What does determinism have in common with gods, the FSM, and pink, invisible unicorns?

[bananas]

Bjorn Brembs does very interesting free will experiments on fruit flies,
his mentor is biologist Martin Heisenberg, son of physicist Werner Heisenberg;
Werner Heisenberg discovered the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Here he compares belief in determinism to belief in gods, the supernatural, the flying spaghetti monster and pink, invisible unicorns.

http://bjoern.brembs.net/comment-n807.html

What does determinism have in common with gods, the flying spaghetti monster and pink, invisible unicorns?

I usually don't blog about physics. Actually, I don't think I ever have, which is not surprising given that I'm not a physicist. This unusual post was prompted by an ongoing series of encounters with people asking me how I can be so sure that the universe is indeterministic. I'm explicitly writing this as an interested layperson, even though I took elementary quantum mechanics as special subject in high school and was supervised during my PhD by Martin Heisenberg, the youngest son of Werner Heisenberg.

The reason why I'm reasonably sure that the universe is indeed indeterministic is rather simple: there is no empirical evidence to suggest that the universe is deterministic and plenty of evidence that it is indeterministic. Of course, that doesn't mean that the universe may not be deterministic after all, it only means that at the moment we don't have the slightest reason to believe in determinism - which is sort of analogous to belief in the supernatural.

Because there are different concepts which people use when they talk about determinism, let me briefly clarify which of these concepts I'm referring to with 'determinism'. The kind of determinism important for behavioral biologists like me, studying spontaneous actions, is 'causal determinism', i.e., the concept that everything in the universe has a cause and every such event can eventually, in theory, be traced back to the big bang. Adherents to this idea claim that the apparent indeterminism in Quantum Mechanics is merely a testament to the finite human brain not being able to accurately account for events which are determined, but seem, to us, random or indeterminate. In essence, this is what Einstein was expressing when he exclaimed that 'god does not play dice with the universe'. Which goes to show that even geniuses like Einstein don't get everything right.

<snip>

Consequently, this would also mean that brains are, at least to the extent as they are part of this universe, indeterminate. Unlike in algae or birds, the degree to which quantum effects affect biological processes in the brain is not yet known. However, unless the brain is a bubble in which quantum effects cannot occur, some of the fluctuations in the brain which are thought to underly the generation of spontaneous behavioral variability, have some quantum origin. We don't know the fraction of these contributions, but they must be larger than zero. We also don't know how relevant they are to behavioral variability, only that they somehow contribute, simply because they occur and the nonlinear mechanisms in the brain could in principle pick them up. This, in brief, is the physics underlying the biology of free will.

Further reading:

Living in a quantum world
Dynamics, Quantum Mechanics and the Indeterminism of Nature
Free randomness amplification
No extension of quantum theory can have improved predictive power

Many thanks to Bruno Landeros for providing most of the references linked to above!

Wilson, C., Johansson, G., Pourkabirian, A., Simoen, M., Johansson, J., Duty, T., Nori, F., & Delsing, P. (2011). Observation of the dynamical Casimir effect in a superconducting circuit Nature, 479 (7373), 376-379 DOI: 10.1038/nature10561

Brembs, B. (2010). Towards a scientific concept of free will as a biological trait: spontaneous actions and decision-making in invertebrates Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 278 (1707), 930-939 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2325

[HereSince1628]

1. Just how does one recognize that an invisible unicorn is PINK?

[MarkCharles]

2. Just the same way one recognizes that one's own invisible god is the only true

god among the thousands of gods out there!

It's really simple, if you would just believe.:sarcasm:

As an aside, I'd really appreciate the OP trying to explain what that cut-and-pasted article means to him/her.

[HereSince1628]

3. But the bible tells of a visible god

at least if you believe he modeled us on his image.

[deacon_sephiroth]

5. Then why does he dislike this image?

particularly the foreskin bit... does he have it, DID he have it? Did he cut it off because it offended him?

