Appendix: (this can be part of a separate article re religion)
Is the issue only "Western"?
In this paper we are dealing with MR form a Western perspective rooted perhaps on Biblical conceptions of moral responsibility, free will etc, however the essence of our arguments are valid also effectively for the 'Eastern' equivalents.
Of course Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians and others in the "East" do not seem to be as preoccupied with "free will" and the types of moral responsibility we have been discussing. Many of the ancient Greeks and others were also not so concerned. Perhaps it was the Biblical influence on the West which made this more of a "Western" preoccupation but the basic aspect sof our argument in thsi paper apply equally to the Eastern equivalents.
Buddhism teaches meditation to achieve detachment, overcoming ego, and this certainly is a method to reduce suffering, and involves nothing nonscientific necessarily, but the rest is counter-scientific or beyond science, and involves effectively a material-transcendent level fundamental to reality, ie to create karma, and for reincarnation, as well as nirvana which is certainly mind-based
"Karma (Sanskrit, also karman, Pāli: kamma) is a Sanskrit term that literally means "action" or "doing". In the Buddhist tradition, karma refers to action driven by intention (cetanā) which leads to future consequences. Those intentions are considered to be the determining factor in the kind of rebirth in samsara, the cycle of rebirth. Karma leads to future consequences, karma-phala, "fruit of action".[33] Any given action may cause all sorts of results, but the karmic results are only those results which are a consequence of both the moral quality of the action, and of the intention behind the action.
The real importance of the doctrine of karma and its fruits lies in the recognition of the urgency to put a stop to the whole process.[61][62] The Acintita Sutta warns that "the results of kamma" is one of the four incomprehensible subjects,[63][web 7] subjects that are beyond all conceptualization[63] and cannot be understood with logical thought or reason.[note 12]"
Hinduism/karma involves effectively the same as the western notion of God or a material-transcendent level in which MR is rooted, because:
1. there is need for a way for the universe to take account actions and even intentions, so the system must be very much like Brain or Mind;
2. this system is definitely beyond the level accessible to physics nowadays;
3. overall the totality gives the feeling of being designed for moral purposes, ie a westerner asks 'how did such a universe come to be, where good actions are rewarded and bad punished, effectively, even if that is not how it is presented.
4. the notion of rebirth according to one's past intentions/deeds, and the idea that the mechanism keeping track can effectuate karmic events and rebirth implies a power similar to that imputed to the God of the bible.
So altogether even the Eastern approach of the Buddhist and karma etc is equivalent to the notion of MR in the West, including the notion of there being a material-universe-transcendent aspect; and all these plus the idea that the workings are beyond our conceptionas makes it all rather equivalent to the biblical approach.
EDIT THIS*
So our major point is that MR is rooted in a material-transcendent realm and it is not possible to explain it using only the methods rooted in the material realm, ie logic, reason etc, and the same is completely true about the equivalent Eastern beliefs - one can try to create a logical rational fully-scientific psychological sociological theory of karma, reincarnation and nirvana however it is doubtful that a fully-convincing sicintific equivalent is possible, and it is likely that if one tried to teach nmc's such a theory, the intelligent ones would soon find out that it was all based on pseudo-science, as opposed to Hinduism/.Buddhism which for the intelligent practitioner has the same status as does religion in the West, ie it is intuitive, a matter of belief etc, and is not meant to be scientifically provable etc.
Perhaps to mc's the pseudo-Hinduism/Buddhism would seem to be a faithful morphing of the original but not to mc's.
[Note: In any case, those "Eastern" religions are ample demonstration that intelligent deep-thinking people by and large do not feel any conflict between an ethical imperative of one sort or another and determinism. However, if one phrases everything in terms of karma etc, then one is motivated by self-interest and there is no need for the notion of "moral responsibility" and sufficient freedom to "deserve punishment". Similarly for notions fo detachment from ego as the way to end suffering , etc.
So perhaps both the need for "free will" and the solution as to how it can exist are both Biblically-related, as outlined below.
Can this imply perhaps that there was some brain-mutation leading to an attachment to a nmc which led to the rise of Biblical religion? It is not clear whethe rone civilization influenced the other and which was prior, but the Buddha lived at the time of the great Biblical prophets, about 1,300 years after Abraham, Hinduism preceded Buddhim of course.]
