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I think your observation can be generalised - all of physics is human narrative description of events in the universe, coupled with some principles for choosing one narrative over another.

I think when a scientist says "free will does not exist", they mean that in a very particular sense - a theory of physics (or narrative) that includes free will has as much predictive power as one that doesn't. So from a scientific point of view it's parsimonious to exclude it.

As you rightly point out this has nothing to do with the subjective experience of free will, which is an aspect of consciousness that I expect most people are familiar with (scientists or no).

By the way, this is not directly related, but who are these scientists you speak of who claim to be unable to measure time? Time, as it is used in theories like classical mechanics or relativity, has been measurable with clocks for millenia. The measurements fulfil the role of time in those theories; the predictions they make have been tested to an extreme degree. This is the strongest evidence for time as an ontological primitive that science can produce!

(which is not inconsistent with the fact that it may behave differently outside those regimes)

> I think your observation can be generalised - all of physics is human narrative description of events in the universe, coupled with some principles for choosing one narrative over another.

At least in regards to scientific study, this is not correct. The purpose of science is to discover the properties of the physically existent universe. The properties, themselves, cannot be "narrative". For example, we would not describe magnetic force as "narrative". We may use "words" to communicate what a magnetic for is, but this does not mean the magnetic force, itself, is narrative, and the magnetic force is what science is discovering.

> I think when a scientist says "free will does not exist", they mean that in a very particular sense - a theory of physics (or narrative) that includes free will has as much predictive power as one that doesn't. So from a scientific point of view it's parsimonious to exclude it.

This is an opinion on what this individual is claiming. However, I can also have an opinion on what this person is claiming, and based on my personal experience with both the body language and tone of the statement, my opinion is she is likely a Humanist or heavily influenced by Humanists (even without realizing this), as a critical part of Humanism is that free will does not exist.

> By the way, this is not directly related, but who are these scientists you speak of who claim to be unable to measure time?

It is easier for me to find them than to post a comment on HN. I am confident you experience will be similar.

> The purpose of science is to discover the properties of the physically existent universe. The properties, themselves, cannot be "narrative".

The purpose of science, as I understand it, is to discover predictive models of the extant universe. I don't think "magnetic force" is a property of the universe any more than "good" or "evil" is. It's a model that gives us good predictive power in certain regimes. It is completely inadequate in others. These models are typically operationalized using formal languages (such as mathematics, or programming languages), so I think calling them "narrative" is justified.

Science also typically proceeds in narrative fashion via papers, journals, conferences and review processes. Your comment strikes me as a map/territory confusion.

> It is easier for me to find them than to post a comment on HN. I am confident you experience will be similar.

This is nice rhetoric, but I know a lot of physicists and none of them claim that they cannot measure time. We literally do it all the time when we set alarms, run stopwatches, etc. It's only mysterious when you get to regimes that physics has yet to capture adequately (microuniverse or extremely high energy microuniverse).

> humans have no free will

I believe that human brains harness quantum uncertainty and chaos theory to combine stateful information (such as preference for chocolate icecream) and recursive processes to make 'free' decisions which aren't random and fundamentally unknowable to outsiders without destroying the human (similar to a quantum system which can't be measured in more than one dimension without destroying it).

At what point did the brain transition from not "harnessing quantum uncertainty and chaos theory to combine stateful information and recursive processes" to doing so? Do fish brains? What about the jellyfish nervous system?

My problem with these types of explanations is that they are so egotistical. We probably all agree that a rock doesn't have free will. Is there no quantum uncertainty and chaos theory happening inside a rock? What about in a solar system?

> a rock

A rock certainly isn't going to surprise us in any time scale relevant for us. The processes shaping it will be more from the outside than inside it's boundaries. Certainly chaos theory and quantum uncertainty are at play, but the stone is rather just like a single pendulum which swings rather very predictably and humans seem to be more like dual pendulums which are so chaotic that they escape simulation beyond minutes.

We have come far to scan the brain for the manifestation of conscious decision making, but nobody serious is claiming that we can predict human choices from say 20 minutes before a decision is made. In the same sense that we can predict the weather now 7-10 days but would never think it viable to go for 100 day weather forecasts.

This phenomenon is certainly on a sliding scale and we might simulate rather well jellyfish, fly, and increasingly bigger brains, but the fundamental uncertainty just means we won't be able to get the outcome correct enough the longer we look into the future.

Our inability to predict something on an arbitrary timescale isn't the threshold for free will, right? Otherwise, we'd say tornadoes and hurricanes exhibit free will.

I think that is a requirement for free will, but not sufficient.

