Suppose you were confused or just plain curious as to the reality of human free will. Where would be a reasonable starting point to look into this topic? And where would likely be a clusterfuck waste of your precious time?
And The Answer Is…
I am going to give you the executive summary for the above two questions immediately, so you can bounce off in case one of your digital devices is signalling you: 1) Introspection, spiritual inquiry, literature and poetry, common sense, observing children, and if you must, philosophy. 2) Arrogant tone-deaf theoretical physicists, people who view reality through a materialistic lens — meaning they have a terrible time conceiving of anything except exclusively in terms of matter — and, much of the time: philosophy
Lay of the Land in La-La Land – 1
Monthly it seems, more often if I hunted, some snarky depthless opinionator on the web broadcasts their new found certitude that they just obliterated the notion of ‘free will’ from the realm of sensible discourse, for evermore. I will give two very representative examples. The first incitement is a brief (after all, why devote any significant thinking time to such an inconsequential conclusion?) post on Cosmos, a website named to lure in hungry but not overly exacting info seekers, labelled: Does free will exist in the universe? No need for modesty here, as fortune favors the boldly unreflective. Let’s not limit our theorizing to what we are vaguely familiar with on the home planet at the risk of not extrapolating to all of cosmic reality. Still I might have let the sleepers enjoy their nap up to this point, but the editor had to go ahead and append the faux authoritative byline ‘That would be a no’. It was at this point that I knew I was going to tear this drivel to shreds for the sake of what’s left of western civilization. After only a few opening sentences the author boldly reveals his entirely introspection-free bias:
“One of the major fundamental questions in physics concerns the presence or absence of free will in the universe, or in any physical system, or subset, within it. Physics is based on the idea that nature is mechanistic, which means that it works like a machine.” – Alfredo Metere
The first assertion is the stupefying one, although the second is also riling and problematic to any fair-minded thought. You get five points if you are puzzled about what the heck the discipline of Physics could have to do with establishing the presence or absence of free will in the universe. But you surrender four of them back if after perusing the remainder of Metere’s article you consider yourself logically persuaded and accept the results with a shrug. Metere has no patience for any dithering subtleties. He leaps right to it: principles dictated without any pretense of scientific or even logical justification. Human decision making (and the impulse to actions upon these) fall within the sphere of a physical system or subset, and nature is a mechanism, which works like a machine. No Physics experiment has ever been performed to assess these bombshell discoveries, nor could any physicist (or anybody else) conceive of any possible scientific experiment to do so! It is simply swallowed as dogma, on the same level as first grade catechisms: Who made me? God made me.That is okay, I guess. You are free to choose your cult. Do not try to pass its foundations off as universal reasoning though, since zero reasoning was involved.
Lay of the Land in La-La Land – 2
The second incitement, recommended if you have an old tablet you’re itching to smash, is a video discussion between John Horgan, a science journalist and Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist who is also revealed as a fairly strict determinist. Now listen… I don’t dislike Sabine H. all that much. The world is a more interesting place with crusty cranky self-assured in-your-face Germanic lady scientific materialism apologists in it. But the reason I include her example is exactly because it seems to so clearly illuminate how deeply entrenched the unconscious bias is within Physics as a discipline.
While Metere at least points to the assumptive character of the ideals he places at the foundations of modern Physics, Hossenfelder just behaves in all discourse as though these ideals are indisputable proven knowledge. It is just because Sabine’s rhetoric is so ardent and straightforward that it becomes easy to see the hollowness and fallacy of it. But to do this one needs to be rigorously clear about where assumptions do and do not intrude, and why. Also, it helps to balance both a healthy skepticism and respect for one’s own intuitions, and not be talked out of them by the simple mechanism of yielding to supposed authority.