Biblical approach
The biblical approach can be said to supply the following 'explanation': we are created in the image of God and our essence is God's breath/spirit, and MR exists at the Transcendent level of God, and since we are at essence of that, it applies to us.
And our free will is also not of the ordinary physical level, and the knowledge of Good and Evil is not physical, etc, it is all due to our essence being Transcendent.
In any case, whether or not a God exits and whether or not the Bible is inspired, the perhaps "Western" conception of the materially-transcendent awareness , free will and moral responsibility is based on the context set up in Genesis, and within that context it may be considered reasonable to suppose that human brains are insufficiently intelligent or sophisticated or developed etc to be able to comprehend the ....and the tools of logic and raitonal thought are incapabe of originating arguments supporting the existence of a moral absolute or a truly-free will etc....
Indeed the Biblical context presents the idea that the level at which these exist - the divine or spiritual level - can be in communiaiton with humans, and that when this occurs the questions disappear.....(The best way to 'answer' a question is to make it vanish)
In any case, this paper is not meant to delve into these aspects.
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Part II
(Possibly this will constitute a separate paper)
Applying to other concepts the arguments we made in regards to moral responsibllity
Part I dealt with fact, the existence of a non-material and even material-transcendent 'awareness'. In Part II we depart from 'known fact',.
Topics:
self-evident truths, the Platonic Realm;
incompatibilist libertarian free will with agent-causation;
the passage of time in physics;
why some propose a role for consciousness in quantum physics.
Mind as non-material vs as software or as a quantum phenomenon.
extra-personal Meaning, Purpose, and Human significance;
Most likely there is strong correlation: mc's are likely to not believe in the above, and some nmc's will believe in some of them (this can be tested via a survey). We can probably therefore categorize these as phenomena/concepts which derive from a transcendent level of reality, and which are therefore inaccessible to materialists and are concomitantly incomprensible to them; they require nmc to be comprehended and to be 'believed', but even to nmcs's are (only) believed rather than known.
The very last one on the list is the only one which involves a 'positive' or 'hopeful' aspect - or even can be considered as being on the path leading in the direction of religion or the existence of a God creator etc - the rest are neutral in this regard. These neutral topics are dealt with in separate articles. One is focused on phyiscs, science, technology and discusses the futility of the modern versions of the centuries-old materialist-nonmaterialist philosophical debate such as fundamentally-different attitudes to AI and to the relevance of consciousness altogether when considering the quantum measurement problem, another is about the acausality underlying free will and its possible ramifications for cosmology.
Part II below will deal with the non-religious aspects of the existence of extra-personal Meaning, Purpose, and human Significance. The only relation to 'religion' which will be relevant is the attitude towards the very possibility of the existence of a God, ie rather than to a blanket dismissal of this as a possibility, which is expected also to correlate strongly to being mc or nmc (ie we expect that some nmc's will accept the possibility whereas mc's will not just as in Part I we proposed the probable correlation to attitudes towards the relation between human moral responsibility and the type of true free will humans posses, where some nmc's will accept libertarian free will which no mc's will accept).
...
not clear what it means for a mc to ‘feel’, but nmcs in our universe say they do ,so we'll use that, eg their brain processes a motivating factor, a surge of current in the 'yes do that' circuit.
why would it evolve? well, not clear why feelings evolve but it makes sense tha tif can be feelings mechanistically ie motivators, then it works to motivate to do what is best for survivial of the group etc.
M&P in a mechanistic universe without nmc
MCs say they can feel m&p and that it is enough; what about moral responsibility?
They can feel it, but if we know all is mechanistic? and know there is no fw? but still feel there is mr (as opposed to MR)? ie maybe the feeling wins out in the end, it is enough to keep going. despite the knowledge of no MR only mr.
And what about in our universe? since we know can have mr wo nmc whyassume there is MR? having nmc doesnt automatically convert mr to MR!
Answer is that even though the prresence of nmc doesnt make it proved that there really is m&p and MR, nevertheless the very fact that nmc exists may convince us: ie nmc is not required for the universe to operate as it does, nor even for the non nmc correlate of feelings to exist, including for the non nmc correlate of mr (ie MR) to exist, however paradoxically the existence of nmc despite it not being needed at all might be a reason to think that there is special ‘reaso’ it exists, eg to enable there to be more to mr than there would be in a mechanistic nmc-absent universe, ie there is MR.
