Re:Quantum Approaches to Consciousness (2015)
by zeotroph on Thursday June 01, 2017 @01:16PM
(#14462280)
Indeed, Making a decision« is not a coherent concept., I should have written the quoted sentence as "making a 'decision' means you will then randomly (but weighted) fall into one outcome". Whether that source of randomness is QM or just deterministic chaos* (say, it depends on being somewhere a second early or any other butterfly-factor). The point is, some decisions might always have a p=1.0, others only a p=.8. And in the not-QM case that is decided by other factors in advance, so the closer you get to the point-in-time itself, the closer it gets to 1.0.
The point is that these different probability values are there, and could be a faux-will. E.g., no matter how bad your commute was, you will be kind to your coworkers (high p), or if your mind encounters new information, you might change your mind (p ~ .5).
Concrete example:
like encouraging people are meaningless
Person has an exam in a week, nobody cheers, and depending how good the coffee is over a week, the weather, etc., p_passing_the_exam is 0.6. So, rolling back time and playing it again 40:60, QM outside the mind, maybe someone making decisions with a geiger counter could be the randomness source. But with some encouraging, p might climb to 0.7 because they outweigh some negative factors. The fact that you cheered someone on, is of course also just a certain probability, but one which you could shape.
* if it is all deterministic chaos and QM is a big lie, then Maxwells daemon could compute it all, but nobody in this universe will every have access to all that data, so it is the same.
The point is that these different probability values are there, and could be a faux-will. E.g., no matter how bad your commute was, you will be kind to your coworkers (high p), or if your mind encounters new information, you might change your mind (p ~ .5).
Concrete example:
like encouraging people are meaningless
Person has an exam in a week, nobody cheers, and depending how good the coffee is over a week, the weather, etc., p_passing_the_exam is 0.6. So, rolling back time and playing it again 40:60, QM outside the mind, maybe someone making decisions with a geiger counter could be the randomness source. But with some encouraging, p might climb to 0.7 because they outweigh some negative factors. The fact that you cheered someone on, is of course also just a certain probability, but one which you could shape.
* if it is all deterministic chaos and QM is a big lie, then Maxwells daemon could compute it all, but nobody in this universe will every have access to all that data, so it is the same.