It's 'plausible' as long as you never try and build a model of human behaviour. Otherwise it's probably better to stick with the existing science. There's a reason why scientists who study behaviour don't have much time for this hypothesis.
Your brush off runs into the problem that sense of agency persists whether one is predicting/deciding or explaining/rationalizing.
That's only a problem if you confuse sense of agency for agency. When you measure intentional behaviour, you're not measuring anyone's 'sense' of anything.
The fact that you can induce an artificial sense of agency doesn't imply that all agency is artificial, any more than the fact that you can induce optical illusions means that people can't really see.
Yes you are! What other QM properties are there to "explain" LFW?
Well the article on Quantum cognition refers to probabilistic superpositioning, which does match people's intuitions around certain kinds of decision making rather better than the alternatives.
Why? A QM evenet could not have been different: what have happened belongs to the past and cannot be different.
Actually, in quantum events, a past event that has not been measured can be different. Hence quantum entanglement.
Just in case your arguments from romanticism are not perfectly sound, would you be able to explain in scientific terms why free will is impossible?
\( \omega_n= \vec{desire}_n \, \, \times \, \, (pros_n - cons_n) \)
\( pros_n= \sum_{k=1}^{m} \, \, pro_k\)
with m being the number of pros. Same for cons.
Sort function for \(\omega_n\) selects greatest \(\omega_n\) to act towards.
Start at \(\omega_n\), compare to \(\omega_{n-1}\):
if \(\omega_n>\omega_{n-1}\), \(\omega_{n-1}=\omega_n\).
if \(\omega_{n-1}>\omega_{n-2}\), \(\omega_{n-2}=\omega_{n-1}\)....
....
if \(\omega_3>\omega_{2}\), \(\omega_{2}=\omega_3\).
if \(\omega_2>\omega_{1}\), \(\omega_{1}=\omega_2\).
At the end of the sort function, \(\omega_1\) has the greatest magnitude, so you will do whatever it is. It's a bit more complicated than that- there are lots of interplaying wills, and during the calculation, certain wills go up and down as focus plays on different variables (pros, cons, and desire), but basically the above set of equations could be a good simplified way of looking at will.
While I salute your grasp of Latex, the equation doesn't actually prove anything, except that if competing courses of action are defined as consisting of independent positive and negative numerical values multiplied by a scalar, then one course of action will generally end up higher than the other. Presumably the use of mathematical relationships was merely decoration? An attempt to make it look more sciency?
Of course we know that competing courses of action aren't independent values, that treating them as interval level data is unjustified, that decision making isn't just a comparison between two values, that isolating decisions from their context doesn't occur in practice, that the processing involved in decision making in is excess of the equation shown here, and that people in practice do not treat desire as a scalar, but as a pro or con in it's own right. Which leads one to wonder why you've isolated it as a scalar in the first line? Is it because otherwise, by your equation, people would do what they want to?
More generally the problem with this kind of equation is that it can be used to model almost any process. Because it can be used to model any process, the idea that it fits a particular process isn't terribly useful.
When you make a choice it is either random or calculated.
<Citation Needed>
The fact that you can use QD models to predict deterministic systems with multiple variables doesn't mean that the systems aren't deterministic.
Then you would agree with the corollary, no? That because you can use deterministic models to predict such systems, doesn't mean the systems are deterministic?
Of course decision making is deterministic. Logically, it has to be.
Presented with given a given set of options (not all available options are available to everyone), the decision that is made by the subject/brain is determined by the criteria, which is governed by memory/past experience, and the state of the processor (brain) at the time that the selection is made.
No.. you're not distinguishing between the process of decision making and the decision itself. A decision is made up of the state of the decision maker, by definition. That's not a determined process, that's just identity. That description doesn't logically make or imply anything about the process used to reach that decision. For example, you could have all the criteria arrived at by a coin flip, and it would still be the case that the decision was made by the brain, determined by the criteria and the state of the brain.
What you need, to make it logically necessary for decision making to be determined, is a prior assumption that the only alternative to determined decision making is random decision making, aka determinism. If you don't hold a priori that decisions must be determined or random, then the statement fails.
Free will would objectively appear to have some randomness. These QM processes in the brain would produce some objective randomness. Most importantly, this fits common definitions of free will, "the ability to make choices that are not controlled by fate or God" (from
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/free will ).
I think we may be missing some context here.
One of the things that's been going on in medical psychological science is a search for a paradigm - some unified concept that both fits the full run of facts and makes some kind of intuitive sense. In this search we've had proposed the engineering model, the psychochemical model, the classical and operant conditioning models, neural net models, and everything from the pandemonium model through to the holographic model. In general they work well enough to be useful in a particular area (engineering model for stress, neural net for learning, holographic for large scale brain lesions, and so on), and poorly enough in other areas that they aren't regarded as universal.
Much of the material around quantum cognition needs to be viewed in this light. The proposal is not that the brain is somehow based on particle physics, but merely that the results we see are best mapped onto a paradigm that is similar quantum mechanics rather than classical physics. Thus a decision is treated as a collapsing wave state, rather than the solution to a sum. You then look at all your existing results and see if they fit better or worse than your previous paradigm. For example, it can be useful to model the memory of serious brain lesion patients in the same manner as if it were a damaged hologram, rather than a computer circuit. It better represents the kinds of results you actually get. Brains aren't holograms, but then they aren't computers either. For the purposes of clinical memory recovery, 'hologram' is a better fit than 'computer'. Similarly, for emotional and physical stress, the engineering paradigm of a structure being stressed but not breaking better models the effects you get than if you treat the brain as a static system that is either working or broken.
The point is that these are attempts to find a paradigm that easily and consistently models the results we actually get. They're not proposals for a specific mechanism. One of the useful side-effects of playing around with these concepts is that it gives a better perspective on what it is that you're replacing.
System might not be the right word, if you're going for something non-deterministic. Even if a system has pseudorandom inputs, and chaotic outputs, in isn't non-deterministic. 