Here is the transcript of the second of my ‘Series 2′ sci-pods (which you can, if you prefer, download from this website or subscribe to for free via iTunes). In this blog I use physics rather than philosophy, metaphysics or theology to argue the case for free will.
Well, it’s rather ambitious to cover adequately the whole subject of the nature of free in a blog, especially since we don’t yet have a clear consensus on whether we even HAVE free will. Scientists, philosophers and theologians, and for that matter, loads of other people too, have debated this subject for thousands of years. I’m going to focus here on some certain aspects of the nature of free will and its connection with my area of physics. I certainly won’t be straying into the realm of what’s called the mind-body problem or the nature of consciousness or the human soul.
Let’s start with the idea of determinism. Basically, a deterministic system is one for which, if you knew everything about it at a given moment in time, then you could, in principle compute what it will be doing at any time in the future. That is, the way it evolves in time is fully determined (hence ‘deterministic’). Isaac Newton showed with his laws of motion and gravity that our whole universe is deterministic – and this has been dubbed the Newtonian clockwork universe.
What has this got to do with free will? Well, since our physical brains are all ultimately made up of atoms and we are nothing more than the software of our brain (if you don’t like this last statement, tough, I stand by it) then those atoms obey the same laws of physics as the rest of the universe. So if we could, in principle, know the position of each atom in our brains and what it was doing at any given moment and we understood fully the rules that govern how they all interact and fit together to make up our brian cells, then we should (IN PRINICPLE – I am not saying this is ever going to be possible in practice) know the state of our brains at any time in the future. That is, I could predict what you will do, or think, next – provided of course you are not interacting with the outside world, otherwise I will need to know everything about that too.
So, basically, if we are part of Newton’s clockwork, deterministic universe, then all our actions are preordained and fixed in advance and we do not seem to have the freedom to choose.
So was Newton right? Well it sort of got worse when Einstein came along. His theory of relativity tells us that time and space are connected in a deep way and that time should really be considered as another dimension along with space to form 4-D spacetime. In this overall picture, called the block universe, time is just another axis, like the side of a box (only this box is one we cannot imagine as our brains cannot cope with that extra dimension. Basically, just as we can imagine a volume of space with all points in that volume coexisting, now we have to imagine all times (past, present moment and future) all frozen together. So it’s worse than Newton thought: it’s not just that the future is in principle ‘knowable’, but that it is already there waiting for our ‘now’ to move along the time axis to reach it. Bugger.
OK, so now along comes quantum physics, seemingly to the rescue. This is the theory of the subatomic world, where the rules of the game are fundamentally different to those in our everyday world. In fact, in the quantum domain, we discover real INDETERMINISM. That is, an atom might radioactively decay by spitting out an alpha particle, say. It turns out that we cannot, even in principle, predict when this might happen. Not because we have inadequate knowledge about that atom, but because the atom itself doesn’t know when this might happen. It’s not quite random of course, because we find that with a large number of identical atoms there is a statistical average that emerges. This is the half-life (the time it takes for exactly half the atoms in a sample to radioactively decay). So basically, the subatomic world is ruled not by certainties but by chance and probability.OK, so does this quantum indeterminism rescue us from the bleak and fatalistic fixed future universe of Newton and Einstein? Some philosophers think so. They are wrong in my humble view. Quantum fuzziness, chance and probability all leak away very quickly before we can build up complex systems involving trillions of atoms. Of course there may be some features of the quantum world that have an effect in our macro world, after all, the reason the Sun shines is down to what’s called the quantum tunnelling effect whereby nuclei can fuse together to release energy. But on the whole, I still think that OUR world, the world of us, our brains and our free will is a deterministic one.
So, I ask again, do we have free will? The answer, despite what I have said about determinism, is yes, I believe we do. And it seems to have a lot to do with what is known as chaos theory. This is the idea that very tiny changes to the initial conditions of a system will quickly grow and lead to completely different outcomes – the famous butterfly effect. We see this most clearly in weather prediction. While we can now know with confidence what tomorrow’s weather will be, the further we try to look into the future, the more uncertain things become. More accurately, chaos theory states that, under certain conditions, applying the simple rules that govern how a completely deterministic system evolves, along with some feedback, can lead to chaotic behaviour. What is important is that such behaviour is not random, but just utterly unpredictable.[As an aside, what is for me much more interesting is the flip side of chaos: that these same simple rules, applied repeatedly, can sometimes lead to beautiful and complex patterns emerging. Basically we can get order and structure where there was none before. You start with something without any structure, allow it to evolve and you spontaneously, without any external designer having a hand in it, start to see structure and patterns appearing.
