Noam Chomsky on free will

 Whatever you might think about Noam Chomsky’s political views, I’ve always found his philosophical views worth listening to, whether I agree with him or not. In the opening of this video - actually an interview by someone (name not given) on a YouTube channel titled, Mind-Body Solution – he presents a dichotomy that he thinks is obvious, but, as he points out, is generally not acknowledged.
 
Basically, he says that everyone, including anyone who presents an argument (on any topic), behaves as if they believe in free will, even if they claim they don’t. He reiterates this a number of times throughout the video. On the other hand, science cannot tell us anything about free will and many scientists therefore claim it must be an illusion. The contradiction is obvious. He’s not telling me anything I didn’t already know, but by stating it bluntly up-front, he makes you confront it, where more often than not, people simply ignore it.
 
My views on this are well known to anyone who regularly reads this blog, and I’ve challenged smarter minds than mine (not in person), like Sabine Hossenfelder, who claims that ‘free will needs to go in the rubbish bin’, as if it’s an idea that’s past its use-by-date. She claims:
 
...how ever you want to define the word [free will], we still cannot select among several possible different futures. This idea makes absolutely no sense if you know anything about physics.
 
I’ve addressed this elsewhere, so I won’t repeat myself. Chomsky makes the point that, while science acknowledges causal-determinism and randomness, neither of these rule out free will categorically. Chomsky makes it clear that he’s a ‘materialist’, though he discusses Descartes’ perspective in some depth. In my post where I critique Sabine, I conclude that ‘it [free will] defies a scientific explanation’, and I provide testimony from Gill Hicks following a dramatic near-death experience to make my point.
 
Where I most strongly agree with Chomsky is that we are not automatons, though I acknowledge that other members of the animal kingdom, like ants and bees, may be. This doesn’t mean that I think insects and arachnids don’t have consciousness, but I think a lot of their behaviours are effectively ‘programmed’ into their neural structures. It’s been demonstrated by experiments that bees must have an internal map of their local environment, otherwise the ‘dance’ they do to communicate locations to other bees in their colony would make no sense. Also, I think these creatures have feelings, like fear, attraction and hostility. Both of these aspects of their mental worlds distinguish them from AI, in my view, though others might disagree. I think these particular features of animal behaviour, even in these so-called ‘primitive’ creatures, provide the possibility of free will, if free will is the ability to act on the environment in a way that’s not determined solely by reflex actions.
 
Some might argue that acting on a ‘feeling’ is a ‘reflex action’, whereas I’m saying it’s a catalyst to act in a way that might be predictable but not predetermined. I think the ability to ‘feel’ is the evolutionary driver for consciousness. Surely, we could all be automatons without the requirement to be consciously aware. I’ve cited before, incidents where people have behaved like they are conscious, in situations of self-defence, but have no memory of it, because they were ‘knocked out’. It happened to my father in a boxing ring, and I know of other accounts, including a female security guard, who shot her assailant after he knocked her out. If one can defend oneself without being conscious of it, then why has evolution given us consciousness?
 
My contention is that consciousness and free will can’t be separated: it simply makes no sense to me to have the former without the latter. And I think it’s worth comparing this to AI, which might eventually develop to the point where it appears to have consciousness and therefore free will. I’ve made the argument before that there is a subtle difference between agency and free will, because AI certainly has agency. So, what’s the difference? The difference is what someone (Grant Bartley) called ‘conscious causality’ – the ability to turn a thought into an action. This is something we all experience all the time, and is arguably the core precept to Chomsky’s argument that we all believe in free will, because we all act on it.
 
Free will deniers (if I can coin that term) like Sabine Hossenfelder, argue that this is the key to the illusion we all suffer. To quote her again:
 
Your brain is running a calculation, and while it is going on you do not know the outcome of that calculation. So the impression of free will comes from our ‘awareness’ that we think about what we do, along with our inability to predict the result of what we are thinking.
 