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NOT YET EDITED
Introduction:There are other related differences between the two or three types in regards to the notions of an objective, morality, to free will, and to the idea of the "signficance of humanity" or "the sanctity of human life" (or all life). The postions are easily associated: nmc's feel that the self-evident moral responsibility they intuit or feel
Abbreviation: S.EvEx= SelfEvidentlyExistentSelf.
Approximately equivalent to the "nmc" in the abbreviations we used elsewhere: nmc vs mc.
Materialism vs Transcending the material: Meaning, purpose, moral responsibility, free will, human significance: When sevex refer to these, generally they are intuiting some material-transcendent realm, which would presumably be incomprehensible to materialist-brains, making discussion fruitless.
Meaning & purpose: A computer/AI can of course be programmed to speak of meaning and purpose, or can perhaps be built to utilize deep learning techniques coupled with massive input from philosophical, literary and scientific libraries etc to 'self-evolve' towards higher-level discourse. However just as sevex would not simply assume that this AI can feel what a human poet felt just because it can recite - or even compose - poetry, so too it could presumably begin to discuss the meaning of life, the purpose of all existence, as well as moral responsibility and free will etc, without sevex feeling compelled to conclude that it too is sevex.
However, if sevex did not exist, would discussions of those sorts exist in the libraries used as input?
Re "the significance of humanity": Many began to propose humanity as insignificant when faced with the new Copernican understanding of Earth's non-centrality (in the spatial sense), and the immensity of the physical universe. However, to a large degree this conclusion of 'insignificance' involves a logical flaw, since ‘insignificance’ is of course a concept in human minds and certainly the universe itself cannot consider anything significant or insignificant; also, 'insignificant' carries an emotional implication of inferior position relative to that which IS significant whereas physics does not engage in assigning such attributes (ie whether 'significant' or 'insignificant'), nor does the inanimate universe; also, since to sevex the significance of a human far outweighs the ‘significance’ of infinitely more massive non-sevex matter. [For an extended discussion see the author's 1986 published article "Geocentrism": an edited version is available online: https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/geocentrism-existentialism/geocentrism-egocentrism, see particularly "Part VI. Existentialist Despair and the Significance of Humanity".]
Free will
This topic is dealt with in depth separately here.
There have long been futile discussions regarding whether there is - or needs to be in order to give meaning to moral responsibility - 'antinomian libertarian acausal free will'. Our proposition is that materialists are simply incapable of understanding what is meant by this type of free will since it requires the existence of a transcendent aspect to reality - which since it is not accessible to them is also incomprehensible.
For non-materialists,one could perhaps use as the standard "the type of free willed choice which is physically and logically impossible, is executed by a sevex, and which would be necessary but not sufficient in order for a compassionate and reasonable (divine or human) creator of that being (human or AI) to consider it morally responsible for its actions".
In order to promote less futile dialogue, one can perhaps create a convention where the usual term “free will” would be licensed for use to materialists to mean basically what non-materialists would call ‘the illusion of free will’, and where 'true free will' or 'antinomian libertarian acausal free will', or the moral-responsibility-granting type referred to above is referred to not as ‘free will’, but rather with a new term earmarked for the purpose. In this way, people can have discussions about whether or not this type of free will can exist, and whether humans - or some humans, or some AI - possess it etc, rather than futile arguments about its definition or characteristics when the two sides are actually referring to different phenomena but absurdly trying nevertheless to agree about its properties.
[END OF INSERTED HERE FROM googledoc "mindless materilaism"]
Also: even if we have fw etc, what makes me obligated, where is the fundamental categorical imperative? It does NOT follow logically from anyhting, see below.
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There have long been endless futile arguments between proponents of libertarian free will vs determinists of various types, and we propose that these arguments are sterile since there are two types of brain involved - one is connected to nmc and the other is not, and secondly,". We propose that brains which are conected in this was to a level of reality transcendent of the material universe have a deep innate intuition regarding free will and moral responsiblity that the other brain-type is incapable of, indeed is unable even to comprehend.
