[tpetrina]

This whole article reeks of "science is BS, we need free will for humans to be real and morally responsible".

For all of its smart wording, this amounts to the same old issue Aristotle had with describing the mathematical universe in which somehow humans are different enough to warrant "higher stuff".

Is there any useful criticism of science besides pseudo-attacks always coming from antropocentric, and usually religious, corners? Can't we just do the one, final Copernican shift and frickin' move humans from the centre?

[wizzwizz4]

The development of quantum mechanics suggests not. When we come up with a new field, even the brightest minds will struggle to ignore anthropocentrism, coming up with wild theories like:

> These equations seem to govern the behaviour of all our toy experiments, with multiple superimposed world states interfering with each other when they happen to transform into the same state as each other… except when a human looks at the result, whereupon all but one of the world states just vanishes!

The first person I know of¹ to propose that the world states don't just vanish – it's just that "brain that sees event X" and "brain that sees event Y" don't converge to the same state, so you don't see quantum interference when people get involved – was Hugh Everett III. This is a simpler explanation, stops quantum mechanics contradicting special relativity, solves the EPR paradox, side-steps Bell's theorem, stops God playing dice with the universe… in short, it solves every problem² except where the Born rule comes from.³

When he proposed it to Niels Bohr, he was laughed out of the room.⁴

In principle, we could probably eliminate anthropocentrism in physics models from popular consciousness entirely… but then we wouldn't be prepared for new fields, where we'd introduce it right back again.

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¹: Okay, technically Erwin Schrödinger mentioned the idea five years earlier, but he didn't do much with it. Apart from, you know, coming up with the equation in the first place…

²: Edit to add: I didn't know about Grete Hermann's flaw in John von Neumann's proof that all non-local hidden variable theories were impossible. Such theories still violate special relativity, but they're not impossible; many-worlds doesn't solve this problem because it isn't actually a problem. (Many-worlds is still the simplest theory I know of, but I'm less certain that it's the simplest possible theory consistent with the evidence… making this comment less relevant than I initially thought it was.)

³: Some people think many-worlds explains the Born rule. I haven't heard all the arguments, but all the ones I've heard have been wrong.

⁴: Artistic license. But Léon Rosenfeld certainly considered him "undescribably stupid" and unable to "understand the simplest things in quantum mechanics".

[mannykannot]

> This whole article reeks of "science is BS, we need free will for humans to be real and morally responsible".

For what it is worth, I did not read it that way at all, and the fact that the author is a neuroscientist suggests (though does not prove) that it was not intended as such.

To me, the article seems consistent with the view that the universe is reducible to a fundamental physics, leaving the author puzzling over why many of us feel we have more agency than this view would seem to imply. It is a reasonable issue for anyone, not just neuroscientsts, to ponder.