Thu 15 Oct 2009
“If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord… So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.”
Albert Einstein said that. Einstein is not alone in doubting whether free will exists. In a recent post, I presented evidence from neuroscience and psychology that free will is an illusion foisted on us by our fractious, mischievous minds. This research would no doubt have bolstered Einstein’s conviction that free will is loony.
But Einstein was wrong! Free will must exist, if some creatures have more of it than others. My teenage daughter and son have more free will—more choices to consider and select from–than they did when they were infants. They also have more than our dog Merlin does. I have (on my good days) more free will than adults my age suffering from schizophrenia or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Try telling prisoners or paraplegics that there is no free will, and that choices are illusory. “Let’s change places,” they might respond, “since you have nothing to lose.”
I reject Einstein’s suggestion that psychological deliberations have no real impact on our actions. Should I marry this woman? Should I take this job? Should I write this column on free will or watch the Giants maul the Kansas City Chiefs? To be sure, sometimes we deliberate insincerely, toward a foregone conclusion, or fail to act upon our resolution. But not always.
Einstein implies that consciousness and hence psychological deliberations and choices are epiphenomenal, superfluous. That’s arrogant, excessive, destructive physics reductionism. Physics can’t account for a paramecium, let alone a person. And when I say physics I include not just classical Einsteinian physics but also quantum mechanics and chaos theory.
As the physicist and Nobel laureate Phil Anderson wrote in his brilliant 1972 essay, “More Is Different,” reality has a hierarchical structure, with qualitatively different phenomena emerging at different scales. “At each stage, entirely new laws, concepts and generalizations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry.”
When we choose, we are of course subject to physical laws. But causation occurs primarily at the psychological and even higher levels. Consider: Phil goes into the voting booth and faces two levers, one for Jon Corzine for N.J. Governor and one for Chris Christie. Would a complete physical description of all the particles comprising Phil’s body and the forces acting upon them let you predict Phil’s vote? No. You need to know Phil’s current mindset and personal history, which in turn requires knowledge of N.J. and U.S. politics, culture, history and so on. Politics is not just applied psychology.
Driving to the voting center, Phil hears a radio report that Christie has denounced health-care reform as a socialist plot. Only then does Phil think, “To hell with Christie, I’m going with Corzine.” It is not the sound waves per se but their meaning—Phil’s psychological interpretation of them–that persuades him to vote for Corzine. The identical radio report may tip Phil’s identical twin Fred toward Christie.
Phil’s choice is caused, even determined, if you insist. But this determinism—which incorporates not only physical processes but also phenomena such as consciousness and meaning, which have no place in physics–is qualitatively different than determinism in physics, in ways that science has not begun to grasp.
More is different! And nothing is more different than the vacillating, impulsive, skeptical, gullible, meaning-hungry, choosy human mind. Minds choose, moons don’t. That’s why Einstein was wrong about free will.
October 15th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
I think John and Einstein are actually in agreement, here’s why:
John says having free will means that normal human beings have more options and behavioral flexibility than infants, dogs, the seriously mentally ill and prisoners, something Einstein would have agreed with. Einstein wasn’t saying that “consciousness and hence psychological deliberations and choices are epiphenomenal, superfluous” and that therefore our deliberations have no effect on behavior.
So what was he saying by comparing us to the moon, fixed in its orbit? Just that human beings don’t have the power to transcend natural causal laws, even though it might feel as though we do. This contra-causal notion of free will is widespread in our culture, and it’s false.
John agrees with Einstein that this sort of free will doesn’t exist since he says our choices are “subject to physical law” and “caused, even determined, if you insist.” But he then goes on to say that the determinism of conscious choosing is “qualitatively different than determinism in physics, in ways that science has not yet begun to grasp.” But determinism is simply the thesis that given a set of conditions plus physical laws there’s one possible future. Our consciousness and choosing, dependent as they are on our physical brains and bodies, are just as determined as our brains and bodies, although we can’t predict and describe them at the molecular level for any practical purposes.
So it isn’t clear that there’s a qualitatively different sort of determinism that applies to human choices that thus far eludes the grasp of science. If there is, I wonder on what *non-scientific* basis John knows about it. At any rate, if you read him as he intended, Einstein was right about free will.
October 16th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Hi John,
I interpret all this as follows:
Einstein meant that we do not have the free will to make any choice that is inconsistent with the laws of nature. This is true of course because our concensus reality is indistinguishable from a completely deterministic Simulation where we would appear to have free will but it would be just a simulation being played out consistent with the rules of that simulation.
Einstein’s philosophical approach was very Realist in a sense that his general covariance ( or invariance) and the seeking of the meta principles which apply to the whole Universe and all its observers is SORT OF equivalent to seeking out the nature of the Universe as it REALLY IS, hence an effectively Realist view where it would not matter in any deep way what we choose or think.