In a way, this is how Darwinian evolution works. Nature starts with a basic life form or rudimentary organ, like the eye, applies simple rules (that it makes copies of itself but with the odd rare mutation that makes tiny changes) and repeats this over and over again. There is feedback in the form of the action of the environment that selects those mutations best suited to it. And what happens? Over billions of years we see complexity emerging spontaneously, without thought or design. Even human consciousness I think can be explained from an evolutionary perspective.]
Anyway, what has chaos theory and the butterfly effect have to do with free will? Well, it doesn’t matter that we live in a deterministic universe in which the future is, in principle, fixed. That future is only knowable if we were able to view the whole of space and time from the outside. Now you might be of the view, if you follow a monotheistic faith, that this is the perspective that God has. But, for us and our consciousnesses imbedded WITHIN spacetime, that future is NEVER knowable. For us, the future is open, the choices we make are real choices, and because of the butterfly effect, tiny changes brought about by different decisions we make, can lead to different outcomes – different futures.
So, thanks to chaos theory our future is never knowable to us. You might prefer to say that the future is preordained and that our free will is just an illusion, but the point is our actions still determine which of the infinite number of possible futures is the one that gets played out. God (if She’s out there) knows what we are going to do next, if you insist on Her necessary existence, but WE don’t and can never know. So we do have free will. QED.
I knew you were going to say that.
I am wondering when , where and how the seeds of choas have been planted !!!???
I think this could help figuring out all the random results , instead of running in circles.
my best
” amazing article “
@Richard Hunt I knew YOU were going to say: “I knew you were going to say that”
This article raises some important points. When we look at deterministic “flip-side-to-chaos” theory as stated above, patterns emerge: biological diversity, regulated gene expression, patterns in mountains, lakes etc, etc. Take also for example studies on Brownian motion and fractals. Could it not be said then, that there exist patterns of free will based on deterministic patterns in neuronal interactions?
For example, surely groups of people with larger amygdala regions in the brain would be more probable to take more aggressive choices when given the same stimuli as those with different brain structures? In a pub fracas I know who I’m going to avoid.
Does this not lead to a parametric model of choice and free will? This means that will or action depends on ones’ inherent Darwinian programming. There have been many studies using self organising maps and other classifiers on voting patterns, purchase patterns and such, all applying statistical models on free will and hence future selection.
Furthermore we still don’t *know* what causes wave-function collapse or if it collapses at all. This would have an implication for free will. And how does free will play out in terms of the delayed choice experiment?
“But the point is our actions still determine which of the infinite number of possible futures is the one that gets played out”- what about the multiverse/Everetterian view? If *all* possible futures play out, free will is an illusion- defunct.
Say you chose- using free will- to look into Schrödinger’s cat box. In one branch of the multiverse the cat is alive, in another cat is dead. Free will has no consequence to the future, chaotic or not .
Furthermore, in one branch of the multiverse you opened the box and in another you did not. There was no “choice” (or rather just an illusion of choice) in the first place for you to “impose” your will upon. All this however is based on the notion the multiverse exists (or not) of course
Personally I think free will may us to break from our selfish Darwinian or deterministic programming. Altruism, compassion, love and generosity – these are probably actions of “true” free will.
@Dev
That is interesting. Re: multiverse theory, why doesn’t free will exist if each universe plays out a choice, there’s no real reason it does or doesn’t.
I think actually it alludes to a thinking mode, i.e. when we look at multiple sets and calculate on them it appears that things are calculable, probabilities get worked out we can reliably predict things. But we often use those predictions to estimate the course of a single event. To give an example, doctors often dole out survival rates when one is diagnosed with a serious ailment. If the doctor says only 5% survives, many patients will believe that they have a 5% chance of survival. But that figure is based on a large set of data, a doctor never knows the real likelihood of survival for an individual person. Five percent for example seems small, but say this is a common condition and a million people have had it, it would mean that 50000 survive. The question is, for those 50000, was their survival rate really 5% or were among them people who had anywhere up to a 100% chance of survival?
