Does True Randomness Actually Exist? ( ^&*#^%$&#% )

Well, I tend to ignore the bad stuff and it doesn't happen or stops happening. My younger brother died 3 years ago, my father two years ago, and I have to make the best of it. To be honest, I have way too much to do and I'm enjoying life. I even enjoy talking to people on here sometimes. Regarding fields, I think that fields are both shared and not shared, probably to suit me.

P.S. go easy on Elroch because he lives near Cambridge and we just had a General Election, which suited me fine.

Incidentally, I believe we have free will and that yes, there's a mechanism that isolates the decision-making processes in the brain from immediately reactive "causality". I call it the Zener effect, after the Zener diode. I'm sure you will know what a Zener diode is and what it does, Elroch, and therefore you should be able to work out the idea for yourself. I worked it out initially and I believe it is the only possible explanation starting from the position that we do have free will and therefore an enabling mechanism must be explained. It is my intellectual property, btw.

It's worse. My local MP is the damn Brexit minister. 

Conway and Kochen - The Free Will Theorem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPGGdijkArc

re Conway and Kochen - The Free Will Theorem, there has been quite a large number of badly designed and interpreted experiments purporting to show that human decisions are never conscious. There are typically by people with PhDs, trying to make a name for themselves. Hitherto, I've tended to give the experimenters the benefit of the doubt, concluding that they aren't that bright and have been indoctrinated. Maybe I'm being too nice about them and they really are fraudulent.

Generally they all follow the same pattern, of setting up an "experiment" where subjects are coerced into an induced hypnotic state by a repetitive element in the decisions they are asked to make. Not only are they repetitive but they are also meaningless. No-one's life can depend on the outcome of their decisions, for instance. Or they can't make a million quid by getting their decisions right. I shouldn't need to explain the rest.

By first principles such an experiment cannot possibly require, as a necessity for this general type of experiment, a consideration of spins of fundamental particles. I spent nearly a minute scanning the article in the link. Yes, nearly a full minute. I would have expected to have been given an experimental overview but all I got was someone very pleased with himself and trying to make jokes. That follows the patterns of how frauds operate. If they start off that way, they never say anything worthwhile. A proper experiment always starts off with an overview and explanation of what is intended to be achieved. Here, they are working a con trick .... probably trying to get people to believe that the truth is hidden in their mathematics. However, I don't intend to read it to find out. I didn't spend 68 years developing my intellect by failing to make conscious and rational decisions regarding what not to read and what TO read.

The link is nonsense.

I've explained to many people, over the years, why these experiments are flawed. In order to demonstrate it, I'd really need to be there at the time they were performed but occasionally when the experimenters are kind enough to provide a detailed description of their method, they can be shown to follow faulty experimental method.

Unfortunately, it is you who are making the glib claim. If you actually understood the experimental procedures, then you would be able to describe them and defend them. However, you are merely taking these people on trust. Why are you doing that? Because you already believe the results they claim to have shown, just as they did. Many experiments have been performed along these lines and I haven't seen one yet that doesn't induce a hypnotic trance in the subjects.

I can easily make an irrefutable argument that the idea that experiments show that all decisions are already unconsciously made, before they become conscious, is incorrect. The argument would be based on real-time behaviour of humans in unpredictable and dangerous situations. Situations that can cost people their lives if they make the wrong decision. A study of the nerve-transference times, cognitive response base times etc etc, compared with the time required to make such a decision, would show that in times of peril, when the nervous system becomes excited to its full extreme, decisions become conscious. They can also become conscious in sports. Most people function in sports using a type of learned behaviour but this is actually inefficient and the most successful sporting decisions would be conscious ones. Most people are incapable of this. All people are incapable of it all of the time. All people operate in a semi-conscious state most of the time and the experiments play on this.

I even saw some experiments where they "proved" that decisions take about 0.8 seconds to become conscious. They were done in universities, round about eight years ago, I think. I can't imagine how the human race managed to survive! Can you???

However, there's another aspect to these ideas. In general, materialists and determinists tend to push the idea that no real, rational choices are possible. We can get away from the idea that, for instance, rational choices have to be conscious. In my last post I made the point that most of the time we act out our lives in a semi-conscious state, not being fully aware of our thinking "in the moment". Yet we are capable of making rational choices unconsciously, partly as a matter of habit. Again, if we weren't capable of it, we wouldn't tend to survive.

So we can make rational choices at times when we are not fully conscious of them, and it takes a small time-lapse for them to enter our cognitive awareness, but this doesn't mean that our unconscious decision-making is necessarily irrational. You or they are suggesting that it's random! But we have on tap a store of all of our experiences, available in 0.2 seconds or less by processes of mental association. These are the things that are capable of informing unconscious decisions and another mistake (or is it a ploy?) made by these people is to confuse "unconsciousness" with "irrationality".