I recommend watching the dialogue at the marker point 26:46, the topic which is labelled ‘John and Sabine tangle over free will’. It is extremely interesting and revealing, going to the core right away. Don’t listen from the standpoint of deciding who you think wins the argument, but rather from the standpoint of what is not being justified but brazenly presumed. I’ll include the following two illustrative quotes, however, for those who wish to hurry along. (Note that the first actually appears in the earlier segment of the video starting at 22:20 titled ‘Is Consciousness Conserved?’.)
On Consciousness: “It comes down to what exactly do you mean by consciousess… for me, personally consciousness has something to do with ‘What happens’… it is actually about what you can do.” – Sabine Hossenfelder
On Determinism: “You think you have choices because you don’t know what you will do… you thought you had options, but you didn’t. It’s just incompatible with the laws of Physics… the future was already determined up to some random quantum events which you couldn’t influence because nothing can… Everything is Physics, you are made of physical particles. The only way you can claim that there is something else to Psychology is to deny that you are actually made of physical things…” – Sabine Hossenfelder
Let me take her quote about consciousness first, in isolation. The sentiments expressed here are very typical of the scientist mentality, though I believe exaggeratedly so, which wants to consider the mind strictly as a black box. It can only be legitimately analyzed in terms of what are measurably reproducible output results. Quantifying, measuring, weighing, physically observing. This Skinner Box stance willfully ignores an enormous swath of reality, in my view, for the sake of what? Keeping matters ‘scientific’? I could be petulant at this point (a bit like Sabine) and ask whether the condition of Helen Keller prior to her setting out to accomplish the amazing things she did therefore was one of non-consciousness — since there were not yet any measurable things she “could do”.
This rigid functionalism goes away however when the subject moves towards human will versus determinism (second quote). Here, suddenly, the observed external results do not indicate much about consciousness at all. Willpower is reduced to an illusion fruitlessly thirsted after by a freedom-hungry humanity. Instead all physically measurable results incidentally achieved by humans are actually due to gazillions of sub-atomic particle realities. Their net outcomes have been entirely pre-determined at the outset of the cosmos, a fact which can be known by any intelligence or computational entelechy vast enough to perceive and assess all the particle states and conditions in effect at moment X within the universe.
What Is Will and Where Is It Located?
It’s not as though the materialist status quo worldview is the only plausible scenario about reality. Hossenfelder blithely disparages the ‘Everything is Physics’ skeptic (around 34:50), throwing her hands up in the air and characterizing denials as magically believing in miracles at the expense of the primacy of particles. But why does she transfer the onus away from herself for demonstrating exactly how laws holding good for physical particles somehow magically and exclusively extend to phenomena like brains or minds or strenuous creative work? Shouldn’t this gargantuan sort of claim be meticulously explained before demanding its acceptance rather than cavalierly declaring that Everything is Physics? At what cultural point exactly did the mission creep within Physics extend towards supplanting epistemology and ontology and psychology and human aesthetics? And under what authority are those who are not red pill imbibers obliged to simply accept this? Here is a succinct depiction of one alternate view:
“Searching for consciousness in the brain is like looking inside a radio for the announcer or emcee.” – Nassim Haramein
I always get the impression, when I encounter this sort of Physics-is-God thinking, that the individual does not know how to take themselves seriously. Or that they have utterly rejected introspection from their repertoires of cognitive behavior. Any professional athlete knows that will is a real thing. Also their professional coaches. The will to win, the refusal to lose, can absolutely distinguish one performer from another who both have equivalent levels of physical talent. Consciously marshalled inner will can also play a decisive role in how deeply we try to penetrate a thorny puzzle. Inspiration can come along which affords us the opportunity to re-examine some long held point of view and play around with altering it… but we still have to apply our energies to do so. Or fail to. One is not compelled to think humans are completely 100% physical in their foundational natures. Not humans or anything else. Consciousness, and will, does not have to only derive its nature and unfolding from whatever obscure components of it are associated with physicality or particles. Will might be entirely aphysical in its true reality, and we may only be employing physical organs as a vehicle for expressing it in the world because that is our present circumstance in world evolution. We are, partly, physical beings. This is true. But there is no fundamentally logical necessity that physicality, matter, has therefore to contitute the entire basis of us and all cosmic phenomena. And there has never been any proof of this belief which has ever been demonstrated. It is simply not a scientific act to hold it, and those who do so deserve to be disabused of their scientific crutch so that such positions may be exposed as wishful or even faith-driven. In the future, this delusion will be seen as a characteristic blind spot inhibiting our age and culture.
