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Free Will 349

Let us say the Mars particle chooses its answer because of an
external influence. Its Hubble twin must choose the same answer. There
is no problem with this because the Hubble particle could have made its
decision before the Mars particle, so the decision was not predetermined.

But in another frame of reference the choice is made in the opposite
sequence. The Hubble particle chooses after the Mars particle. This is
predetermination and it breaks the Kochen-Specker theorem.

You can reverse the whole analysis and see the same problem from
the other point of view. There is a paradox here however you look at it.

The only solution to the paradox is that both particles make their
choice without any information from an outside source; particles have
free will. This means at least one new piece of information spontaneously
appears in the Universe – a ‘bit’ of free will, so to speak.

You might think there is a problem because the first particle affects
its twin, even if the second did not receive any outside influence. This
would result in the Kochen-Specker paradox reemerging. There is a
neat way out of this; time has no meaning for the particles. Or, I should
say, relative time has no meaning and, therefore, has no effect. There is
no concept of before or after between the particles. They live in a little
bubble of space-time where the order of events has no meaning. The
particles make their free choice together within this safe bubble, and the
paradox is avoided. When we come to measure them, we see they both
made a random decision together, but if we ask which made it first, the
question has no meaning. There is no clock valid for both particles, so
there is no possible answer to the question.

Conway and Kochen have proven sub-atomic particles have free will
– or at least entangled bosons do. At this point, their argument becomes
a philosophical one. They propose that these particles pass on this free
will to larger entities in the Universe and ultimately to us. Although
particles are small and insignificant, they are the fundamental building
blocks of nature, and the butterfly effect multiplies up tiny variations in
the microscopic world into the macroscopic events we see.

Although their theorem is very elegant, we still have to address the
question of whether the experimenter has the true freedom to run the
experiment in the first place: the determined determinist argument.

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