Reductionism cannot explain freedom

Scientific reductionism has made dramatic progress in nearly all areas of study, but it has failed to explain human personal freedom. Most people believe that they are rational beings with the agency to make personal choices in their daily lives.

Science has sometimes shown that personal choices are constrained by non-obvious factors, or are misinformed, or are correlated in unexpected ways. Physics predicts the future by setting up time-dependent differential equations. But ultimately people make decisions that do not feel like just the time evolution of the solution to a differential equation.

A barrier to understanding human decisions is consciousness. People collect data through their senses, and we can analyze that. The data enters the brain, and there is some progress in understanding that. But at some point the data enters into a human conscious awareness of possible choices, and the conscious brain makes a decision on its own. How that happens is a total mystery to science.

There is not even a good definition of consciousness, nor any agreement over whether animals and computers are ever conscious. They certainly do not appear to be conscious in the way that humans are, but without a sharp definition, we cannot say.

Maybe some day there will be artificially intelligent computers that are obviously conscious, and maybe there will be a good understanding of what makes a computer conscious, but maybe not. We are not even sure that other people are fully conscious.

Is Hillary Clinton conscious? She was widely regarded by intellectuals as being the most qualified person for the most important job in the world. Surely a top requirement would be for a fully conscious person who can make good decisions. And yet she also appeared fully programmed and predictable, and there was no way to be sure that she ever made any conscious decisions.

It is not even clear that it makes any sense to have a scientific explanation of freedom. Science is all about reducing observations to deterministic sequences of events. Scientific ideas are demonstrated by doing repeatable experiments.
Freedom is all about not being determined by previous events. Freedom is demonstrated by doing something that no one can predict.

Some people respond to this dilemma by denying that freedom exists. They might say, “I have a rational scientific outlook, and freedom cannot have a scientific explanation, so therefore there is no such thing.”

Or they might argue as follows. There is no god or human soul, so the brain is just a wet computer following the laws of physics. We don’t know how the brain works, but just knowing that it obeys the laws of physics tells us that it is a programmed automaton with no free will of its own because the laws of physics are deterministic.

The laws of physics are not even really deterministic, because of uncertainties from chaos, quantum mechanics, and unknown effects, but that does not faze the people making the anti-freedom argument. Their conception of science and freedom are mutually exclusive, and they would say that freedom is unscientific no matter what the laws of physics are.
Thus explaining freedom is completely intractable. Those who believe in freedom get stuck on the problem of consciousness, and the others get stuck on the problem of scientific repeatability.

Freedom is experienced by everyone who gives a rating to this essay. You can readily find detailed explanations on video display, internet communications, muscle contraction, digital computer processing, electrical power transmission, optics, and everything else related. But when it comes to actually deciding on a rating, science has almost nothing to say.

Why We Believe Obvious Untruths

A NY Times op-ed says:

How can so many people believe things that are demonstrably false? The question has taken on new urgency as the Trump administration propagates falsehoods ...

Knowledge isn’t in my head or in your head. It’s shared. ...

Consider some simple examples. You know that the earth revolves around the sun. But can you rehearse the astronomical observations and calculations that led to that conclusion? You know that smoking causes cancer. But can you articulate what smoke does to our cells, how cancers form and why some kinds of smoke are more dangerous than others? We’re guessing no. Most of what you “know” — most of what anyone knows — about any topic is a placeholder for information stored elsewhere, in a long-forgotten textbook or in some expert’s head.

No, I cannot rehearse the astronomical observations and calculations that led to that conclusion, because they do not exist.

We say that the Earth revolves around the Sun because it looks that way if you use a center-of-mass inertial frame of reference. Other frames are possible. The Earth's revolution is not really a fact, but a subjective view based on popular conventions. Yes, it is in your head, and not necessarily shared by experts.

We say that smoking causes lung cancer because of statistical correlations, not from what smoke does to our cells.

We suspect that most of those people expressing outrage lacked the detailed knowledge necessary to assess the policy. We also suspect that many in Congress who voted for the rollback were equally in the dark. But people seemed pretty confident.

Such collective delusions illustrate both the power and the deep flaw of human thinking. It is remarkable that large groups of people can coalesce around a common belief when few of them individually possess the requisite knowledge to support it. This is how we discovered the Higgs boson and increased the human life span by 30 years in the last century.

The Higgs boson was discovered by ppl who knew what they were doing, and not just accepting collective delusions. The human life span was not really increased so much. Life expectancy increased by cutting infant mortality.

It is funny how everyone is supposed to be an expert on the conclusions from long-range climate models, but no one has anything to say about the details of those models.

The authors are described:

Philip Fernbach is a cognitive scientist and professor of marketing at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business. Steven Sloman is a professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University. They are the authors of the forthcoming “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.”

So this is what cognitive science professors do? Hmmm. I think I will skip their book.

Five years to commercial quantum computer

The Economist mag reports:

A BATHING cap that can watch individual neurons, allowing others to monitor the wearer’s mind. A sensor that can spot hidden nuclear submarines. A computer that can discover new drugs, revolutionise securities trading and design new materials. A global network of communication links whose security is underwritten by unbreakable physical laws. Such — and more — is the promise of quantum technology.

