BBC: Horizon - Consciousness and free will

[Final-Fan]

Slimebeast said:

Final-Fan said:

Slimebeast said:

I don't believe in the concept of randomness. Is there anything in our world that has been proven to behave randomly?

In quantum physics I believe the obsrved particles acting what looks to be randomly (or particle reactions that seem to have certain % chances to have different outcomes) is actually caused by unknown factors.

Interestingly enough, I was just reading a magazine article (Discover?) about how our brains work.  Turns out that to be efficient on power consumption, the neurons work at such low energy levels that signals are misread or misfired quite often -- [edit: 30] to 90 percent!  Our brains make up for it by having a whole ton of them doing the same jobs so the right answer comes out on top.  

With this kind of computing, things don't always happen the same way every time like the computers humans build -- we put a lot more power into the transistors so they don't make mistakes.  

Even if we don't have "free will" in that these neurons are controlling us instead of the other way around, that doesn't mean that our thoughts are predetermined based on our experience.   

Well, no one said that stuff is predetermined based only on experience, right? But the argument is that everything, including our thoughts, looks to be predetermined based on the combo of biology and experience, and the question is if there's also an independent external 'free will' or 'soul' or not, in addition to biology + programming (experience).

The misfired or misread neuronal signals are still based on biological or physical mechanisms and not on any 'randomness'.

Well, I probably read too much into certain comments that could be read that way but probably weren't meant to be so.  

But even if quantum physics turns out to be deterministically derived from some even more fundamental thing, that doesn't mean that the randomness isn't there -- it just means that quantum physics isn't itself the source of the randomness.   

"Contrary to classical physics, quantum physics is fundamentally random. It is the only theory within the fabric of modern physics that integrates randomness. This fact was very disturbing to physicists like Einstein who invented quantum physics. However, its intrinsic randomness has been confirmed over and over again by theoretical and experimental research conducted since the first decades of the XXth century."

"Until recently the only quantum random number generator that existed were based on the observation of the radioactive decay of some element. Although they produce numbers of excellent quality, these generators are quite bulky and the use of radioactive materials may cause health concerns. The fact that a simple and low cost quantum random number generators did not exist prevented quantum physics to become the dominant source of randomness.

"Optical quantum random number generator 

"Optics is the science of light. From a quantum physics point of view, light consists of elementary "particles" called photons. Photons exhibit in certain situations a random behavior. One such situation, which is very well suited to the generation of binary random numbers, is the transmission upon a semi-transparent mirror. The fact that a photon incident on such a component be reflected or transmitted is intrinsically random and cannot be influenced by any external parameters. The figure below schematically shows this optical system."
http://www.randomnumbers.info/content/Generating.htm

This shows that devices on the macro scale can show effects of quantum level randomness.  Are you positive that misfiring neurons aren't another example?