_______RS
[ Notes : For the philosophy fans out there, I have purposely omitted any mention about Compatibilism though I do know about it. I do not think it sheds light on the main points here one way or the other. I could also have mentioned (but did not for brevity’s sake) the very real thing among some theoreticians that while Determinism is a clearly true fact about reality, it should be kept under wraps due to the massive social despair and disengagement it would cause. This is hilarious in so many ways that it feels unfair to debate it. Thank Goodness at least a few Physicists possess the emotional maturity to process this reality without utterly losing heart in life. 🙂 ]
[ Image: from Deviant Art, “Wind-Up World” ] (link)
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immensely refreshing, thank you!
Most welcome, Max. Preaching to the choir, I know, but still feels cathartic. 🙂
Well, I guess I’m doomed. My degree was in Physics, if “applied” as opposed to “theoretical”. Regardless, I didn’t give up on General Relativity, Feynman diagrams or the Schrodinger equation simply because they suggested that the universe had already determined my final grades.
Less facetiously, does it really make any difference? It takes a supercomputer just to to ball-park next week’s weather, there’s a reason for the term “Voodoo economics”, and a single human thought is the end result of some ludicrous number of interacting linear partial differential equations. Sometimes, the fastest calculator of an outcome is simply the universe itself.
And while I’m not waiting for the universe to produce miracles, we can’t know anything of the metaphysical aspect from which it emerges. It may very well be deterministic from our quite limited internal perspective, but therein created from the start to be precisely as was/is *intended*.
I am honestly delighted that you are, or have been, a Physics major. Truly! One of my degrees was in Math. One of my very favorite side courses was a study of Feynman’s lovely book “The Character of Physical Law” and its inquiries into symmetry. (I say this so you know that I am not entirely unacquainted.) It turns out that your concise remark is nicely organized and pretty clear, so that it offers a great chance for me to talk about three underlying themes within this post, corresponding to your paragraphs.
First, consider the title. Getting advice about surgery from a baker: Taking opinions on authority about deeply important human, psychological, ultimately spiritual, and APHYSICAL matters from an expert in physical particles, whether applied or not. I do not think you are doomed at all. The equations of Einstein and Schrodinger, and the clever formulations of Feynman make absolutely zero suggestions about whether or not your professors graded you this way or that. This is a crucial point in the essay, which you may have missed or ignored. Materialism/Physicalism/Naturalism as a philosophical outlook is entirely a metaphysical proposition and thus not implied one way or another by Physics equations. You needn’t give up on these things which once inspired or captivated you in order to recognize that truth. The only way that such abstractions could have any bearing on the outcome of your education exams and work is if “Everything Is Physics” — which is itself an absolutely exterior-to-Physics assertion or belief or speculation, and a particularly unfounded one in my view. But bakers have no right to theorize that the universe is baking. Right? That would be ridiculous or arrogant on their part.
To your next question, I would resoundingly answer “yes”. It matters very much whether human beings believe and act and formulate culture under the illusion of materialism or not. I would also point out that perhaps climate, certainly ecoomics, and most assuredly thought, involve exhaustive amounts of aphysical aspects to them or any particular characterization of a single phenomenon within their spheres. If you assume otherwise, it would be incumbent upon you to explicate all these gaps rather than simply assume that the universe computes them — which would indeed be a “voodoo” assertion. The universe is not a computer — thank God! 🙂 Your ideas in this second paragraph seem to be based on the same presumptions as expressed in the first one, I would say.