In the same video (from which this quote is extracted) she uses the term ‘software’ in describing the activity of one’s brain’s processes, and in combination with the word, ‘calculation’, she clearly sees the brain as a wetware computer. So, while Chomsky argues that we all ‘believe’ in free will because we act like we do, Sabine argues that we act like we do, because the brain is ‘calculating’ the outcome without our cognisance. In effect, she argues that once it becomes conscious, the brain has made the ‘decision’ for you, but gives you the delusion that you have. Curiously, Chomsky uses the word, ‘delusion’, to describe the belief that you don’t have free will.
 
If Sabine is correct and your brain has already made the ‘decision’, then I go back to my previous argument concerning unconscious self-defence. If our ‘awareness’ is an unnecessary by-product of the brain’s activity (because any decision is independent of it), then why did we evolve to have it?
 
Chomsky raises a point I’ve discussed before, which is that, in the same way there are things we can comprehend that no other creature can, there is the possibility that there are things in the Universe that we can’t comprehend either. And I have specifically referenced consciousness as potentially one of those things. And this takes us back to the dichotomy that started the entire discussion – we experience free will, yet it’s thus far scientifically inexplicable. This leads to another dichotomy – it’s an illusion or it’s beyond human comprehension. There is a non-stated belief among many in the scientific community that eventually all unsolved problems in the Universe will eventually be solved by science – one only has to look at the historical record.
 
But I’m one of those who thinks the ‘hard problem’ (coined by David Chalmers) of consciousness may never be solved. Basically, the hard problem is that the experience of consciousness may remain forever a mystery. My argument, partly taken from Raymond Tallis, is that it won’t fall to science because it can’t be measured. We can only measure neuron-activity correlates, which some argue already resolves the problem. Actually, I don’t think it does, and again I turn to AI. If that’s correct, then measuring analogous electrical activity by an AI would also supposedly measure consciousness. At this stage in AI development, I don’t think anyone believes that, though some people believe that measures of global connectivity or similar parameters in an AI neural network may prove otherwise.
 
Basically, I don’t think AI will ever have an inner world like we do – going back to the bees I cited – and if it does, we wouldn’t know. I don’t know what inner world you have, but I would infer you have one from your behaviour (assuming we met). On the other hand, I don’t know that anyone would infer that an AI would have one. I’ve made the comparison before of an AI-operated, autonomous drone navigating by GPS co-ordinates, which requires self-referencing algorithms. Notice that we don’t navigate that way, unless we use a computer interface (like your smart phone). AI can simulate what we do: like write sentences, play chess, drive cars; but doing them in a completely different fashion.
 
In response to a question from his interlocutor, Chomsky argues that our concept of justice is dependent on a belief in free will, even if it’s unstated. It’s hard to imagine anyone disagreeing, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to hold anyone accountable for their actions.

As I’ve argued previously, it’s our ability to mental time-travel that underpins free will, because, without an imagined future, there is no future to actualise, which is the whole point of having free will. And I would extend this to other creatures, who may be trying to catch food or escape being eaten – either way, they imagine a future they want to actualise.

 

Addendum: I’m currently reading Brian Greene’s Until The End Of Time (2020), who devoted an entire chapter to consciousness and, not surprisingly, has something to say about free will. He’s a materialist, and he says in his intro to the topic:
 
This question has inspired more pages in the philosophical literature than just about any other conundrum.  

Basically, he argues, like Sabine Hossenfelder, that it’s in conflict with the laws of physics, but given he’s writing in a book, and not presenting a time-limited YouTube video (though he does those too), he goes into more detail.
 
To sum up: We are physical beings made of large collections of particles governed by nature’s laws. Everything we do and everything we think amounts to motions of those particles.
 
He then provides numerous everyday examples that we can all identify with.
 
And since all observations, experiments, and valid theories confirm that particle motion is fully controlled by mathematical rules, we can no more intercede in this lawful progresson of particles than we can change the value of pi.
 
Interesting analogy, because I agree that even God can’t change the value of pi, but that’s another argument. And I’m not convinced that consciousness can be modelled mathematically, which, if true, undermines his entire argument regarding mathematical rules.
 
