave less responsibly if they regard their actions as beyond their control. If I think that there’s no point in trying to be good, then I’m less likely to try.

09 Jun 08

I believe that the feeling of having free will is a residual effect of how our brains work. Our own self-awareness has has a built in illusion of free will. And stepping up the ladder, I believe self-awareness is an overflow effect of intelligence. The more intelligent a species, the more self-aware they are and the more they have a sense of free will. Ants have very little sense of free will because they are not very aware of themselves to begin with.