Stephan Wehner

Over here in British Columbia (“B.C.” – also known as “Bring Cash”), it’s election time. (I can’t vote for lack of citizenship, but that is another story.) This time, like last time, there is also a referendum on “Electoral Reform”, to switch to the Single Transferable Vote system (oh boy, they even have a video).

On the weekend I remembered a few ideas I had some years ago about alternatives to the ordinary democratic arrangement. I could recall two but I knew there were three; it took a visit to the Wise Hall to recover the third one: it was a friend’s favourite from when I passed it by her at the time.

None of these are likely to work as such; I think it’s nice to ponder though. Here they are, enjoy:

1. “Copy and Paste”

Instead of maintaining a parliament for your city, province or country, just copy the laws some other parliament comes up with and make them your own. They pass a new law, it becomes yours too. They remove one, its gone for you. Why would you think you can do better than they? Save the time and effort! Usually no one is happy with their parliament anyway.

2. “Everyone is a Minister”

Instead of maintaining a government, divide up all its functions among the constituents. There will be a long list of small areas and responsibilities. Assign each of these areas and responsibilities to one person only: no arguments, they have all the say in their area. If you see something that’s wrong there’s exactly one person to complain to.

Ordinarily, ministers are appointed because of who they know, instead of what they know. After ten years every one of the mini-ministers will be an expert in their field, and do a much better job.

3. “The Less Power, the More Votes”

Usually each person gets one vote. However, some people already have a lot of power over other people’s lives. For example, a store manager has eight hours a day to have things their way. CEO’s of big companies may have thousands of people follow their lead.

At election time, this is reversed. For each person, add up the number of hours times the number of people, for an election period, that they control those other people. If a person controls people that control other people, add the hours from the middle person to the one at the top. The more hours a person is assigned, the less their vote counts.

Listen to how this one flows:

Further, it should be noted that since relativistic quantum theories (such as quantum field theory) can always be expressed in terms of a local Lagrangian density, it follows that probability mass in such theories always flows locally through configuration space, and therefore that a classical configuration of the system’s (field) variables can still be made to evolve locally in a way that simply tracks the flow of the conserved probability current in configuration space.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohm_interpretation

74 words. I think the climax is at “simply”.

Here’s the vocabulary (48 words), sorted alphabetically, with repetitions:

• a
• a
• a
• always
• always
• and
• as
• be
• be
• be
• can
• can
• classical
• configuration
• configuration
• configuration
• conserved
• current
• density
• evolve
• expressed
• field
• field
• flow
• flows
• follows
• further
• in
• in
• in
• in
• it
• it
• Lagrangian
• local
• locally
• locally
• made
• mass
• noted
• of
• of
• of
• probability
• probability
• quantum
• quantum
• relativistic
• should
• simply
• since
• space
• space
• still
• such
• such
• system’s
• terms
• that
• that
• that
• that
• the
• the
• the
• theories
• theories
• theory
• therefore
• through
• to
• tracks
• variables
• way

The Free Will Theorem, published in 2006 by John H. Conway and Simon Kochen, says in rough terms, that if we (as humans) have free will then so do elementary particles. As you would ordinarily take it for granted that you have “free will”,  and if you follow their argument, then elementary particles, or, since all of matter is said to be made up of them, matter has free will too. Certainly a spectacular situation, and if you read their writings, I think you will agree that they think it is spectacular too, and they are quite proud of their discovery.

The theorem does not assert that we have free will whatsoever. But if we do then we would not be so free as to withhold the same from those elementary particles; Conway and Kochen’s operative keywords are SPIN, FIN and TWIN. Earlier this year, they announced the Strong Free Will Theorem, which came to my attention and puzzled me quite a lot.

In my experience, it is very hard to cross from science or mathematics to philosophy or metaphysics; in many ways, philosophy and metaphysics are a lot more difficult. In the case of this Free Will Theorem, one might like to perform an experiment to make sure the mathematics corresponds to reality. At the end of section 9, “Historical remarks”, on page 21 of the (earlier) Free Will Theorem article, Conway and Kochen discuss possibilities of such an implementation.

This is because our Free Will assumption requires decisions by a human observer, which current physiology tells us takes a minimum of 1/10 of a second. During such a time interval light will travel almost 20,000 miles, so the experiment cannot be done on Earth.

This is were the following gedanken experiment commences: namely, despite those difficulties, some scientists apply for grants, devise an experiment that can be carried out on Earth, design the equipment, and soon realize that the average person’s free will does not elicit a measurable amount of free will on the part of the elementary particles, at least within their budgetary constraints. They perform some back-of-the-envelope calculations and happily notice a gap: one person in a billion will have sufficient free will.

Jimi Hendrix.

So they call him up and explain the situation, and ask him whether he wants to participate. Jimi reluctantly agrees after some hesitation. They arrange a time, tell him where the lab his, he arrives, and they show him their machine, explain how it works. They tell him that they regret it is loud and noisy, after all it is the first of its kind. When one of its lamps turns from orange to green, he is to push away at the three buttons that they point out, any way he wants to. They will then compare his choices with the elementary particle’s, and graph the results to correlate the free will. He nods, sits down at the chair that is provided, and they start the final preparations. Finally, the lamp turns to green.

Jimi is not pushing any buttons.

They cancel the experiment, and ask him (quite annoyed), why he didn’t follow the instructions. To which he responds, “Well, I wanted to increase volume of your machine, but I couldn’t find the control.”

A bit of a funny story about Windows Vista, or Microsoft systems in general. My friend’s laptop would not boot up anymore, so I took it to another friend who knows more about fixing laptops (I don’t use one myself, so I don’t have much experience).

Since there was an indication of hard drive problems when running BIOS system checks, we removed the (SATA) hard drive from the laptop, and connected it to his Vista PC. When it recognized it, it showed up as “F:” under “My Computer.” Right-click → Tools, and we got an option to “check the volume for errors”.

We selected “Automatically fix file system errors” (but not “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors”). After clicking the “Check Now” button we waited for a while.

Then this message popped up

Some problems were found and fixed.
Any files that were affected by these problems were moved to a folder named “Found”.

We spent quite some time looking for this folder named “Found”. (Since it was his PC I didn’t want to get too involved in the search). We never found it. Was it supposed to be on his PC, or on the laptop’s harddrive? Why wouldn’t the message say explicitly just were that folder is?

(With the harddrive placed back in the laptop, it booted again. So that was good.)