My immediate internal response to his entire thesis was that he’s writing a book, yet effectively arguing that he has no control over it. However, as if he anticipated this response, he addresses that very point at the end of the next section, titled Rocks, Humans and Freedom.

What matters to me is… my collection of particles is enabled to execute an enormously diverse set of behaviours. Indeed, my particles just composed this very sentence and I’m glad they did… I am free not because I can supersede physical law, but because my prodigious internal organisation has emancipated my behavioural responses.
 
In other words, the particles in his body and his brain, in particular, (unlike the particles in inert objects, like rocks, tables, chairs etc) possess degrees of freedom that others don’t. But here’s the thing: I and others, including you, read these words and form our own ideas and responses, which we intellectualise and even emote about. In fact, we all form an opinion that either agrees or disagrees with his point. But whether there are diverse possibilities, he’s effectively saying that we are all complex automatons, which means there is no necessity for us to be consciously aware of what we are doing. And I argue that this is what separates us from AI.
 
Just be aware that Albert Einstein would have agreed with him.

 

Freedom of the will is requisite for all other freedoms

 I’ve recently read 2 really good books on consciousness and the mind, as well as watch countless YouTube videos on the topic, but the title of this post reflects the endpoint for me. Consciousness has evolved, so for most of the Universe’s history, it didn’t exist, yet without it, the Universe has no meaning and no purpose. Even using the word, purpose, in this context, is anathema to many scientists and philosophers, because it hints at teleology. In fact, Paul Davies raises that very point in one of the many video conversations he has with Robert Lawrence Kuhn in the excellent series, Closer to Truth.
 
Davies is an advocate of a cosmic-scale ‘loop’, whereby QM provides a backwards-in-time connection which can only be determined by a conscious ‘observer’. This is contentious, of course, though not his original idea – it came from John Wheeler. As Davies points out, Stephen Hawking was also an advocate, premised on the idea that there are a number of alternative histories, as per Feynman’s ‘sum-over-histories’ methodology, but only one becomes reality when an ‘observation’ is made. I won’t elaborate, as I’ve discussed it elsewhere, when I reviewed Hawking’s book, The Grand Design.
 
In the same conversation with Kuhn, Davies emphasises the fact that the Universe created the means to understand itself, through us, and quotes Einstein: The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it’s comprehensible. Of course, I’ve made the exact same point many times, and like myself, Davies makes the point that this is only possible because of the medium of mathematics.
 
Now, I know I appear to have gone down a rabbit hole, but it’s all relevant to my viewpoint. Consciousness appears to have a role, arguably a necessary one, in the self-realisation of the Universe – without it, the Universe may as well not exist. To quote Wheeler: The universe gave rise to consciousness and consciousness gives meaning to the Universe.
 
Scientists, of all stripes, appear to avoid any metaphysical aspect of consciousness, but I think it’s unavoidable. One of the books I cite in my introduction is Philip Ball’s The Book of Minds; How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings; from Animals to Aliens. It’s as ambitious as the title suggests, and with 450 pages, it’s quite a read. I’ve read and reviewed a previous book by Ball, Beyond Weird (about quantum mechanics), which is equally as erudite and thought-provoking as this one. Ball is a ‘physicalist’, as virtually all scientists are (though he’s more open-minded than most), but I tend to agree with Raymond Tallis that, despite what people claim, consciousness is still ‘unexplained’ and might remain so for some time, if not forever.
 
I like an idea that I first encountered in Douglas Hofstadter’s seminal tome, Godel, Escher, Bach; an Eternal Golden Braid, that consciousness is effectively a loop, at what one might call the local level. By which I mean it’s confined to a particular body. It’s created within that body but then it has a causal agency all of its own. Not everyone agrees with that. Many argue that consciousness cannot of itself ‘cause’ anything, but Ball is one of those who begs to differ, and so do I. It’s what free will is all about, which finally gets us back to the subject of this post.
 