[dmallind]

4. The same way we know the universe would be beige seen from the outside.

By knowing the wavelengths that fall in the visible spectrum.

[darkstar3]

6. How I hate the English language sometimes.

Do you know what determinism is in my world?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178091.aspx

To simplify it greatly: Determinism is the concept of reaching the same results every time given the same inputs for each iteration. It's very important for writing any kind of code you can think of.

[ZombieHorde]

7. So free will equals random shit now?

Both determinism, and the indeterminism described in this article, seem to contradict free will.

Seems to me he is suggesting we have random will.

[bananas]

8. Random just means uncorrellated or unpredictable.

So of course is a creature is acting freely instead of deterministically, it's actions will appear random.
Duh.

[ZombieHorde]

9. In mathematics, random means equal chance for every possible outcome.

This is how predictions are made in quantum mechanics. The individual events are random, and can not be predicted, but a large number of events will have predictable results.

[bananas]

11. No, it has to be uncorrelated or unpredictable.

For example, a pseudo-random number generator will have equal chance for every possible outcome,
but is not random. That's why it's called "pseudo-random".

If you want a random number generator which generates random numbers between 1 and 5,
something which generates the sequence 1,2,3,4,5,1,2,3,4,5,1,2,3,4,5,...
is not random, even though there is equal chance of each number between 1 and 5.
It's a pseudo-random number generator, and not a very good one.

[ZombieHorde]

12. Visit a math website you trust, and look up "random."

The definition I offered is really standard.

[Jim__]

10. Did you follow the links in the article?

I'm only including one link from the last paragraph, and an excerpt from that linked article:

Consequently, this would also mean that brains are, at least to the extent as they are part of this universe, indeterminate. Unlike in algae or birds, the degree to which quantum effects affect biological processes in the brain is not yet known. However, unless the brain is a bubble in which quantum effects cannot occur, some of the fluctuations in the brain which are thought to underly the generation of spontaneous behavioral variability, have some quantum origin. We don't know the fraction of these contributions, but they must be larger than zero. We also don't know how relevant they are to behavioral variability, only that they somehow contribute, simply because they occur and the nonlinear mechanisms in the brain could in principle pick them up. This, in brief, is the physics underlying the biology of free will

.


This excerpt from that new link indicates that the concept of free willl being discussed in in the article is not just randomly generated actions (my bolding):

Together with Hume, most would probably subscribe to the notion that ‘tis impossible to admit of any medium betwixt chance and an absolute necessity’ <75>. For example, Steven Pinker (1997, p. 54) concurs that ‘A random event does not fit the concept of free will any more than a lawful one does, and could not serve as the long-sought locus of moral responsibility’ <76>. However, to consider chance and lawfulness as the two mutually exclusive sides of our reality is only one way to look at the issue. The unstable nonlinearity, which makes brains exquisitely sensitive to small perturbations, may be the behavioural correlate of amplification mechanisms such as those described for the barrel cortex <74>. This nonlinear signature eliminates the two alternatives, which both would run counter to free will, namely complete (or quantum) randomness and pure, Laplacian determinism. These represent opposite and extreme endpoints in discussions of brain functioning, which hamper the scientific discussion of free will. Instead, much like evolution itself, a scientific concept of free will comes to lie between chance and necessity, with mechanisms incorporating both randomness and lawfulness. The Humean dichotomy of chance and necessity is invalid for complex processes such as evolution or brain functioning. Such phenomena incorporate multiple components that are both lawful and indeterminate. This breakdown of the determinism/indeterminism dichotomy has long been appreciated in evolution and it is surprising to observe the lack of such an appreciation with regard to brain function among some thinkers of today (e.g. <2>). Stochasticity is not a nuisance, or a side effect of our reality. Evolution has shaped our brains to implement ‘stochasticity’ in a controlled way, injecting variability ‘at will’. Without such an implementation, we would not exist.

My reading of this article is that the ability to freely make decision is unknown, but is something that can be scientifically studied.