No, none of this is happening.

Quantum mechanics replaced wholesale the centuries-old notion of a clockwork, deterministic universe with a reality that deals in probabilities rather than certainties — one where the very act of measurement affects what is measured. Along with that upheaval came a few truly mind-bending implications, such as the fact that particles are fundamentally neither here nor there but, until pinned down, both here and there at the same time: they are in a “superposition” of here-there-ness. The theory also suggested that particles can be spookily linked: do something to one and the change is felt instantaneously by the other, even across vast reaches of space. This “entanglement” confounded even the theory’s originators.

It is exactly these effects that show such promise now: the techniques that were refined in a bid to learn more about the quantum world are now being harnessed to put it to good use. Gizmos that exploit superposition and entanglement can vastly outperform existing ones—and accomplish things once thought to be impossible.

No, particles are not "here and there at the same time", and it never happens that "change is felt instantaneously".

Other aspects of quantum theory permit messaging without worries about eavesdroppers. ...

The advantageous interplay between odd quantum effects reaches its zenith in quantum computers. Rather than the 0s and 1s of standard computing, a quantum computer’s bits are in superpositions of both, and each “qubit” is entangled with every other. ...

Google said last week that such machines are only five years from commercial exploitability. This week IBM, which already runs a publicly accessible, rudimentary quantum computer, announced expansion plans. ...

Fortunately for quantum technologists, the remaining challenges are mostly engineering ones, rather than scientific. And today’s quantum-enhanced gizmos are just the beginning. What is most exciting about quantum technology is its as yet untapped potential. ... For much of the 20th century “quantum” has, in the popular consciousness, simply signified “weird”. In the 21st, it will come to mean “better”.

I would be in favor of giving a Nobel Prize to anyone who can demonstrate quantum supremacy. I guess the quantum computer advocates are not even going for the prize, because they imply that the big problems have already been solved, and only an engineering problem remains.

Quantum mechanics does not even help with protection from eavesdroppers, in spite of the claims. This is all a scam. In the 21st, quantum will mean scam.

If you don't believe me, wait five years and look for those commercial exploits. Research is always at least a couple of years ahead of commercialization, so Google is essential saying that quantum supremacy will be proved in the next 2-3 years.

The fallacy in all this is the belief that changes can be transmitted instantaneously, or that a particle can be in two places at once. If you believe those, it is not much more to believe that communications can bypass eavesdroppers and that particles can do simultaneous computations in parallel universes.

If quantum mechanics was invented in 1925, and quantum computing is just an engineering problem, why didn't anyone realize that until about 25 years ago?

The answer, I'm afraid, is that the founders of quantum mechanics understood the theory better than today's physicists.

Here is quantum computing, in a nutshell. Suppose I want to test a million numbers for some property. I toss a coin, splitting the world into two universes, one where I see heads and one where I see tails. I do it again, splitting those 2 universes into 4. I continue for 20 tosses, keeping a record of the sequence of heads and tails. Now I have a 20-bit number and I test the property for that number. Since 2²⁰ is about a million, there are a million copies of me in parallel universes, each testing a different number. Now I destroy the coin, and all those million coalesce into one, and if we all agree on the outcome, then it must be the same for all million. That is how quantum computers do parallel computation.

Scott Aaronson would complain that this explanation is oversimplified to the point of being wrong, because it leads you to expect exponential speedups, and that is not always possible. He likes the subject because it generates new classes of complexities for abstract theorists like him.

Okay, he is right that the computation in parallel worlds cannot be so cleanly separated and combined. I accept that. But the example is essentially right because the alleged speedups come from computations on entangled states, and you have avoid the measurement that collapses the entanglement.

It is as if they take the Schroedinger Cat metaphor too literally. They know that as soon as they open the box, they will see a dead cat, but somehow they think that a half-alive half-dead cat is going to do some meaningful work for them.

IBM to sell quantum computers

Here is the latest IBM hype:

Months after laying the groundwork for offerings in eemerging tech categories such as artificial intelligence and blockchain, IBM sees quantum computers as a big, if nascent, business opportunity. From a report on ArsTechnica:

IBM will build and sell commercial 50-qubit universal quantum computers, dubbed IBM Q, "in the next few years." No word on pricing just yet, but I wouldn't expect much change from $15 million -- the cost of a non-universal D-Wave quantum computer. In other news, IBM has also opened up an API (sample code available on Github) that gives developers easier access to the five-qubit quantum computer currently connected to the IBM cloud. Later in the year, IBM will release a full SDK, further simplifying the process of building quantum software. You can't actually do much useful computation with five qubits, mind you, but fortunately IBM also has news there: the company's quantum simulator can now simulate up to 20 qubits. The idea is that developers should start thinking about potential 20-qubit quantum scenarios now, so they're ready to be deployed when IBM builds the actual hardware.

At least one comment points to Why Quantum Computers Cannot Work.

IBM will never make a dime on this project. You read it here first.