There is of course a difference between knowing, inferring, and intuiting. A non-materialist knows of being aware in a non-material sense; and infers the implication and so acknowledges the existence of a material-transcendent-level to reality; and intuits (but not knows) that there is a meaningful possiblity of a materially-transcendent and therefore causality-transcendent free will mechanism associated to its brain's decisions. Also, that there is a meaningful sense in which there could be a good/bad which transcends the purely-material, and that all these are necessary components in the arising of a moral responsibility which transcends the purely-material bounds set by evolutionary socio-biology. None of this is comprehensible to the materialist, since their brain is not associated to the material-transcendent level of reality.
As a result of this disparity, discussion between the two types of brain on these topics is doomed to unproductivity. Neither type can understand that from the viewpoint of their brain, which is dependent on how it is constructed, how it operates, and how it interacts with reality, the other side's position indeed seems absurd while their own seems compelling.
Why conversations between sevex and elmats on the topic of meaning may be fruitless: Perhaps the existence of sevex affects one's feeling that there is - or could be - a deep meaning and purpose to life, or at least induces a sense of loss because of the feeling there isn't any, or that one bears moral responsibility for one's actions. If so, then if some sevex feel internally that - or may propound a philosophy to the effect that - a transcendent realm is not even needed for providing the deep sense of meaning and purpose they feel exists or can exist, but are not aware that they feel this because they do have sevex. That is, perhaps this claim (of the non-necessity of sevex) would only occur in beings with a transcendent element such as sevex - ie perhaps they are feeling the transcendent effect of sevex without realizing it - and don't realize that material entities will not feel this - and so erroneously conclude that a being without a transcendent aspect will feel "meaning and purpose" as they do.
Perhaps they may offer philosophical justifications which unwittingly depend on a hidden assumption about the existence of sevex. Or perhaps they do rely on sevex but somehow do not consider sevex 'transcendent'. However, sevex itself is in fact 'transcendent' of the material universe, and to many sevex it automatically grants concepts like meaning and purpose precedence over the nay-saying of logic, psychiatry, physics and cosmology, and accords mind-based notions like meaning and purpose a certain degree of credibility despite their not being provably-existent.
Until we can create AI which 'self-evolves' without input from us, and learn what it does and does not 'think' about, perhaps the only way to know is to compare what is felt by materialists and non-materialists - though of course materialists have been exposed to discussions of meaning and purpose and so the experiment is compromised..
[Note: If materialists do possess sevex but not the awareness of it, how would this affect what they feel, and therefore the comparison to sevex-self-aware?]
In all this, of course there is an implicit assumption that sevex can indeed affect the material universe causally, in the minimalistic sense that its existence gives rise to different words spoken by those with and without it. It perhaps is reasonable to suppose that if sevex can affect the material cause-effect chain at least minimally, it would be in some way like this.
Towards non-futile dialog: Can we define the terms meaning, purpose and moral responsibility in ways which convey the same meaning to materialist and non-materialists, so that intelligent discussion can take place on these topics, or do they require the notion of some element of 'transcendence', but as soon as that is mentioned the possibility of discourse vanishes?
Those with sevex would likely state that beings which are fully-material cannot conceive of a transcendent realm as meant by those with sevex, or in the way that sevex conceive it. To many non-materialists the notion of some realm transcending that of the material is intuitive, and to some even compelling, but even if not that, at the minimum to non-materialists one expects that they would say that it is not incomprehensible, and certainly is not to be rejected out of hand.
It would therefore be intriguing to investigate the above - regarding the attitudes of non-materialists, and also to determine what avowed materialists say about all this.
Do they dismiss out of hand the notion of a transcendent realm?
Presumably they consider it a mistaken notion that anything to do with what non-materialists call “consciousness” is at all necessary in order to speak of "meaning and purpose" as they conceive it.
What do they feel…
…..
The survey & experiment
Question to ask physicists. Can there at least in theory exist "Purpose" (ie of a "human-transcendent type": give quotes form various phsycists implying there is...) or is it absolutely impossible, nonsense, a meaningless term.
Not "do you believe there is..." but rather "is it at all possible or is it not (ie either impossible or simply undefinable and absurd nonsenical)".
Question to be resolved via a survey: Will there be a correlation between the answers ot this quesiotn and to the others re consciousness etc?
To be investigated via experiment: If indeed mc and nmc answer differently, and is that a result of a brain-difference (which mc can claim is correlated to their ability to attach to a transcendental level.)
Eg: A bunch of autonomous vacuum cleaners can be programmed to work together to accomplishta complex task, and they can be programmed to say so. Etc. This is not it.