I think what makes our reality/world so incredibly amazing is the fact that consciousness makes us individually speaking – as experiencers of consciousness – a single unit, in the sense that it gives us an entirely unique point of view that we can’t copy or convey in its base form. For us to reliably predict, or arrive at a deterministic reality, we need multiple sets of data, that we then recalculate back to make a prediction about a single unit or a single course of events. But that single unit in nature can potentially go anywhere. Quantum mechanics seems to support the view that on the level of a single unit, there is no limitation in potential. In debates about free will in psychology circles the question is raised whether ‘ free’ is really free, or really a limited degree of freedom (choices are restrained to a limited set of possibilities because of various constraints (i.e. I can’t choose that my car becomes red while driving)). Quantum mechanics seems to convey that there really is no such thing a limited degree of freedom in that argument, there are just an infinite amount outcomes that are incredibly unlikely.
The problem with theory making, predicting etc, is that we naturally make the trip from the unpredictable single unit, to clumping up data from multiple units to derive at various degrees of probability on the outcomes and then feel falsely confident that we know what a single unit is going to do. I think that is what some scientists who argue there is no free will are doing. But I think predictions only gives us the ability to predict the outcomes of groups of ‘ units’ not a single unit – you can’t consistently predict the outlier in a group of data. Similarly, free will seems to grant that potential that allows for choices that are unpredictable – each of us can become an outlier.
@Dev, I think I agree with you. Jim’s thought-provoking article seems to imply that any system exhibiting chaotic behaviour, for example a vibrating string, has free will, simply because it affects the future in an unpredictable way.
… although I hate the “many worlds” theory. What explanatory power does it have? Postulating the “existence” of an infinite number of undetectable universes seems to be the worst idea in the history of science.
@Richard Thanks for the book recommendation. I’m also wikipedia-ing Orch-or just as a light intro. Theres a line in the entry “Penrose asserted that the brain could perform functions that no computer could perform”.
Personally I see no distaste in the multiverse as an idea, as Peter says below there is still much to learn about consciousness, perhaps the conscious mind can ‘navigate’ the multiverse space and render a single/chosen reality a-la-Copenhagen interpretation- restoring free will? Ok so all this is a bit of hypothetical space-head thinking but I feel in science we must not discard ideas based on distate- nature is beautiful but it has hidden with ‘unanswerable/unexplainable’ aspects to it, some of which cause us to have a distate towards.
Parallel universes may not be detectable yet, but at one stage nor were radiowaves, entangled photons/particles, kasimir forces, quantum tunnelling and the rest waiting to be discovered: Higgs bosons, possible additional dimensions, dark matter etc.
I hope I’ve tried to convince you that at face value something as ‘nihilistic’ as a multiverse may actually (if it truly ‘exists’) add to our understanding of nature and free will rather than have an empty meaning to it. This is probably where the next generation of quantum computers will be interesting-can we get them to explore a multiverse of possibilites and give us the most optimal solution, say for protein folding? The multiverse is as yet undetectable and theoretical but the Everett ‘view-point’ is just as valid when trying to explain the nature of the wave-function and it’s apparent collapse.
Dev, I too am intrigued by the possibilities for a better understanding of consciousness opened up by quantum mechanics. However, my objection to Many Worlds is not that it they are currently undetectable, but rather that the idea makes no predictions which are in principle verifiable. It is not a good scientific hypothesis. What question does it tackle?
The question of is there really just ‘our’ reality? This question is falsifiable ( if the method of detection is robust), repeatable (if they can be detected mechanically/physically according to a protocol) in accordance with the empirical scientific principle. As we’ve also discussed it has huge implications for notions about free will, choice, states and transitions, causality, the block universe, wave-functions; all from an empirical non meta-physical point of view. If all states are possible, then do they evolve according selection criteria, if so, we can learn about what results in a ‘valid’ or ‘optimal’ configuration of states within a multiverse, again e.g. protein folding. These are the question it tackles.
So how would one go about designing an experiment to detect these other worlds? What type of effect might they have on “our” universe?
Theories, proposed experiments, criticisms, a ‘multiverse’ of material
http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+multiverse/0/1/0/all/0/1
Wow! Thanks for the reference, Dev. It’s going to take me quite a while to digest all of that.
A predictable write up indeed after watching Jim’s tv shows and articles, but a little unimaginative and sterile for a quantum scientist?
Until we find something close to a scientific understanding of consciousness – an area which quantum mechanics helped shake up – the debate about free will from a physics or science point of view will be lacking depth in my opinion. And there are some that are quite happy sticking to materialistic explanations of consciousness but that is as much of a cop out as the ‘shut up and calculate’ mindset present with some quantum physicists. Isn’t regarding the brain as a collection of atoms a rather arbitrary level on which to view the brain.
