We could wonder if the philosophical problem of freedom, or "free will", might get a boost from the idea of quantum entanglement. In the Newtonian universe -- "an orderly, predictable universe where one thing clearly caused another thing to happen" -- it is exceedingly difficult to find an explanation for the mechanism of free will. I doubt that quantum theory provides a way for the universe to be entirely, or ultimately, unpredictable. At this point in our understanding, we find it difficult to predict the future, mostly because we have not yet devised the means to peer into the depths of space to be able to see or detect what is heading toward us.
I like the idea that the human mind has an aspect that could be explained by some kind of field theory that enables us to have moral agency, and moral dilemmas. Gottfried Leibniz argued that even in a deterministic universe -- the Newtonian universe, which is like a clockwork mechanism -- free will should still be possible. I can't recall Leibniz talking about anything like quantum entanglement.
If the mind can exist, or operate, in a field that offers immunity from the deterministic effects of the mechanical universe, we might be able to settle the question of freedom, and moral agency.
How far down the emergence rabbit hole have you gone so far? I've eagerly embraced the idea that free will could be a thing and the universe still be deterministic, paradoxical as it might sound, by way of the same sort of emergent properties we see from all sorts of simpler systems that produce surprising complexity. I'm with you here.
I had to look up emergence, so you get full credit for introducing me to something important that I have completely missed.
I began working on my cosmology in 1967. I evolved from "cogito, ergo sum" to "something exists". Creation ex nihilo is impossible to conceive, so what exists must go through phase changes, like ice, liquid water, and steam, or mass and energy. I postulated a third state following H2O: mass, energy, and something more ethereal, as "spirit" or "mind" or some kind of field phenomena. I used Genesis as a model, but instead of a Creator, the eternal being, or eternal state of being, pulled itself together with gravity, and intentionally became protons, electrons, quanta. It could not imagine a tree, but it could attempt to solve the problem of being alone in the middle of nowhere.
So now we have a self-assembled universe made of protons and electrons and quanta. From an epistemological perspective, we cannot honestly say we know that Life exists elsewhere. In all of the "petri dish" galaxies, for all we know, this may be the only place that the magic happened, the only place where everything was just right, for Life to begin. Until we learn otherwise, we should treat our Earth as precious and irreplaceable. And we should learn how to sustain life beyond our local star.
I think the emergent universe theory logically emerges from a teleological analysis of observable phenomena. Why THIS universe? I love this world. Wouldn't want to lose it.
This type of thinking really stretches your brain, and it's really good for your mind. I hope folks are reading through these comments and thinking a bit more! I feel you on the existence of extraterrestrial life. Everyone is quick to point to the Drake equation, but nobody seems to remember that we have exactly one individual data point.
This book attracted my attention when it was published: "Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe." Here is the wikipedia article about the Rare Earth Hypothesis:
The article mentions Frank Drake, along with Carl Sagan. They argued that Life is probably abundant throughout the universe.
My memory suggests that the authors, two professors at the University of Washington, later recanted their original arguments.
Without data, it seems that all speculation is just that: guesswork.
Your observation, that we have exactly one data point, is also the basis of my opinion on how we should conduct ourselves with respect to our home planet. As far as we know, our planet is the only place in the whole universe, full of galaxies, where the experiment bore fruit. If this world is the hoped-for outcome of 14 billion years of evolution, we should stop mucking it up, and begin to get serious about working to restore the balance of Nature we who are now senior citizens can easily remember from our youth in the 1940s and '50s. We may discover that we have a mission which we have not yet glimpsed. Socrates warned against hubris: he said something to the effect of, the more I learn, the more I understand how little I know.
I will look forward to delving into the theories of quantum entanglement. There are some places to which my mind refuses to travel -- such as time travel. I read Bishop Berkeley's "De Motu" in college -- nearly half a century ago. I tried to read it again a few years ago, but I could not reconcile what I was reading with what I thought I remembered. My understanding back in my youth was that time is a function of motion, simply a measurement of relative motion between lumps of mass. It seemed clear to me that there could be no travel backward or forward in time because the bodies are no longer where they were, nor where they will be. The bodies are where they are in the present moment, and the present moment is very narrowly bounded between past and future. I like to tell a story about the variable width of the present moment. It is wider on a lazy summer Sunday afternoon, which we wish could be endless. It is narrower in dangerous situations, such as driving on the Interstate highway, or in a war when there is a sniper in the tree line and everybody is in a state of hyper-alertness, and the width of the present moment is barely one second wide. To my way of thinking, anything beyond those narrow boundaries is the stuff of mental constructs, hypothetical, improbable. But I will try to get into quantum entanglement!
I posit after much study by the way of practical application to my direct experience in life and people fortunate or not enough to know me~ we cannot fight fate, we can run and shirk corners to avoid it, now here’s the kicker, free will yes, to an extant only as much as will not interfere with fate designed by superior forces. So the ending is decided but shall we embrace the journey?
We must if we are to suffer through seeing evil winning atm but not for long.
Good over evil wins.
Trample the abusers.
That’s my mission to protect people without a voice.
We will win!
Only by heaven forces.
Peace and blessings
I have written much about quantum entanglement and RPG Theory.
Also the foundation of quantum computing! I read something the other day about how smartie scientists are using superposition and entanglement to generate and transfer energy instantaneously (!)
Very promising stuff! Of course, we're talking decades and not years into the future for this to be super useful, but we are marching toward this right now.
You have a gift for explaining things…
Thanks, David!