If we give each consciousness, it still is not it. We mean when there is somehow a purpose at a higher level.
Eg according to science the evolution of humans is due to chance , not purpose, so. We don't mean that.
We mean somehow a purpose at a higher level.
INSERTED HERE FROM googledoc "mindless materilaism"
Free will: Proposition to test via survey and experiment: Perhaps sevex feel its transcendent nature and intuit what it would mean to have a moral responsibility arising from that, whereas materialists do not, and don't feel that the free will provided for by known physics conflicts in some way with moral responsibility.
Explanation: Although Attila's behavior is clearly selected for, so too in its own way is pro-social brain-wiring, for example 'feeling morally responsible' for one's actions, so it is not at all surprising that brains feel this, irrespective of whether one can find philosophical or scientific 'justification' for it. However it would be interesting to survey and brain-test physicist-brains which understand the issue and can compare their feeling with logic and science, to see whether there is a split correlating to m/non-m in those who feel that the free will provided for by known physics conflicts in some way with moral responsibility (eg whether or not it is dependent on the existence of "libertarian incompatibilist free will with agent causation"), and to then test whether the responses correlate to a belief/disbelief in (the possibility of) some sort of transcendent aspect to reality, and to different brain structure/wiring.
......
Contrasting two paradigms re the Free Will needed for a meaningful sense of moral responsibility:
i. genesis scenario: the transcendent-based intuition
ii.determinism/randomness+reductionism (rather than true emergent wholism): the mc attitude.
To what degree do m/non-m consider the paradigms plausible, not impossible, nonsensical, provably wrong?
Materialists (presumably also atheists) will consider i.entirely ludicrous, and therefore not useful in defining a meaningful sense of "freedom" whereas non-materialists will consider ii.ludicrously incompatible with moral responsibility .
Are both approaches ‘equally nonsensical’?
ii. is nonsensical within its own paradigm since it is inconsistent, ii. is nonsense if one believes it is completely disprovable, as perhaps atheists will claim, so each side may feel its claim is less nonsensical than the other’s.
..
the non-materialist brain's material-transcendent perspective on free will:
This recognition is particularly important today. Philosophical materialism worked quite successfully to eliminate from pubic acknowledgment the notion of the uniqueness of humanity, and now with the emergence of powerful AI, the cultural domination of materialism may be dangerous - AI created in the image of materialist neuroscientists and engineers may be the final nail in our coffin.
There is no claim here that we can know that true free will exists, however we do know that non-material consciousness not only exists but is at a more fundamental level of reality than is the material universe. One infers that it is not impossible that the interactions and phenomena associated to our 'mind' need not necessarily conform to the laws of causality and even logic - and certainly (not to) the 'laws of nature'. Of course the conundrums involved are well known, profound and numerous, but to a mind which recognizes the material-transcendent level as more fundamental than the material, this does not disuade - at least from the non-impossibility.
....
A computer/AI utilizing deep learning techniques coupled with massive input from philosophical, literary and scientific libraries etc could 'self-evolve' towards higher-level discourse and begin to discuss the meaning of life, the purpose of all existence, as well as moral responsibility and free will etc, without sevex feeling compelled to conclude that the AI is sevex.
...
Long before qp, there was the conundrum "if a tree falls in the forest". Materialists of course did not then or now understand it, however to sevex there was always an intimate relation between existence and "consciousness", where it seemed that the former could not be considered meaningful in the absence of the latter. Wheeler's diagram could well have been drawn not even in the context of the measurement problem and 'observership'.
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My philosophical view regarding what we can know: Godel stated that a consciousness can know a truth that it cannot prove - we can see this as mirroring the fundamental feature of consciousness itself: that it knows itself to exist but cannot prove this to others like itself (and further like Godel, only perhaps a state of higher-level of awareness could know of the consciousnes sof another!) .
Nmc's understand that there (likely/possibly) are unprovable truths other than the existence of consciousness, for example the moral 'ought'.
Kant's categorical imperatives are the 'oughts', and I say that this is a primitive since it is rooted in Transcendenance, and it is thus inaccessible to materilaists.