Even Stephen Hawking ( and many others) has fallen prey to this kind of thinking. See “Godel and the end of Physics” at: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/strings02/dirac/hawking/
This Realistic outlook precisely contradicts the necessary Positivism of Quantum Mechanics where science only concerns itself with the measurable ( and need not explain things which DON’T occur)and that is what Einstein may not have liked about QM.
This loss of positivistic rudder in the philosophy underpinning much of physics today is why we have fallacious or misunderstood notions of ManyWorlds, MultiVerses and Landscapes etc. The debate which rages about whether these are proper science or not should not be about Popperian critical tests (measureability which is not the positivism i mean in this context, it should be about the violations of strict Positivism ( and Conservation and Unitarity and Occam) that these notions violate when they invoke regions unmeasureable “in principle”.
Luckily for Einstein, Machian Priciples and General Covariance and universality principles led to results which sidestep this mistake of thinking too Realistically.
When we find our long sought Einsteinian Complete(where every element in our concensus reality has its counterpart in the theory), Quantum Gravity cosmology (cQGc), we will have a positivistic description/philosophy of our concensus reality which will be the WaveFunction of every consistent, allowed state we might measure the universe to be in. The so-called WaveFunction of (our) Universe.
The inherently positivistic role that Consciousness plays is that it DEFINES and constrains the scope of the theory to explain not the Universe as it actually is, but exactly the Concensus Universe we observe, consistent with our nature.
This is how Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem (GI) needs to be understood. cQGc will be Godel incomplete in that it cannot be a statement that can bootstrap itself to mean ‘I AM TRUE” or i am the universe as it Really IS. Our cQGc is the description/explanation of our arbitrary, observed, concensus universe. This will still be true even if the derivation of cQGc is made from First Principles in a line by line, Formal System approach which would be called a proof in any lower level context.
It is precisely to such formal systems that GI aplies after all. As in the Godel proof, we will know ( or exhaustively believe) our cQGc to be true on an Einsteinean Completeness and self consistency basis but it remains open ended ( and disprovable by counterexample). Our cQGc does not ( and can never) rise to the level of a proof of Absolute Truth. This is the Instrinsic Positivism of science.
So, for example, our cQGc would be useless to dolphins and would not help them understand the universe they might be seeking to understand ( in their terms). They are working on their own theory of Quantum Wetness though and results are expected well…eventually.
LOL
Thanks,
Phil
October 17th, 2009 at 9:30 am
I agree with John on this. Firstly, Einstein was notoriously stuck in the metaphysics of classical physics, suffering as it does from over-determinism, having no ’space’ for human consciousness.
Where I disagree with John is in saying that (a) quantum theory is no different from classical physics in this respect, and (b) consciousness can manifest as an emergent property through complexity. (I think Henry Stapp gets a good handle on this in The Mindful Universe. As Einstein noticed, Quantum Theory, forces us to confront the ideal aspect of reality, just as Berkeley anticipated: see his reply to the usual suspects in ‘Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist’, Chicago: Open Court, 1949.)
The most important point on which I agree with John is on coming back to first principles of experience, where science and ethics (and anything worthwhile) are supposed to be grounded. Science may adopt this and that metaphysical framework to build successful explanatory and predictive theories, but one would be a complete fool to believe that these metaphysical and methodological frameworks *are* reality, and proceed to smash up ethics and disregard our own first-hand lived experience. By propagating such irresponsible dogma the foundations of ethics are undermined because ethics is critically dependent on the psychology. John gets this. Many of our moral philosophers don’t seem to.
October 18th, 2009 at 10:57 am
First of all, I agree with Chris Christie. Many versions of the mysterious bill brewing in Congress will put health care insurers out of business within a few years, because they can not compete with an entity backed not only by the ability to tax everyone, but to simply print more money whenever it needs some. Once the competition is gone, that entity will then dictate to the bargain-seeking consumers what life will really be like–the classic monopolistic strategy. First destroy the competition, then inform the customer they are now your slave.
Save Aetna! I like my Cadillac plan! Obama promised he wouldn’t take it away from me, why doesn’t ANYBODY believe him?
Is anybody making a true choice in politics? The Bible implies that a number of things happen on schedule, because time is God’s way of dictating that everything doesn’t happen at once. A lot of folks nowadays believe that in mid-December of 2012 a very troubling change will come over the world due to Mayan calendar and some other predictions. I am more worried about around Christmas this year, because the Iran and Afghanistan crises will be peaking in a few months and it is also exactly 200 years since the most powerful earthquake experienced in the USA, the New Madrid event of 1809.
You see, I am anticipating that President Obama will end up being practically as much the hammer versus the Taliban and Iran’s Shi’ite extremist nuclear regime as, say, Dick Cheney. Why? Because it is written. . . Also because Obama is a true moral relativist and pragmatist, whose ankles are 100% friction-free ball bearings.
