: Most people, however, don't define a person's choice as
: free if it's transparently obvious that, because of
: the sort of person he is, he'd make the choice that
: way. We don't blame alcoholics for choosing to drink
: themselves blind, because we don't believe the choice
: was free--there was no way they'd opt for temperance.
: Personally, I don't think "free will" has
: any real meaning. You're all puppets! Puppets!!
Yes, we are all puppets of the past, barring quantum chaos (in which case we're just puppets of a slightly different past). However, without knowing ALL of the past (or, to be accurate, the exact state of the entire universe, including positions AND velocities of all elementary wave/particles - which you should know can't be done - at any given moment in time), you can't perfectly predict the future. The less you know, the harder it is to predict, and it's pretty hard to know so much that you can perfectly predict what a person will do. So, from any being less than a 1000% omniscient god, people can be said to have free will.
: BTW, a couple of different types of causal loops have
: already been shown to be possible under the rules of
: modern physics. General relativity allows an object to
: move along a trajectory which, from our point of view,
: is closed in spacetime--that is, the object eventually
: (in its own frame of reference) travels back to the
: same place in space and time (in our frame of
: reference) as it used to occupy. And in Feynman's
: description, the QED-governed production and
: annihilation of a particle-antiparticle pair is a
: causal loop; the particle travels forward in time,
: emits a photon, is knocked backwards in time by the
: "recoil," absorbs a photon, and heads
: forward again. What we see as an antiparticle is
: actually the particle on the backwards leg of its
: trip.
: **is rushed by an angry mob of physicists and beaten to a
: pulp for his ridiculously simplified description of a
: process only truly describable by math he doesn't know
: yet**
Ah, I know the feeling. I've developed a perfect Grand Unified Theory, but refuse to show it to any real physicist for fear that they'll laugh since it has no math in it, just written concepts. That, and fear that they'll take it, develop the math, and publish it as their own.
"Homer, I really like your idea of a donut-shaped universe. In fact, I may just have to steal it." - Steven Hawkings, "The Simpsons"
: Actually, you'd get a dot. You only see the ripple
: pattern when you fire a whole lot of electrons
: through--the impact dots accumulate over time to form
: the pattern. It's a statistical process.
Ah! But when you put a sensor over one of the slits, all the electrons land in the same place on the film behind it? I don't quite get it.
(Another odd thing about this experiment that I've heard: if the computer sensing the particles is set to erase the data after sensing them, they appear as waves. But if it is set to keep the data, or a human is looking at it as it happens, they appear as particles. So an event in the future - the reading or erasure of the data - effects an event in the past - whether the thing appears as particle or wave).