At the moment we simply don’t know the extent to which consciousness affects our reality, evolutionary processes, etc. Topics like the measurement problem open up many unanswered questions about the role of consciousness. What we do know is that most of the traditional ways of thinking about evolution completely disregards consciousness (darwinian explanations require small incremental changes to derive at complex physiology, such as the eye and until we can – through computer models perhaps – show that we can evolve complex organs such as the eye through these incremental steps through this incredibly slow process, it’s unconvincing to me).
Seeing as free will and consciousness are inseparable concepts (hard to exert free will if consciousness isn’t present), any stance on free will with a footing in evolution theory as understood today seems to me to be incomplete at best. And that is intellectually rather unsatisfying if not hard to tolerate as a scientist.
Peter, are you a Roger Penrose fan, by any chance? If you haven’t read his book “Shadows of the Mind” then I recommend it.
@Richard
Thanks for the recommendation, I have put it on my reading list! I have not read it but I do have some familiarity with Penrose stemming from Orch-OR theory which I do follow with interest.
Thank you all for comments. I agree that an understanding of free will cannot be complete or reliable without a better understanding of consciousness. But please don’t try to equate or connect consciousness with quantum mechanics. The measurement problem in qm has nothing to do with consciousness – that is old hat and pretty discredited (Wigner’s ideas). And the Penrose-hameroff theory as described in P’s Shadows of the Mind are no longer taken seriously. Quantum decoherence may well play a role in biology but not as the seat of consciousness. I’ve never liked the “qm is weird, consciousness in weird, so must be connection” argument.
Thanks for the reply Jim.
Guess I haven’t got to the end of “Quantum Aspects of Life” to see the refutation of the Penrose theory (p392). Personally it annoys me no end, when people hijack qm to explain consciousness a-la Deepak Chopra et al, particularly to enforce their own version of their ‘inner’ god is consciousness woo. However, I’m still puzzled and amazed that there is no known relationship between qm and consciousness. In fact this resets a lot of things for me. I don’t even know what question to ask next!
If “our actions still determine which of the infinite number of possible futures is the one that gets played out”. Assuming the next ‘future block/moment’ is one planck second/length away -is it correct to state it this way? Assume our actions stem from conscious free will. Are these ‘futures’ already de-cohered in a non-superposition/collapsed state or are they unmeasured? How is the transition made between the now to a given future X? Where could consciousness fit in? This is all too weird!
To be fair to Roger Penrose, the main thrust of Shadows of the Mind is to demonstrate that the human mind is capable on non-algorithmic activity, rather than to establish a link between quantum mechanics and consciousness.
Wow! I’ve really enjoyed reading all these fantastic comments and opinions. Very interesting notions.
I’m not a Scientist but, I do love mingling in with great minds. I learn a great deal and file much knowledge.
I haven’t got any fixed opinion on ‘conciousness’. I’d be intrigued to witness any experimentation to see how it correlates to the theories people put forward. The notion of a ‘Multiverse’ is very interesting indeed. My only experience of concious ‘wobble’ is if I get really drunk! I end up unconscious and, I wonder where ‘I’ went. Sleep, dreaming and imagination seems to be some ability to tap into the ‘other side’. A way of being in different places at the same time but, the place of our ‘reality’ is the here and now. I suspect we will one day be able to tap into the elusive ‘other worlds/multiverses via unorthadox ways.
I look forward to reading more fantastic contributions by some amazing people on here.
I thank you as a lay person with no scientific qualifications.
We know there is “free will”, “God” and “time” in the same way we know that “you can’t be and not be”, so we do not really need hypotheses (so called scientific theories) which are uncertain and work dynamically (I don’t have any reason not to believe in thousands of other theories will be developed in close future).
Kind regards,
You absolutely have to read Daniel Dennett on this subject. You might find Eliezer Yudkowsky’s take on “free will” interesting:
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will
How significant is the` knowledge about the future´ with regard to free will? Very little I would have thought. Facing the cosequences of our Action is unavoidable regardless of whether the Action was appropriated out of free will or not. Is what we call ´instinct´ being confused for free will here? Animals behave instinctively, just as do human babies suckling the breast. As an adult human, if I was the only person in the vicinity, no one (GOD included) would be there to challenge my free will. Free will becomes an issue only in a social context and ONLY in human society. Significance of Chaos and Evolution here is the fact that humans have EVOLVED to appreciate unpredictability, the significance of such manifestation as the ´Future´ and we are not merely driven by instinct sitting largely in the brain.