You also need locality (from within a boundary rather than remote controlled) and difference from randomness. Probably some more.

I believe that with perfect information, humans are predictable, but that doesn't make the will any less free.

Just because someone could predict that you would make a decision doesn't mean you didn't make the decision, it just means you're internally consistent.

Isn't this just saying that you _don't_ have free will? All of your choices are made before you are even born in this world view.

But you still get to make them yourself, too. If free will is synonymous only with unpredictability, than you'd necessarily have to make some choices that you don't want to in order to demonstrate free will, and that doesn't really make sense to me.

What am I making if it was determined before I existed? It can't be a choice, because I don't actually have any other choice.

I figure you have the choice. You could choose to do otherwise, but you don't. If someone offers to give me a million dollars absolutely free, or to not do so, just because I could be predicted to take the million dollars doesn't mean I don't have the choice to reject it. I'm not being coerced to take it. It's just a very predictable decision.

> It's just a very predictable decision

But if it's a certainty, with perfect information, then there's no choice to be had. The choice is an illusion.

I think you’re presupposing the existence of free will. Here’s a question for you: what explanatory or predictive value does the concept of free will have?

The goal of the concept of free will is to explain that there is a possibility of an event to be 'caused' by a human (or another life form sufficiently able).

Without the concept of free will you would have to assume that the cause for the event is originating from something else (a calculation of sorts based on previous states of the universe is a commonly stated alternative).

Free will walks the line of being a physics-based process which is neither to easily deterministic such as stone being heated in the sun or too random such as a radioactive element emitting a radioactive decay at a random/statistical time but still localizes the cause for an event in some assemblage of atoms such as a living being.

We know that the universe doesn't permit perfect information. You have to pick if you want to know the speed of a particle or its location once you approach the tiniest scales (and various other trade-offs based on the fundamental uncertainty). Thus you can't predict perfectly how a system will behave.

Neuronal processes in the brain seem to be build in a way to amplify such tiniest scale difference to generate divergent outcomes from very similar sensory and memory inputs.

Exactly, this is my thinking as well; I've mentioned the recursive concept in another comment before.

And I suspect the question of free will is not resolvable until the hard problem of consciousness is solved. The cells in our bodies may not have free will, but we might. The issue involves characterizing what exactly does or does not have free will, which is bound up with the question of consciousness.

I like to assume both sides of the free will argument will be wrong in the future. The future answers will be wrong as well. This is consistent with history.

> cannot be sampled

Time is measured by clocks.

> Time is measured by clocks.

What is the fundamental unit of time discovered by using these "clocks"?

What do you mean by "fundamental unit"? Like, what would you consider a "fundamental unit" of space?

What I am doing here, really, is demonstrating that time does not seem to be a particle, which is usually made up of some fundamental unit (molecules are made from atoms, atoms are made from nucleons, those are made from quarks, etc) or is a fundamental unit.

Same with space

Can you define "space"?

how much time have you got?

I have a volume of spacetime approximately equal to 5e11 quartic meters :)

These clocks fundamentally measure how long certain processes at the quantum level take. We can measure time now so exactely that on the scale of the age of the universe we are less than 1/10th of a second inaccurate. Or as another example clocks are now so accurate that we can measure the time dilation by raising a clock in the gravitational field of the earth by millimeters.

How does this compare to confirming the existence of other things demonstrated to exist? For example, do we confirm the existence of a proton as some percent of the universe of protons? The same for gravity? Magnetism? Why is it that with time, we are always using some kind of tolerance statement based on some understanding of the entire existence of the universe (which I am unclear on how to test such theories), meaning that we still are not coming to a single statement "time is x" while also assuming time to exist (I haven't seen things published such as "we are less than 1/10th of a nuclear force inaccurate" because this is not how the nuclear force is demonstrated to exist)? To me, this suggests there may be certain broadly predictable properties of the universe such that time seems to explain some aspect what we observe, but it is merely concurrent with the mechanics of the universe and useful for human understanding, but not something that exists (note that this is my interpretation, not a scientific proposition).

(Conceptually similar to how the Ptolemaic model of the universe can predict the cycles of the stars, but does not provide a description of how the universe works, but I'm not trying to change the topic, just to stick strictly here to demonstrate things can be useful and scientifically not true.)

every single measurement is subject to measurement uncertainty. the mass of an electron will be quoted with some errorbar.

we had a quote in the lab at uni: errorbars or it didn't happen. errorbars aren't a weakness, on the contrary, they indicate how confident we are of some measurement.

The measurement of the mass of an electron is not the same as the claim that an electron exists, the latter of which is not stated with tolerance.