The old free will question revisited.

[fnord_too]

One thing I have pondered a lot is the possibility of free will. First, a little orientation to my jumbled thought process:

The future is certainly unpredictable. Even without quantum uncertainty, even if Newtonian physics held perfectly true, there would be no way to predict the exact state of the system in the future. One reason is that you need position, velocity, etc. of everything in a system to make those predictions, and those things are going to be not entirely presise no matter how many decimal places you carry them out (the existence of transcendental numbers gurantees this). But in a purely Newtonian environment, the future state of the system would be inescapable, even though unpredictable.

Unless things have changed in the past couple of years or my memory fails me, our current understanding is that quantum states are collapsed into in truely random fashion. That is, there is no deterministic reason why say a photon collapses into a state that allows it or does not allow it to pass through a polarized lens, it just does. The mainstream belief, IIRC, is that there are no suspected hidden variables that force these quantum phenomena. But...

Things do collapse into specific states. So take a system and set it in motion. Now even though quantum effects would render predicting exact future states impossible, even if we could somehow get arround the propagation of measurement error problem, since quantum effects introduce true randomness into the system (assuming the above statements are true.) But once things collapse into an observable state they will interact in accordance with the physics of the situation. (That is, the real physics defining the interaction, which may or may not correspond with current theory).

Now, onto free will. If we are merely physical beings, governed by physics, then we are certainly unpredictable and random, but can we have free will? If our brain is just a big biological neural net, then it is governed by physics. Sure, the quantum state something collapses into can have an impact on the system, but it is not an impact we control.

The notion of sentience is very hard to reconcile here. Is there an area of physics surrounding conciousness that we just have not discovered? Or are we really just a bunch of sub-atomic particles that are dancing in a determined manner to a random drummer? I certainly like to think I am more than the latter, but I have yet to see evidence that I am. Emotion is about the closest thing to a counter-argument I can come up with, but modern pharma-psychiatry looms as strong counter-counter-argument.