[Avodah] free will

[Micha Berger]

On Sat, Nov 28, 2020 at 07:31:51PM +0200, Eli Turkel via Avodah wrote:
> I have listened to about 10 shiurim of Rav Michael Avraham...
> 
> He analyzes determinism vs free will from just about every angle from
> philosophic to chaos theory to quantum mechanics to brain experiments.
> 
> He basically comes to the conclusion that there does not exist any logic or
> experiment that demonstrates determinism. All experiments have their weak
> points and he doesn't believe that one could construct a better experiment
> that would prove determinsim.

Yeah, but, that just proves the possitility of "free".

I mean the brain is arguably a perfectly designed Chaotic System, with
85-100bn neurons in complicated non-linear feedback loops.

Definition: Chaotic System: A system that is unpredictable because
immeasurably small difference in initial conditions can create huge
differences in outcome. Because the system has feedback, which can
magnify a small change (or dampen it) in response to other microscopic
differences. Like the proverbial butterfly fluttering its wings in Africa
making the difference between whether or not a tornado develops in the US.

But the brain is more than just chaotic. Because a neuron's behavior can
depend on stimuli on the subatomic level -- a single photon or electron's
state. Its microscopic initial conditions get down to quantum uncertainty.

So the brain can end up in very different macroscopic states due to
quantum randomness.

Then there is the No Cloning Theorem, an idea in Quantum Mechanics
which says that there is no way to copy an existing quantum state.
(Entanglement is something else, since that's about a *shared* quantum
state, not a copy.) No outside machine could ever determine what some
brain's qauntum initial microscopic state was.

So the "free" part of free will is done.

Now, define "will". Rolling a die and getting a 6 isn't an expression
of the will of the die.

Free Will requires the mind to be both deterministic and not simply
random.

And if the mind is not physical, how does it intervene in causing physical
effects without violating laws of nature. Even those, like quantum ones,
that "only" give us probabilities.

If quantum mechanics says that the odds of something happening is .5,
the soul would have to interact with brains such that over huge numbers
of interactions, it happens half the time.

Me, I think this middle ground between deterministic and random is
ineffible. I think R/Dr Moshe Koppel proves it exists in Metahalakhah
ch. 2, and I summarized his demonstration a number of times on-list
over the decades. One of which got edited and ended up on my blog
https://www.aishdas.org/asp/neither-random-nor-predetermined

But I don't think we can say what it is. Because if we could describe it
in words, we could turn it into an algorithm -- and it would be either
deterministic or random.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger                 The true measure of a man
http://www.aishdas.org/asp   is how he treats someone
Author: Widen Your Tent      who can do him absolutely no good.
- https://amzn.to/2JRxnDF                 - Samuel Johnson