All in all, the people who are trying to indoctrinate us are doing so for political reasons and there's no reason that they will be aware of their motivations for so doing. They are simply less aware! It's a bit like Dawkins or Sam Harris telling us that it's irrational to be anything but an agnostic. They are wrong, but try explaining it to them!

I do not believe you have got a genuine definition of "free will" that goes beyond that used by Conway and Kochen (which might be expressed as the part of variation in behaviour that is not determined by all the knowable information about state). The Conway and Kochen theorem is not very weighty - it relies on the interaction of one system (a human) with another system (a simple quantum system) and concludes that you can't have one behaving in a way that is incompatible with the behaviour of the other. This is even less surprising when you remember than a human is a quantum system, just one that involves a stupendous number of particles.

Pretty much everyone who talks about free will in the way you do has not taken the step to realising that it is a psychological mirage to think of a self making decisions in a way which is of entirely different character to that of the behaviour of physical systems in general. Logically speaking, at whatever level decisions are made they have to be a combination of deterministic behaviour (determined by information about state before they occur) and random behaviour. There is no third option.

So for example, your decision as to which of two breakfast cereals you eat is to some extent determined by the state of your neurons (and sensor information interacting with them which affects that state) and partly random (because it all comes down to partially random molecules causing neurons to fire). If there was some magical additional entity that is not part of the physical system, but which affected the firing of the neurons, this entity would itself have to act in a way that is partly determined by whatever information it has access to and partly random. There is no escaping from this (just a way of forgetting it if you don't think carefully enough).

If humans don't have some kind of freedom of decision which governs their actions (free will!) then how on Earth did the brain evolve as anything more than a memory store?? Before you rubbish the idea of free will, you have to show that you understand what consciousness is and its relationship to experiences, which include those past, present and in the future, and also its relationship to will, which can be said to motivate actions. You or anyone cannot prove the non-existence of free will via a comparison between a human and a simple quantum system in any way whatsoever which is demonstrably free of faulty interpretation based on insufficient knowledge of how the mind works (not the brain) and of how the universe works at a fundamental level. To say you understand these things perfectly is silly and therefore so is the claim. It is that simple.

I am not rubbishing the idea of free will. I am just pointing out that it has no fundamental differences from the behaviour of all physical entities. The specialness of the "free will" associated with humans lies entirely in the very sophisticated nature of the physical brain, which makes it very versatile and subtle, rather than any magical "freedom".

Ha well, I do believe in what might be called magic but which is, of course, some kind of weird interference between the brain and the physical world. Of course, anyone is entitled to think that all of our thoughts are a direct result of previous states of the universe in such a way that we only imagine that we're responsible for them. In the past, that kind of thinking used to be considered to be indicative of mental illness but now that it's become fashionable to reiterate that kind of idea, that explanation doesn't hold any more, since people might think it not because they've been brought to do so due to some kind of inner turmoil but because people are actually claiming that it's correct.

It is my opinion that if it's correct then it must follow that accounts of the creation of the world, mankind and the universe must be correct. Therefore, by a reverse logic that is inductive rather than deductive, it isn't correct.

The problem of climate change has been exacerbated because mankind is divided into races and so on which evolve at different rates and which all claim independence of each other, so that we can't send in the tanks, invade Brazil and stop them burning their forests. Of course, if America was actually paying attention instead of impeaching people, Trump could send a drone and perhaps effect political change that way. Basically, mankind is at a curious impasse between complete stupidity and the dawning of an extended awareness, including of its environment. This impasse means that the conditions which are destroying our habitat are likely to persist and that our habitat will be largely destroyed. I think that will result in the deaths of 60 to 70 % of the world's population in the next century or century and a half, due mainly to famine and disease. This is bound to result in evolutionary change but not necessarily in our thinking if mankind enters a new dark age, which is entirely possible. The recent political turmoil in Britain is all about self-protection, which can only be achieved by self-government. It's too late to reverse man-made climate change.

If anyone thinks that IF what I say is true THEN it was all brought about by a mixture of random chance and preexisting states of the universe, then they're welcome to think that ... but perhaps if the Second World War hadn't happened then there might have been a possibility of something better, and the Second World War was brought about by the perversity of a number of politicians and not just by one. But climate disaster merely brings complete breakdown of our systems which means fresh challenges for mankind. Mankind will survive it and sooner or later its thinking will evolve into a form which intuitively prioritises more correctly. I believe I'm aware that mankind has free will. All I'm doing is confirming it in the face of those who would deny it, because denying it essentially harms people and also it's incorrect. And neither can it be proven that we have no free will, and neither can it ever be proven. It can merely be claimed that having no ability to make real decisions is the default position for mankind ,,,, and that would also have to be correctly demonstrated.

Thus our thoughts are a combination of a deterministic component (which causes them to make at least some sense) and a random component (which makes them to at least some extent absolutely unpredictable, either by ourselves or by anyone else).

...and ur point ?

Note that your diagram is a bit pointless since three of the sectors are known to be wrong (see my posts for the reasons).

The bottom right attaches a label to the way things are that risks being confused with more common political use of the word.