>
> Someone once asked William Provine of Cornell, a strict classical
> determinist who discounts any notion of free will, or God for that matter,
> if he thought quantum indeterminancy had any relevance for the issue of
> free will, i.e. whether or not we can truly initiate events rather than be
> completely limited to being "downstream" links in causal chains. He said
> no, that any objective indeterminancy that might exist at the atomic level
> would be "damped out" at the level of molecules on up. I'm not so sure,
> and I note that a meeting called "Tuscon II" will be held April 8-13, 1996
> at the Univ. of Arizona called "Toward a Science of Consciousness 1996."
> One of the questions to be addressed at that meeting: Is there any
> experimental evidence to indicate that quantum effects play a role in the
> processes of the mind?
>
At a meeting last year, I asked a similar question of Murray Gell-Mann, the
physicist who developed the quark theory and now heads up the Santa Fe
Institute. (This institute is focusing its efforts on pioneering new fields of
science such as complexity theory and artificial life; Gell-Mann wrote a book
about it ("The Quark and the Jaguar") and I also read an excellent book on the
Complexity by W. M. Waldrop - which I commend to everyone.)
Anyway, I asked Gell-Mann what he thought free will was. He said, "I don't
know. It could be a phenomenon that emerges from memory, or possibly from
quantum fluctuations."
(I thought it was pretty cool that I could ask a question that stumped a
Nobel prize winner.)
Someday I would like to write a review of some of the literature in
complexity; it seems to be promising in terms of getting to the bottom of the
'hard question' about the origin of new genetic information. This work has been
mostly ignored by Christian critics, as far as I can tell.
Paul Arveson, Research Physicist
73367.1236@compuserve.com arveson@oasys.dt.navy.mil
(301) 227-3831 (W) (301) 227-1914 (FAX) (301) 816-9459 (H)
Code 724, NSWC, Bethesda, MD 20084