Quote:
Originally Posted by Rod66
Nesti, in your discussion, one has to consider if by knowing the future, does it really affect what we do next OR if knowing the future was already a predetermined consequence of our particles reaction to previous particle interaction. Thus changing our future because we see the future (and see something we didn't like) was already a known reaction and therefore no matter how many times we see the future and react to it, its still a known reaction and therefore we have no free will...
Your head will hurt if you think about this for too long.
|
Um, I personally feel that knowing the future is impossible, however, knowing how the future is derived ie, the bits and pieces which come together in creating a stable physical environment, where deterministic behavior and freedom of choice peacefully coexist, can be known. BUT, knowing whether a particle will go this way or that, or whether the cat will be dead or alive, is just not possible. Freedom of Choice may well overpower determinism over extend numbers of events. If so, quantum computation will be accurate only most of the time, not ALL the time.
My head is fine; just spent 4 years writing on this exact subject.
(sorry for the length)
Aharanov writes;
"5.2 The Problem of Free-Will
The “destiny-generalization” of QM inspired by TSQM (§4.2) posits that
what happens in the present is a superposition of effects, with equal contribution from past and future events. At first blush, it appears that perhaps we, at the present, are not free to decide in our own mind what our future steps may be26. Nevertheless, we have shown [32] that freedom-of-will and destiny can “peacefully co-exist” in a way consistent with the aphorism “All is foreseen, yet choice is given” [78, 76].
The concept of free-will is mainly that the past may define the future,
yet after this future effect takes place, i.e. after it becomes past, then it
cannot be changed: we are free from the past, but, in this picture, we are not necessarily free from the future. Therefore, not knowing the future is a crucial requirement for the existence of free-will. In other words, the destinyvector cannot be used to inform us in the present of the result of our future free choices.
We have also shown [32] that free-will does not necessarily mean that
nobody can in principle know what the future will be because any attempt to communicate such knowledge will make the memory system unstable, thereby allowing the freedom to change the future. Suppose there is a person who can see into the future, a prophet. Then while we, at the present are making a decision, and have not yet decided, the prophet knows exactly what this decision will be. At this point, as long as this prophet does not tell us what our decision will be, we are still free to make it, since we know that if the prophet had told us what our decision was going to be, then we would be free to change it and his prophecy would no longer be true. Therefore, the prophet could be accurate as long as he doesn’t tell us our future decision. Our decisions stand alone and the prophet’s knowledge does not affect our free-will....Only in the future, when all the measurements are finished and we actually make the post-selection, can we retrospectively conclude whether the eccentric-weak-value shown by the measuring-device was either an error, or a real result due to the concrete post-selection. Again, the conditions for a weak-measurements require a high probability of experimental error. From this we conclude that our prophet, the post-selected vector coming from the future, does not tell us the information we need to violate our freewill, and we are still free to decide what kind of future measurements to conduct. Therefore, free-will survives."