Philosopher argues with a skeptic

Philosophy professor Massimo Pigliucci writes a rant:

Yet another frustrating conversation: why talking science to “skeptics” is a hopeless endeavor ...

First, let me remind you that Curiosa is a smart, well read, and genuinely curious person. She ain’t no country bumpkin, so to speak.

Second, precisely because she reads widely, she can’t help herself putting what I write — or what truly eminent evolutionary biologists, like Stephen Jay Gould, write — on the same level with the sort of fluff ...

Fourth, Curiosa has fallen for the well known technique of spreading doubt on mainstream science, enough that people cannot genuinely make up their minds about what is going on. This was the deliberate strategy of the tobacco industry in its absurd (and lethal, for many people) denial of a link between smoking and cancer, ...

Yes, I have had frustrating conversations with skeptics also, but philosophers like Massimo are the worst offenders.

Stephen Jay Gould was a truly eminent evolutionary biologists, but he was also also a leftist-Jewish-Marxist kook who wrote a lot of silly fluff and wrong science. His most famous book is based on faked science to support a leftist ideological view.

No one denied a link between smoking and cancer. The question was whether there was a causal link. But Massimo himself belongs to a school of philosophical thought that denies causality.

Massimo does not seem to realize that real scientists look at him the way he looks at Curiosa. Yes, he is smart and well-read, but he has been taken in by goofy philosophy ideas and has a crippled view of what science is about.

Randall trashes popular quantum gravity book

Lisa Randall has a surprising harsh review of a best-selling
popular quantum gravity book.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/books/review/reality-is-now-what-it-seems-carlo-rovelli.html

Author response.
https://www.facebook.com/Prof.Rovelli/posts/1622834574408273?__fns&hash=Ac3pgoNzSoKulTJb

She doesn't reach the heart of the problem -- that quantum gravity
is not really a scientific subject and there is no science to explain.

Lisa Randall has a surprisingly harsh review of Carlo Rovelli's popular quantum gravity book. There are comments by Woit and Motl.

She writes:

The science as presented isn’t always correct, and interpretations are misleadingly presented as facts. Explaining quantum mechanics, Rovelli says: “Electrons don’t always exist. They exist when they interact. They materialize in a place when they collide with something else. The ‘quantum leaps’ from one orbit to another constitute their way of being real: An electron is a combination of leaps from one interaction to another.”

Rovelli is correct that in some interpretations, electrons only exist as particles, and exhibit particle properties, when an interaction is observed. Otherwise they are some sort of wave-like field-like non-classical entities.

The real problem here is that quantum gravity is not a scientific subject, and there is no way to give a scientific explanation of it.

The core justification for the pursuit of quantum gravity is the claim that there is some incompatibility between quantum mechanics and general relativity. But the problem only exists at the center of black holes and during the first nanosecond of the big bang, and both of these are unobservable in principle. So there is no empirical data upon which to base a theory, and there is no way the theory could ever be tested.

Randall is right that Rovelli oversells his silly quantum gravity ideas, but so does everyone else who writes on the subject. Most of the ppl in the field are string theorists, and they oversell even more.

She is also right that he gets the most important number in the book wrong, even if the reader will not care. It is funny that all the theory can do is count orders of magnitude, and it has trouble even doing that correctly.

Randall herself wrote a popular book on how dark matter killed the dinosaurs, a theory that will never be proved. I guess she thinks that she did a better job of explaining the speculative nature of the hypothesis, and how empirical data might make the idea more or less plausible.

Paper repeats mistakes of Einstein and Bell

Belgium physicist Jean Bricmont writes:

History of Quantum Mechanics or the Comedy of Errors ...

Bohm’s theory was introducing “hidden variables”, meaning some unobservable quantities (hence, “metaphysical”) that are not part of the standard quantum mechanical description.2 Einstein had also favored the introduction of such variables in order to “save determinism”. The first objection to this idea is obvious: why bother with unobservable entities in order to satisfy a philosophical prejudice?

However, the definite blow against hidden variables was given in 1964 by John Bell who showed that, merely imagining that such variables exist leads to predictions that are in contradiction with those of quantum mechanics. Moreover, those specific predictions were later tested in laboratories and, of course, the observations came definitely on the side of quantum mechanics and against hidden variables. Case closed!

The goal of this paper is to show that all of the above is essentially false.

No, all those leading physicists are right and Bricmont is wrong.

The purpose of the hidden variable theories is to give a local classical explanation for quantum uncertainty. Bell's theorem and the subsequent experiments showed that was not possible. Mainstream physicists have understood this for decades, and textbooks explain this.

The Bell results do leave the possibility of nonlocal hidden variable theories like Bohm's, but they are much stranger than ordinary quantum mechanics, and harder to use, so there is no value in pursuing such ideas.

These are the facts. Bricmont quotes Hawking and various other respected physicists agreeing with them, but then tries to refute them with silly and misguided quotes from Einstein, Bell, and others who refused to accept quantum mechanics. More specifically, they refuse to accept non-commuting observables.

I am surprised that nonsense like this can get published. It is the equivalent of saying that relativity is wrong because of the twin paradox. Quantum mechanics is now 90 years old. Get with the program.