Maybe the most important objection I would carry is reserved for your third paragraph. Why exactly is there a knowledge limitation imposed upon any metaphysical aspects of anythig in the cosmos? Why do you accept or believe this? I do not. Isn’t this also a kind of materialist bias? It is not Icarus hubris to intuit that we can devise or uncover new ways to probe more deeply the aphysical aspects of reality as humanity evolves. After all, you (we collectively, really) have no issues with presuming that we have been able to somewhat effectively investigate the physical nature of the cosmos with our human capacities and contrivances. And rightfully so, because we are of the universe and share in its physical nature. We are well positioned to inquire. Same thing for the metaphysical aspects. We are of the cosmos, which like us, is deeply metaphysical. Therefore our humanity is ideally positioned to research these matters, given our intelligence and intuition. And what else, really, is the impulse behind wonderful things like Zen or Tao or esoteric Christianity besides this? Kant was wrong about this limitation (if you are familiar with his pronouncements about never being able to approach “things in themselves”).
I understand your love or admiration for Physics. Or for anything you have studied. You simply have to maintain its observations in their proper spheres. When Einstein protested that God does not play dice, he wasn’t doing Physics! He was doing something else. And that something else is totally legit.
Thanks very very much for your comments. Exactly the sort I hope for.
Thank you for the excellent reply!
The question of “determinism” seems to me loaded by semantics.
As you assert, “sciences” are merely mathematically descriptive approaches to epistemology. The approach’s power is in its mechanical objectivity; it can be used to discern patterns fixed into the functioning of the universe. As physical parts of the universe, we are subject to those same rules. Relativity, rotated Feynman diagrams, deterministic mathematical descriptions of “chaotic” phenomena (including QM), indeed causality… the universe is clearly a fixed structure, probably a “block universe”. However, why it exists is not something that can be objectively measured, and so it is outside of the domain of science.
*Experiences* can be related to describable patterns of firing neurons, hormones, and electrical potentials, but their qualities (“qualia”) are something intangible. Nevertheless, we must experience them passively as a result of the universe’s causally-related patterns. Use a psychoactive, suffer a brain-injury, have a surgeon stimulate a neuron… the subjective *experiences* of the individual will be no less real.
Personal experience is consequently no less powerful, but only to the individual. It is by definition, subjective. We create a universe in our heads, literally… the *experiences* of colors, smells, love, passion, suffering… These *are* our reality. And this is why separating the noise of ego from experience is so profound. It is the closest we can come to experiencing the thing-in-itself, as the thing is the experience.
So to me, the more interesting question is regarding *experience* – whether we’re simply misinterpreting a pattern as a “thing”, or if it reflects something strongly emergent or deeply connected to some underlying reality.
Hi LT, you are welcome and thanks as well. I begin to worry that WP will soon place two words per line the longer this thread goes. I disagree with some stuff you have just written, or see them differently, but I will try to stay close to the main theme of the post.
Re: Determinism, true it could get very tangled if we went into what philosophers say about it all, but I do not think that what Sabine H. has to say about it is “semantics” at all. She is starkly simple: We don’t have choices, we just think we have. Because choices would violate the principles of Physics. Everything is pre-determined. To hold otherwise denies that we are physical. (I paraphrase — check her quotes.) No! To hold otherwise does not deny that we are physical. We are physical beings in the sense that we have physical aspects to us. We contain matter. This does not admit that we are exclusively physical or material. And in no way does it imply that purely exclusively physical laws, about matter, are therefore the only or even the main determinant of what we are and what we do and what we choose. It may very well be that the aphysical foundational aspects of our being operate far more meaningfully than do the physical matter laws, and even override them. It is just Physics imagining that its domain of influence is wider than it actually is which would let someone think that everything is down to bosons and mesons. Physics studies the physical aspects of the universe. It does not study the entirety of the universe.