I believe that the non-disprovability of solipsisim is a stagering truth which indicates to us (or to ME! since only my awareness is known) that we will inevitably err if we assume something more, and this is born out by EPR etc, and this over-reach includes all forms of blanket self-assured statements whether it is Russel's Realism, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, or Schopenhauers " ", all assume that we can know what exsts other than our on consciousness. A scpetic agnostic approach is less likey to err, though of course the huyman brain requires models and this requires us to make generla statements but we need always to be careful, a la Bridgman...
Berkely's idealism similarly assumes some level of existence that is not exactly accessible or comprehensible since we perceive reality as material to a large degree, whereas solipsism as mean it is simply the minimalistic assumption, what Descartes said he aimed for but then overshot.
"There is the known unknown and the unknown unknown": Kant's noumenon is completely unknowable, but if so, how do we know it exists, unless it is the name given for "what we don;t know at all" including "possible inacuracies of our theory, and inconsistencies and fundmanetal misperceptions etc"
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A purposeful universe, or 'the universe has (a) purpose"What do these mean?
Better to be more specific eg:
⦁ The universe emerged into existence as a result of a conscious act made for a purpose. We might prefer the formulation "the existence of the universe fufils a purpose for some conscious entity" rather than "the universe has apurpose".
⦁ There are conscious entites which feel their lives have purpose: this is fact.
⦁ Consciousness arose in a randomly-emerging universe, and eventually sufficient intelligence achieved consciousness for there to be conscious entites which feel their lives have purpose: (The purpose they feel is undeniable and is not contingent on there having been a purpose to the emergence of the universe into existence).
⦁ Mind chose to enter into the pre-existing physical universe in order to guide its development for some reason, ie to achieve some purpose, so "the conscious aspect of the universe exists in the universe to fulfil a purpose".
⦁ Consciounsess arose in a randomly-emerging universe, and eventually sufficient intelligence achieved consciousness for the totality of it to be working towards some purpose (Consciousness did not choose to exist, but at some point in its evolution, it developed a purpose for its continuued existence.)(The totality of living entities has a purposive existence which its component parts are not necessarily aware of.)
...
APPENDIX
Besides the issue discussed above of differences in philosophical-stances that are actually due to brain-wiring, many discussions about these issues could benefit by a framing of the issue they are addressing, the assumptions they are making, etc.
For example, here is an excerpt from the Feyman lectures, at end of the chapter (Vol I: ch 38 https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_38.html and the same material in Vol III: ch 2:"Chapter 2.The Relation of Wave and Particle Viewpoints "]): https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_02.html (see very bottom of this webpage [or perhaps it willbe moved to source page on the menu])
re "tree falls in the forest":
Feynman: was there a sensation of sound? No, sensations have to do, presumably, with consciousness. And whether ants are conscious and whether there were ants in the forest, or whether the tree was conscious, we do not know.
AR: Does this mean that Feynman was NOT a materialist!? What do materialists think he meant?}
Feynman re Free will: ...the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics...has given rise to all kinds of nonsense and questions on the meaning of freedom of will...
Of course we must emphasize that classical physics is also indeterminate, in a sense. It is usually thought that this indeterminacy, that we cannot predict the future, is an important quantum-mechanical thing, and this is said to explain the behavior of the mind, feelings of free will, etc. But if the world were classical—if the laws of mechanics were classical—it is not quite obvious that the mind would not feel more or less the same. It is true .. the classical world is deterministic. Suppose, however, that we have a finite accuracy ... given an arbitrary accuracy, no matter how precise, one can find a time long enough that we cannot make predictions valid for that long a time. ....The time goes, in fact, only logarithmically with the error, and it turns out that in only a very, very tiny time we lose all our information...It is therefore not fair to say that from the apparent freedom and indeterminacy of the human mind, we should have realized that classical “deterministic” physics could not ever hope to understand it, and to welcome quantum mechanics as a release from a “completely mechanistic” universe. For already in classical mechanics there was indeterminability from a practical point of view.
Framing the discussion: I would say that what he really means is not 'free will' but rather "that which makes it possible for the brain to fool itself into actually believing the nonsensical notion that it freely chooses its actions".
It seems he assumes a rational brain would not be able to fool itself into thinking it acted/chose freely if the phenomena involved in thinking were simple and everything was predictable. But it COULD fool itself if there is 'calculational indeterminacy' which is an "effective indeterminacy", and that quantum indeterminacy which is inherent and real rather than just effective, is not even needed for this, and the "true free will" we are discussin in this paperhe he would say is meaningless, impossible.