We could wonder if the philosophical problem of freedom, or "free will", might get a boost from the idea of quantum entanglement. In the Newtonian universe -- "an orderly, predictable universe where one thing clearly caused another thing to happen" -- it is exceedingly difficult to find an explanation for the mechanism of free will. I doubt that quantum theory provides a way for the universe to be entirely, or ultimately, unpredictable. At this point in our understanding, we find it difficult to predict the future, mostly because we have not yet devised the means to peer into the depths of space to be able to see or detect what is heading toward us.
I like the idea that the human mind has an aspect that could be explained by some kind of field theory that enables us to have moral agency, and moral dilemmas. Gottfried Leibniz argued that even in a deterministic universe -- the Newtonian universe, which is like a clockwork mechanism -- free will should still be possible. I can't recall Leibniz talking about anything like quantum entanglement.
If the mind can exist, or operate, in a field that offers immunity from the deterministic effects of the mechanical universe, we might be able to settle the question of freedom, and moral agency.
How far down the emergence rabbit hole have you gone so far? I've eagerly embraced the idea that free will could be a thing and the universe still be deterministic, paradoxical as it might sound, by way of the same sort of emergent properties we see from all sorts of simpler systems that produce surprising complexity. I'm with you here.
I had to look up emergence, so you get full credit for introducing me to something important that I have completely missed.
I began working on my cosmology in 1967. I evolved from "cogito, ergo sum" to "something exists". Creation ex nihilo is impossible to conceive, so what exists must go through phase changes, like ice, liquid water, and steam, or mass and energy. I postulated a third state following H2O: mass, energy, and something more ethereal, as "spirit" or "mind" or some kind of field phenomena. I used Genesis as a model, but instead of a Creator, the eternal being, or eternal state of being, pulled itself together with gravity, and intentionally became protons, electrons, quanta. It could not imagine a tree, but it could attempt to solve the problem of being alone in the middle of nowhere.
So now we have a self-assembled universe made of protons and electrons and quanta. From an epistemological perspective, we cannot honestly say we know that Life exists elsewhere. In all of the "petri dish" galaxies, for all we know, this may be the only place that the magic happened, the only place where everything was just right, for Life to begin. Until we learn otherwise, we should treat our Earth as precious and irreplaceable. And we should learn how to sustain life beyond our local star.
I think the emergent universe theory logically emerges from a teleological analysis of observable phenomena. Why THIS universe? I love this world. Wouldn't want to lose it.
This type of thinking really stretches your brain, and it's really good for your mind. I hope folks are reading through these comments and thinking a bit more! I feel you on the existence of extraterrestrial life. Everyone is quick to point to the Drake equation, but nobody seems to remember that we have exactly one individual data point.
This book attracted my attention when it was published: "Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe." Here is the wikipedia article about the Rare Earth Hypothesis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis
The article mentions Frank Drake, along with Carl Sagan. They argued that Life is probably abundant throughout the universe.
My memory suggests that the authors, two professors at the University of Washington, later recanted their original arguments.
Without data, it seems that all speculation is just that: guesswork.
Your observation, that we have exactly one data point, is also the basis of my opinion on how we should conduct ourselves with respect to our home planet. As far as we know, our planet is the only place in the whole universe, full of galaxies, where the experiment bore fruit. If this world is the hoped-for outcome of 14 billion years of evolution, we should stop mucking it up, and begin to get serious about working to restore the balance of Nature we who are now senior citizens can easily remember from our youth in the 1940s and '50s. We may discover that we have a mission which we have not yet glimpsed. Socrates warned against hubris: he said something to the effect of, the more I learn, the more I understand how little I know.
I will look forward to delving into the theories of quantum entanglement. There are some places to which my mind refuses to travel -- such as time travel. I read Bishop Berkeley's "De Motu" in college -- nearly half a century ago. I tried to read it again a few years ago, but I could not reconcile what I was reading with what I thought I remembered. My understanding back in my youth was that time is a function of motion, simply a measurement of relative motion between lumps of mass. It seemed clear to me that there could be no travel backward or forward in time because the bodies are no longer where they were, nor where they will be. The bodies are where they are in the present moment, and the present moment is very narrowly bounded between past and future. I like to tell a story about the variable width of the present moment. It is wider on a lazy summer Sunday afternoon, which we wish could be endless. It is narrower in dangerous situations, such as driving on the Interstate highway, or in a war when there is a sniper in the tree line and everybody is in a state of hyper-alertness, and the width of the present moment is barely one second wide. To my way of thinking, anything beyond those narrow boundaries is the stuff of mental constructs, hypothetical, improbable. But I will try to get into quantum entanglement!
I posit after much study by the way of practical application to my direct experience in life and people fortunate or not enough to know me~ we cannot fight fate, we can run and shirk corners to avoid it, now here’s the kicker, free will yes, to an extant only as much as will not interfere with fate designed by superior forces. So the ending is decided but shall we embrace the journey?
We must if we are to suffer through seeing evil winning atm but not for long.
Good over evil wins.
Trample the abusers.
That’s my mission to protect people without a voice.
We will win!
Only by heaven forces.
Peace and blessings
I have written much about quantum entanglement and RPG Theory.
Best
Spooky action indeed. Missed opportunity to call them Halloween particles.
Einstein never got to practice his quips on Substack, so credit where it's due: he still did pretty good!
Also the foundation of quantum computing! I read something the other day about how smartie scientists are using superposition and entanglement to generate and transfer energy instantaneously (!)
Very promising stuff! Of course, we're talking decades and not years into the future for this to be super useful, but we are marching toward this right now.
Quantum Energy Teleportation man how cool does that sound and I don't want to wait
Drink plenty of water, go for lots of walks, eat pretty healthy, and stay sane! Let's get there.
Good advice :)
I'm gonna try. I'm no saint, but I do drink a lot of water and try to get plenty of sleep, and I tend to stay active.