"Angelmaker": free will and quantum indeterminacy

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In “Angelmaker’, Nick Harkaway’s Apprehension Engine MacGuffin threatens to bring complete truth to the human race, in the process necessarily eliminating quantum uncertainty. According to the government agency tasked with suppressing this dastardly plot, this would end reality as we know it. People would be reduced to Laplacian clockwork automata; Free Will would vanish.

The agency is most likely wrong about that, and I'm still too early in the novel to determine whether the author shares that belief (which incidentally didn't seem all that upsetting to Laplace).

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AI researchers tend to take it as axiomatic that human consciousness (including the illusory sense of free will) may be implemented on a classical computer - no explicit quantum phenomena there.

But are they right?

Neurons are chemistry and chemistry is an effective theory largely decoupled from its quantum foundations. Indeed it's news when a non-classical mechanism is discovered within the chemistry of the cell, such as electron tunneling transport in ATP synthesis.

But nothing in biology depends upon 'the collapse of the wave function’.

In my QM course (SM358) we discussed atomic and molecular structure in terms of orbitals - solutions of the time-independent Schrödinger equation. There were no quantum fluctuations (except for the miniscule Lamb shift), and nowhere for free will to be smuggled in.

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I'm reminded of Greg Egan's (classical simulation) Autoverse in his novel Permutation City. If our universe could be re-engineered to work in a Laplacian fashion (and maybe it does) I don't think in a state of nature we'd really notice. Historically, people didn't, you know.

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I wrote this today while Clare was swimming. Strangely, Google didn't autocomplete this one.

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Backreaction has a post on this very subject just out. Take a look.