...
Full chapter-section: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_02.html
2–6 Philosophical implications
Let us consider briefly some philosophical implications of quantum mechanics. As always, there are two aspects of the problem: one is the philosophical implication for physics, and the other is the extrapolation of philosophical matters to other fields. When philosophical ideas associated with science are dragged into another field, they are usually completely distorted. Therefore we shall confine our remarks as much as possible to physics itself.
First of all, the most interesting aspect is the idea of the uncertainty principle; making an observation affects the phenomenon. It has always been known that making observations affects a phenomenon, but the point is that the effect cannot be disregarded or minimized or decreased arbitrarily by rearranging the apparatus. When we look for a certain phenomenon we cannot help but disturb it in a certain minimum way, and the disturbance is necessary for the consistency of the viewpoint.
The observer was sometimes important in prequantum physics, but only in a trivial sense.
The problem has been raised: if a tree falls in a forest and there is nobody there to hear it, does it make a noise? A real tree falling in a real forest makes a sound, of course, even if nobody is there.
AR: He defines a sound as an air vibration, later he'll speak of the sensation: Quesiton: when people made up this conundrum though, did they mean sensation?
Even if no one is present to hear it, there are other traces left. The sound will shake some leaves, and if we were careful enough we might find somewhere that some thorn had rubbed against a leaf and made a tiny scratch that could not be explained unless we assumed the leaf were vibrating. So in a certain sense we would have to admit that there is a sound made.
[AR's bold/italics:]
We might ask: was there a sensation of sound? No, sensations have to do, presumably, with consciousness. And whether ants are conscious and whether there were ants in the forest, or whether the tree was conscious, we do not know. Let us leave the problem in that form.
[AR: Does this mean that Feynman was NOT a materialist!? What do materialists think he meant?}
Another thing that people have emphasized since quantum mechanics was developed is the idea that we should not speak about those things which we cannot measure. (Actually relativity theory also said this.) Unless a thing can be defined by measurement, it has no place in a theory. And since an accurate value of the momentum of a localized particle cannot be defined by measurement it therefore has no place in the theory.
The idea that this is what was the matter with classical theory is a false position. It is a careless analysis of the situation. Just because we cannot measure position and momentum precisely does not a priori mean that we cannot talk about them. It only means that we need not talk about them.
[AR: Is he unaware of EPR at the time of the lecture, and Bohr's position, or were the later ideas of Bell and Aspect needed to make the point?]
The situation in the sciences is this: A concept or an idea which cannot be measured or cannot be referred directly to experiment may or may not be useful. It need not exist in a theory. In other words, suppose we compare the classical theory of the world with the quantum theory of the world, and suppose that it is true experimentally that we can measure position and momentum only imprecisely. The question is whether the ideas of the exact position of a particle and the exact momentum of a particle are valid or not. The classical theory admits the ideas; the quantum theory does not. This does not in itself mean that classical physics is wrong.
When the new quantum mechanics was discovered, the classical people—which included everybody except Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Born—said: “Look, your theory is not any good because you cannot answer certain questions like: what is the exact position of a particle?, which hole does it go through?, and some others.” Heisenberg’s answer was: “I do not need to answer such questions because you cannot ask such a question experimentally.”
It is that we do not have to.
AR: In the above sentence I think he is referring to his previous statement " Just because we cannot measure position and momentum precisely does not a priori mean that we cannot talk about them. It only means that we need not talk about them". SO he is saying it seems, that Heisneberg's answer is ok, H does not NEED to answer, but the quesiotn COULD be asked. But I would ask Feynman: Isn't it extraordinary that we find that the notion of 'which slit' is 'not needed' (in your terminology)? Doesn;t that tell us something? Maybe it warns us that it might be unwise to assume the concept is meaningful?
Consider two theories (a) and (b); (a) contains an idea that cannot be checked directly but which is used in the analysis, and the other, (b), does not contain the idea. If they disagree in their predictions, one could not claim that (b) is false because it cannot explain this idea that is in (a), because that idea is one of the things that cannot be checked directly.
It is always good to know which ideas cannot be checked directly, but it is not necessary to remove them all. It is not true that we can pursue science completely by using only those concepts which are directly subject to experiment.