Like me, Ball prefers to use the word ‘agency’ over free will. But he introduces the term, ‘volitional decision-making’ and gives it the following context:

I believe that the only meaningful notion of free will – and it is one that seems to me to satisfy all reasonable demands traditionally made of it – is one in which volitional decision-making can be shown to happen according to the definition I give above: in short, that the mind operates as an autonomous source of behaviour and control. It is this, I suspect, that most people have vaguely in mind when speaking of free will: the sense that we are the authors of our actions and that we have some say in what happens to us. (My emphasis)

And, in a roundabout way, this brings me to the point alluded to in the title of this post: our freedoms are constrained by our environment and our circumstances. We all wish to be ‘authors of our actions’ and ‘have some say in what happens to us’, but that varies from person to person, dependent on ‘external’ factors.

Writing stories, believe it or not, had a profound influence on how I perceive free will, because a story, by design, is an interaction between character and plot. In fact, I claim they are 2 sides of the same coin – each character has their own subplot, and as they interact, their storylines intertwine. This describes my approach to writing fiction in a nutshell. The character and plot represent, respectively, the internal and external journey of the story. The journey metaphor is apt, because a story always has the dimension of time, which is visceral, and is one of the essential elements that separates fiction from non-fiction. To stretch the analogy, character represents free will and plot represents fate. Therefore, I tell aspiring writers the importance of giving their characters free will.

A detour, but not irrelevant. I read an article in Philosophy Now sometime back, about people who can escape their circumstances, and it’s the subject of a lot of biographies as well as fiction. We in the West live in a very privileged time whereby many of us can aspire to, and attain, the life that we dream about. I remember at the time I left school, following a less than ideal childhood, feeling I had little control over my life. I was a fatalist in that I thought that whatever happened was dependent on fate and not on my actions (I literally used to attribute everything to fate). I later realised that this is a state-of-mind that many people have who are not happy with their circumstances and feel impotent to change them.

The thing is that it takes a fundamental belief in free will to rise above that and take advantage of what comes your way. No one who has made that journey will accept the self-denial that free will is an illusion and therefore they have no control over their destiny.

I will provide another quote from Ball that is more in line with my own thinking:

…minds are an autonomous part of what causes the future to unfold. This is different to the common view of free will in which the world somehow offers alternative outcomes and the wilful mind selects between them. Alternative outcomes – different, counterfactual realities – are not real, but metaphysical: they can never be observed. When we make a choice, we aren’t selecting between various possible futures, but between various imagined futures, as represented in the mind’s internal model of the world… (emphasis in the original)

And this highlights a point I’ve made before: that it’s the imagination which plays the key role in free will. I’ve argued that imagination is one of the facilities of a conscious mind that separates us (and other creatures) from AI. Now AI can also demonstrate agency, and, in a game of chess, for example, it will ‘select’ from a number of possible ‘moves’ based on certain criteria. But there are fundamental differences. For a start, the AI doesn’t visualise what it’s doing; it’s following a set of highly constrained rules, within which it can select from a number of options, one of which will be the optimal solution. Its inherent advantage over a human player isn’t just its speed but its ability to compare a number of possibilities that are impossible for the human mind to contemplate simultaneously.

The other book I read was Being You; A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth. I came across Seth when I did an online course on consciousness through New Scientist, during COVID lockdowns. To be honest, his book didn’t tell me a lot that I didn’t already know. For example, that the world, we all see and think exists ‘out there’, is actually a model of reality created within our heads. He also emphasises how the brain is a ‘prediction-making’ organ rather than a purely receptive one. Seth mentions that it uses a Bayesian model (which I also knew about previously), whereby it updates its prediction based on new sensory data. Not surprisingly, Seth describes all this in far more detail and erudition than I can muster.

Ball, Seth and I all seem to agree that while AI will become better at mimicking the human mind, this doesn’t necessarily mean it will attain consciousness. Applications software, ChatGPT (for example), despite appearances, does not ‘think’ the way we do, and actually does not ‘understand’ what it’s talking or writing about. I’ve written on this before, so I won’t elaborate.

Seth contends that the ‘mystery’ of consciousness will disappear in the same way that the 'mystery of life’ has effectively become a non-issue. What he means is that we no longer believe that there is some ‘elan vital’ or ‘life force’, which distinguishes living from non-living matter. And he’s right, in as much as the chemical origins of life are less mysterious than they once were, even though abiogenesis is still not fully understood.