No getting around destiny. In God’s eyes the long term evolution of civilizations is even more predictable than the fate of individuals. Even great civilizations decay and die. There will never be a 1,000 year Reich or a British Empire and its Commonwealth that endure a 1,000 years, in Churchill’s wishful phrase.
Well, Constantinople held out for an awful long time, but the Eastern Roman Empire may have been the exception that proves the rule.
October 18th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
C’mon Horgan!!! You’re still flailing over this issue. You sound like Ken Wilber for goodness sakes. Tom Clarke summed it up nicely when he said that our culture is plagued by a contra-causal notion of free will that is false. That’s why everyone who put their eggs in the power of their prayers were sadly leveled when the Benson’s Intercessory-Double -Blind Prayer Experiment came back negative, ineffectual, waste of time. Psychology only goes so far.
Hey, I read Wegner’s book too. It proved effective because unlike most psycho-babble books, The Illusion of Conscious Will was based on empirical evidence. Save the anecdotes for friends and family. What we are really interested in here is at the moment of decision-making, the final pulling of the trigger, what actually gets to choose: the make pretend unified John Horgan or unconscious mechanisms that can’t even be calculated. Yes, personal history, education, the debate on the radio, a surge of cortisol because you’re getting old, a memory of a childhood trauma, and what you had for breakfast are all on the table. What chooses? Maybe today’s the day your fusiform gyrus shits the bed and peoples faces are no longer emotionally significant like they were yesterday. I don’t know, you sound pretty convinced.
October 19th, 2009 at 12:27 am
Well Einstein stated that God does not play dice — which seems to indicate that God’s free will is the same as the natural laws of physics. Horgan you seem to be going along with the recent “emergence” model of science that chaotic self-organization creates different states of existence that can not be reproduced on other levels of science.
Phil points out that positivism inherently limits science in terms of rational predictions and therefore free will always has a step ahead of science — this is Roger Penrose’s argument as well. But in fact Godel stated that time travel is possible and the “change your past” paradox is not a problem because a time-traveler would not
DESIRE to change his/her own past.
Which brings us to the political/psychological paradox of mind versus body. Godel doesn’t specify where “desire” comes from but the Eastern religions (Taoism, Buddhism, Hindusim) relying on yoga, use sublimation of sex energy to overcome physical desire.
In other words that which time travels is not “you” (your mind) but pure mind beyond physical desire. Similarly, as per Einstein and logical definitions of God as “I Am” — the logical inference of truth, as per Godel, defines free will as the truth beyond any personal identity. So “free will” is the same as eternal will realized as beyond desire.
Science is predetermined by mathematics which comes from logic. Circular logic is fundamental to Western math whereas logical inference is an open system — again science IS much like Horgan claiming a type of self-organizing complexity to different disciplines of science.
The political crises, the ecological crisis are fundamental to the future of science. Will technology save us? If so then what “free will” will be left when we rely more and more on microchips and machine-mind interface, etc.
Chaos demonstrates that computers create the iterations for the mathematical logical solution — without free will, as Steve Strogatz has detailed.
So from the perspective of science Horgan is correct but Einstein was speaking from the perspective of mathematics and pure logic — similar to Godel. Yet even beyond the concept of free will there is the stark reality of the political and ecological crisis. What are humans really in the larger scheme of geological “deep time”? If anything science has proved that humans are next to nothing in the scheme of the universe, despite the anthropocentric principle. The technology used to prove science is the same means that undermines human free will.
My solution is nonwestern music as a model that transcends free will (just think of the effect of powerful music, despite your intentions otherwise — take any big movie and the soundtrack, for example) which is similar to looking for the scalar Higgs field to “save” humanity. haha.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:33 am
“Consider: Phil goes into the voting booth and faces two levers, one for Jon Corzine for N.J. Governor and one for Chris Christie. Would a complete physical description of all the particles comprising Phil’s body and the forces acting upon them let you predict Phil’s vote? No. You need to know Phil’s current mindset and personal history, which in turn requires knowledge of N.J. and U.S. politics, culture, history and so on. Politics is not just applied psychology.”
Good example, John. Free will is proved to exist because in a democracy we’re all free to choose once every four years between a couple of candidates who have a chance of winning, and who therefore are pretty similar. Yeah! Right!
In the City States of Ancient Greece, the word “democracy” meant something different: the citizens would gather to vote for policies each evening. (Not once every four years to elect a rich dictator.) That was closer to free will, although all decision making is constrained terribly by economic and other factors in practice.