AR: the above and below he seems to be merely stating that human brains can only create new physics if they can create models, and models invariably contain non-measureables. Below he admits that this can lead to errors, but says that is fine, it is the way forward, and then one eliminates the errors. So he is talking about pragmatic procedure, due to our brain-limitations, he is not talking about "physical reality", or "truth".
In quantum mechanics itself there is a probability amplitude, there is a potential, and there are many constructs that we cannot measure directly. The basis of a science is its ability to predict. To predict means to tell what will happen in an experiment that has never been done. How can we do that? By assuming that we know what is there, independent of the experiment. We must extrapolate the experiments to a region where they have not been done. We must take our concepts and extend them to places where they have not yet been checked. If we do not do that, we have no prediction. So it was perfectly sensible for the classical physicists to go happily along and suppose that the position—which obviously means something for a baseball—meant something also for an electron. It was not stupidity. It was a sensible procedure. Today we say that the law of relativity is supposed to be true at all energies, but someday somebody may come along and say how stupid we were. We do not know where we are “stupid” until we “stick our neck out,” and so the whole idea is to put our neck out. And the only way to find out that we are wrong is to find out what our predictions are. It is absolutely necessary to make constructs.
AR: Again, it is all a matte of practicalities and how our brain works, not about 'reality' or 'truth' etc.
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AR: Below he speaks of Free will, but I would say that what he really means is "that which makes it possible for the brain to fool itself into actually believing the nonsensical notion that it freely chooses its actions".
We have already made a few remarks about the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics. That is, that we are unable now to predict what will happen in physics in a given physical circumstance which is arranged as carefully as possible. If we have an atom that is in an excited state and so is going to emit a photon, we cannot say when it will emit the photon. It has a certain amplitude to emit the photon at any time, and we can predict only a probability for emission; we cannot predict the future exactly. This has given rise to all kinds of nonsense and questions on the meaning of freedom of will, and of the idea that the world is uncertain.
Of course we must emphasize that classical physics is also indeterminate, in a sense. It is usually thought that this indeterminacy, that we cannot predict the future, is an important quantum-mechanical thing, and this is said to explain the behavior of the mind, feelings of free will, etc. But if the world were classical—if the laws of mechanics were classical—it is not quite obvious that the mind would not feel more or less the same. It is true classically that if we knew the position and the velocity of every particle in the world, or in a box of gas, we could predict exactly what would happen. And therefore the classical world is deterministic. Suppose, however, that we have a finite accuracy and do not know exactly where just one atom is, say to one part in a billion. Then as it goes along it hits another atom, and because we did not know the position better than to one part in a billion, we find an even larger error in the position after the collision. And that is amplified, of course, in the next collision, so that if we start with only a tiny error it rapidly magnifies to a very great uncertainty. To give an example: if water falls over a dam, it splashes. If we stand nearby, every now and then a drop will land on our nose. This appears to be completely random, yet such a behavior would be predicted by purely classical laws. The exact position of all the drops depends upon the precise wigglings of the water before it goes over the dam. How? The tiniest irregularities are magnified in falling, so that we get complete randomness. Obviously, we cannot really predict the position of the drops unless we know the motion of the water absolutely exactly.
Speaking more precisely, given an arbitrary accuracy, no matter how precise, one can find a time long enough that we cannot make predictions valid for that long a time. Now the point is that this length of time is not very large. It is not that the time is millions of years if the accuracy is one part in a billion. The time goes, in fact, only logarithmically with the error, and it turns out that in only a very, very tiny time we lose all our information. If the accuracy is taken to be one part in billions and billions and billions—no matter how many billions we wish, provided we do stop somewhere—then we can find a time less than the time it took to state the accuracy—after which we can no longer predict what is going to happen! It is therefore not fair to say that from the apparent freedom and indeterminacy of the human mind, we should have realized that classical “deterministic” physics could not ever hope to understand it, and to welcome quantum mechanics as a release from a “completely mechanistic” universe. For already in classical mechanics there was indeterminability from a practical point of view.
AR: So it seems he is talking about the notion that a rational brain would not be able to fool itself into thinking it acted/chose freely if the phenomena involved in thinking were simple and everything was predictable. But it COULD fool itself if there is 'calculational indeterminacy' which is an "effective indeterminacy", and that qunatum indeterminacy which is inherent and real rather thant just effective, is not even needed for this.
However, all this is not relevant to the discussions of "true free will" - which he would say is meaningless, impossible.
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