The apparent dichotomous relationship between consciousness and determinism

 Someone (Graham C Lindsay) asked me a question on Quora:

Is it true that every event, without exception, is fully caused by its antecedent conditions?

 Graham Lindsay is Scottish, a musician (50 years a keyboard player) and by his own admission, has a lot of letters after his name. I should point out that I have none. The Quora algorithm gave me the impression that he asked me specifically, but maybe he didn't. As I say at the outset, David Cook gives a more erudite answer than me. It so happens, I've had correspondence with David Cook (he contacted me) and he sent me a copy of his book of poetry. He's a retired psychiatrist and lecturer.

In fact, I recommend that you read his answer in conjunction with mine - we take subtley different approaches without diverging too far apart.

I concede that there's not a lot that's new in this post, but I've found that rearranging pre-existing ideas can throw up new insights and thought-provocations.

Thanks for asking me, I feel flattered. To be honest, I think David Cook gives a better and more erudite answer than I can. I’d also recommend you ask Mark John Fernee (physicist with University of Queensland) who has some ideas on this subject.

I’ll start with Fernee, because he argues for determinism without arguing for superdeterminism, as Sabine Hossenfelder does. To answer the question directly, it appears to be true to the best of our knowledge. What do I mean by that? Everything in the Universe that has happened to date seems to have a cause, and it would appear that there is a causal chain going all the way back to the Big Bang. The future, however, is another matter. In the future we have multiple paths that are expressed in QM as probabilities. In fact, Freeman Dyson argued that QM can only describe the future and not the past. As another Quora contributor (David Moore) pointed out, you can only have a probability less than one for an event in the future. If it’s in the past, it has a probability of One.

In the Universe, chaos rules at virtually every level. A lot of people are unaware that even the orbits of the planets are chaotic, so they are only predictable within a range of hundreds of millions of years. Hossenfelder (whom I cited earlier) has a YouTube video where she demonstrates how a chaotic phenomenon always has a limited horizon of predictability (for want of a better phrase). With the weather it’s about 10 days. This doesn’t stop the Universe being deterministic up to the present, while being unpredictable in the future. The thing about chaotic phenomena is that if you rerun them you’d get a different outcome. This applies to the Universe itself. The best known example is the tossing of a coin, which is a chaotic event. It’s fundamental to probability theory that every coin toss is independent of previous tosses.

Regarding QM, we all know that Schrodinger’s equation is deterministic and time-reversible. However, as Fernee points out, the act of ‘measurement’ creates an irreversible event. To quote Paul Davies:

The very act of measurement breaks the time symmetry of quantum mechanics in a process sometimes described as the collapse of the wave function... the rewind button is destroyed as soon as that measurement is made.

David Cook, in his answer, mentions the role of imagination in his closing paragraph and I don’t think that can be overstated. To quote another philosopher, Raymond Tallis:

Free agents, then, are free because they select between imagined possibilities, and use actualities to bring about one rather than another.

I feel this is as good a description of free will as you can get. And like David, I think imagination is key here. And this raises the issue of consciousness, because I’m unsure how it fits into the scheme of things. As Schrodinger pointed out, consciousness exists in a constant present, which means that without memory you wouldn’t know you are conscious. And this has actually happened, where people have behaved consciously without being aware of it. It happened to my father when he was knocked unconscious in a boxing ring, and I know of other incidents. In my father’s case, he got back on his feet and knocked out his opponent – when he came to, he was standing over his opponent with no memory of what happened.

I tell this anecdote, because it begs a question. If we can respond to events that are harmful or life-threatening without conscious awareness, then why do we need consciousness?

All evidence of consciousness points to a neural substrate dependency. We don’t find consciousness in machines despite predictions that we eventually will. But it seems to me that consciousness acts outside the causal chain of the Universe. We have the ability, as do other sentient creatures, to perform actions on our physical environment that are purely determined by imagination, therefore thought. And we can even use thought to change the neural pathways in our brains, like a feedback loop, or as Douglas Hofstadter coined it, a ‘strange loop’.

 

Addendum: For my own benefit, I've coined the terms, 'weak determinism' and 'strong determinism', to differentiate between deterministic causality and superdeterminism respectively. I know there's a term called 'compatible determinism', from Hume, which, according to other sources, is the same as weak determinism, as I expound on below.

The point is that weak determinism (causality) is compatible with free will, which is what Hume argued, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia reference (linked above). However, Hume famously challenged the very idea of causality, whereas I'd argue that 'weak determinism' is completely dependent on causality being true and a universal principle. On the other hand, 'strong determinism' or superdeterminism (as advocated by Sabine Hossenfelder) axiomatically rules out free will, so there is a fundamental difference.

For the sake of clarity, the determinism I refer to in my essay (and its title) is weak determinism.