The point you are missing is that decision making is stressful where the consequences of the decisions are very grave. That’s precisely why we elect politicians to take our free will away from us: it’s like the freedom from worry of being a child. If you don’t have any real decision making power, you’ve no free will to worry about and someone else takes the blame for the mistaken decisions that cause disasters.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Oh, for ****’s sake – who cares! The “illusion” of free will isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. You can either play along like a nice boy, or you can sink yourself into a spiral of depression, waiting like the deterministic automaton that you are for your death while pondering your lack of ‘free will’. Despite whatever science tells you, you still feel like you can choose what you want to eat for breakfast, so do it! And move on to these “bigger problems” that Horgan loves to ramble on about.
October 20th, 2009 at 12:45 am
Of course, the assertion that human existance in the first place is a totally meaningless accident and that all evolution has only been a combination of accidents and the working out of certain bio-chemical-physical imperatives and constants that were themselves unintended and accidental (no matter how fortuitous for life and us)an assumption that most definitely assumes that there is no God or supernatual creator whatsoever of any kind or nature, period, end of statement.
Or in other words, to believe in the blind watchmaker today you have to believe not only that there is no Judeo-Christian-Islamic anthropomorphic God, but also that there are no supernatural activities or influences of any kind, no mysterious coincidences, no premonitions, absolutely nothing whatsoever not recognized by Official Science. Yet somehow, without any mystery at all attached whatsoever, free will arises from an otherwise chance and mechanistic process? (As James Gleick explained, true chaotic systems are highly deterministic on some scale. The weather only SEEMS to be random or to have some strange wilfulness, it is actually a precise summing up of tediously calculable butterfly effects!)
It truly is hard to imagine that a creator God could exist who would not meddle in or somehow at least have influenced the initial and the boundary conditions of evolution. Therefore, Official Science of the Darwinian Imprimatur must necessarily be the most profound statement of obligatory atheism imaginable.
And so, unmistakeably, it is presented in the schools. Claims not to be its own form of religious or philosophical belief as well. . .
October 21st, 2009 at 6:17 am
“Oh, for ****’s sake – who cares! The “illusion” of free will isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. You can either play along like a nice boy, or you can sink yourself into a spiral of depression, waiting like the deterministic automaton that you are for your death while pondering your lack of ‘free will’. Despite whatever science tells you, you still feel like you can choose what you want to eat for breakfast, so do it! …” – Feral Onion
You’re right that the perceived presence or absence of free will is linked to levels of depression and optimism. But you’re wrong to conclude that it’s not important; it’s important because of this. It’s not a question of semantics either, like seeing your glass half full or half empty.
If you’re brought up to believe the popular media version of democratic freedom, namely that you’re free to do whatever you want provided you put enough effort in, you’re going to end up very depressed if you aspire to big things, put the effort in, then fail through bad luck. Your choice of breakfast is limited to what’s available. No matter how much money you make, if you’re unattractive, you’re not going to get a date. No matter how much effort you put in to research, it won’t lead to perceived success if nobody is interested enough to listen. There is only a limited amount of “free will”. All kinds of constraint and pure luck/fate operates to limit our freedom by reducing the real choices available to us, or making the price of desirable options too high to contemplate. Your “choice” of breakfast is limited to what’s in the fridge.
October 24th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Nigel, I think we’re in danger of confusing a few things with ‘free will’… Of course your options are constrained, but you still can consciously deliberate (or not) to the extent that you see fit and make a choice between those options. (Or at least it feels like that…)
Similarly, what Horgan refers to as ‘my kids have more of it than my dog’ is really just cognitive capacity. The brain grows, information is processed, and the individual becomes more aware of what is or isn’t possible. If we follow this line of reasoning, a more educated person could arguably have more ‘free will’ because they are more aware of system constraints and what is necessary to overcome them.
I define ‘free will’ to be the ability to work with whatever I have (cognitively and environmentally) and to make a choice. You can argue that my choice is made for me by my past experiences, values, etc., and that all I’m doing is executing a program to validate that past, but that isn’t enough to stop the feeling I have of being able to choose. I choose to embrace that feeling. (Sheesh – it’s starting to sound like a Rush song in here.)
Sorry for the delay in responding. I chose to be out of reach of The Damn Internet for a few days.
P.S. Someday we’ll address the “luck/fate” portion of your comment.
October 24th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
Truly, it is a puzzle. I have “chosen” to imbibe my fifth tumbler of iced wine for the night. When I was a school counselor and some troubled young lad or lassie confessed to me that he or she had been doing troubling things on their sleep-overs with buddies, I did not advise them that these experiments necessarily meant that their sexual orientation is chosen for life, get used to it.
But maybe it was. I have noticed that when the human corpus performs certain actions, there is a kind of metaphysical point of no return. To me it was an experience that touched all the senses: sight, smell, sound, taste, the feeling of touch. . .everything. It was almost as if the most clear chime you could ever hear went “ding” in your head, and all because you had performed an action that, indeed, you were driven to by a kind of strange compulsion.