Thursday, August 02, 2007

Free Will - Is Our Understanding Wrong?

This is an article that is more suited to philosophy than physics, but still, is a direct consequence of 't Hooft's view of what QM really is. It stems from 't Hoofts claim that there is a deterministic, classical description that underlies QM. I am guessing that it is based on this paper by him titled "Determinism beneath Quantum Mechanics". But strangely enough, if this view is correct, John Conway and Simon Kochen showed that it means we have no free will! So introducing determinism in QM destroys free will. How ironic!

To be honest, I am not that fond of these types of issues, especially when many of these things can't be measured and verified. We all end up choosing one camp over another based on a matter of "tastes" than anything else. Maybe this is just the experimentalist in me rearing its ugly head.

Zz.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's not ironic. It would be ironic if introducing determinism into QM meant that we didn't have free will. It's usually the case that determinism and free will are seen as incompatible, so it would not be ironic if accepting one meant ruling out the other.