Some quicker points just for reference. I don’t think of science as a mathematized approach to epistemology. Because epistemology has to do with how we can gauge whether we know something. Science is just a methodology, a toolset. It does not examine how we know or what knowing is. I do not believe we are subject to physical rules because we are physical parts of the universe. We are not physical parts of the universe. We are only partly physical. That is only one aspect of us. Furthermore there is no justification to presume that the universe itself is exclusively physical either. That is merely an unexamined prejudice, I would hold. I also do not think that the universe has to be a fixed structure, although I might be hazy what you mean by this. I do not think we are fixed structures either.
Also, I do not buy your implications between neurons and inner mind states. Specifically, I doubt seriously that a specific neuro-electrical event shape, if I could put it like that, uniquely corresponds to every possible inner experience, including thoughts and sensory perceptions. It may very well be true that such brain phenomena are occasioned while one is thinking and sensing, etc (and also at other times like during sleep) but this in no way implies any causality link between the two.
I would say something else even. There is no reason to suppose that our perception of the blueness of something and a subsequent thought about it are any less a characteristic of the object instead of us. We may be so organized that our senses provide us some truth about an onject and our thinking potentially later provides some further truth. It is because of the way we are that the one arrives as given and the other must be worked for… but all is a feature of the thing itself.
Finally, I don’t think will, willing, and choosing is the same thing as experiencing, and therefore should not be too casually grouped together with them. Willing is generally more subconscious than experiencing qualia as you put it.
Overcoming the “littler ego” has more to do with recognizing the arbitrariness of one’s associations and sympathies and antipathies, not with the experiencing of qualia, and not with active thinking. This has to do with differences between Eastern and Western meditation goals and also the corruptions which have been applied towards both over the centuries. But no time here to go into that. Real meditation can never not be subjective. It’s goal is to walk in a landscape which is beyond the polar opposites of objective and subjective, which is a limitation our consciousness is usually restricted by.
Also, I am not persuaded by the various uses of “emergence” which has been applied to explain various things in the philosophy of science — like life and consciousness. Basically this seems to happen whenever materialists notice that their worldview does not convincingly support a real phenomenon, so they claim it “emerges”. But it is really hard to treat all these things so briefly. If you wish, you could try looking into Thomas Nagel. I wrote about him years back — it would give you a picture about what is wrong in general with science according to him, and me, (but does not have to be) the past four plus centuries and why it forces materialism upon us unnecessarily, which cuts off its ability to completely examine reality. I think my essay was entitled “Nagel vs. The Uber-Narrative”. Thanks much!
I understand the two-word threads. It’s “Kumi”, and I appreciate your responses. I’ll try to follow up with the Thomas Nagel references.
I know of Sabine Hossenfelder, mostly regarding her criticisms of theoretical physics having run off the rails over the last decades. I think it’s cost her an academic career. I believe she’s a proponent of a relativistic universe along the lines of Gerard ‘t Hooft, though I’m not familiar with the specifics of her arguments. However, that implies determinism.
I long ago came to the conclusion on my own. The only way around it that I can see is a universe created from the start with an intent as to how it should play out and then merely peered-in upon… a sort of cop-out compatiblist perspective. And it’s not for lack of objectivity or introspection. It’s simply the result of a search for rational consistency that doesn’t require a Soren Kierkegaard style leap-of-faith. Regardless, I don’t see any reason to conclude that what underlies our experience of “this” must necessarily adhere to any of the same rules that govern our existence. And in that regard, I’ll defer to Max Planck’s concluding words in, ” The Universe in the Light of Modern Physics”.
Thank you, and sincere good wishes to you!
Sometimes I wonder why solipsism it’s undervalued..?
Maybe because each head is a world of its own?
I’m not so sure it’s undervalued. Seems to be on the increase these days in the news. 🙂