By analogy, the concept of a soul has also lost a lot of its cogency, following the scientific revolution. Seth seems to associate the soul with what he calls ‘spooky free will’ (without mentioning the word, soul), but he’s obviously putting ‘spooky free will’ in the same category as ‘elan vital’, which makes his analogy and associated argument consistent. He then says:

Once spooky free will is out of the picture, it is easy to see that the debate over determinism doesn’t matter at all. There’s no longer any need to allow any non-deterministic elbow room for it to intervene. From the perspective of free will as a perceptual experience, there is simply no need for any disruption to the causal flow of physical events. (My emphasis)

Seth differs from Ball (and myself) in that he doesn’t seem to believe that something ‘immaterial’ like consciousness can affect the physical world. To quote:

But experiences of volition do not reveal the existence of an immaterial self with causal power over physical events.

Therefore, free will is purely a ‘perceptual experience’. There is a problem with this view that Ball himself raises. If free will is simply the mind observing effects it can’t cause, but with the illusion that it can, then its role is redundant to say the least. This is a view that Sabine Hossenfelder has also expressed: that we are merely an ‘observer’ of what we are thinking.

Your brain is running a calculation, and while it is going on you do not know the outcome of that calculation. So the impression of free will comes from our ‘awareness’ that we think about what we do, along with our inability to predict the result of what we are thinking.

Ball makes the point that we only have to look at all the material manifestations of human intellectual achievements that are evident everywhere we’ve been. And this brings me back to the loop concept I alluded to earlier. Not only does consciousness create a ‘local’ loop, whereby it has a causal effect on the body it inhabits but also on the external world to that body. This is stating the obvious, except, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, it’s possible that one could interact with the external world as an automaton, with no conscious awareness of it. The difference is the role of imagination, which I keep coming back to. All the material manifestations of our intellect are arguably a result of imagination.

One insight I gained from Ball, which goes slightly off-topic, is evidence that bees have an internal map of their environment, which is why the dance they perform on returning to the hive can be ‘understood’ by other bees. We’ve learned this by interfering in their behaviour. What I find interesting is that this may have been the original reason that consciousness evolved into the form that we experience it. In other words, we all create an internal world that reflects the external world so realistically, that we think it is the actual world. I believe that this also distinguishes us (and bees) from AI. An AI can use GPS to navigate its way through the physical world, as well as other so-called sensory data, from radar or infra-red sensors or whatever, but it doesn’t create an experience of that world inside itself.

The human mind seems to be able to access an abstract world, which we do when we read or watch a story, or even write one, as I have done. I can understand how Plato took this idea to its logical extreme: that there is an abstract world, of which the one we inhabit is but a facsimile (though he used different terminology). No one believes that today – except, there is a remnant of Plato’s abstract world that persists, which is mathematics. Many mathematicians and physicists (though not all) treat mathematics as a neverending landscape that humans have the unique capacity to explore and comprehend. This, of course, brings me back to Davies’ philosophical ruminations that I opened this discussion with. And as he, and others (like Einstein, Feynman, Wigner, Penrose, to name but a few) have pointed out: the Universe itself seems to follow specific laws that are intrinsically mathematical and which we are continually discovering.

And this closes another loop: that the Universe created the means to comprehend itself, using the medium of mathematics, without which, it has no meaning. Of purpose, we can only conjecture.

Daniel C Dennett (28 March 1942 - 19 April 2024)

 I only learned about Dennett’s passing in the latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 162, June/July 2024), where Daniel Hutto (Professor of Philosophical Psychology at the University of Wollongong) wrote a 3-page obituary. Not that long ago, I watched an interview with him, following the publication of his last book, I’ve Been Thinking, which, from what I gathered, is basically a memoir, as well as an insight into his philosophical musings. (I haven’t read it, but that’s the impression I got from the interview.)
 
I should point out that I have fundamental philosophical differences with Dennett, but he’s not someone you can ignore. I must confess I’ve only read one of his books (decades ago), Freedom Evolves (2006), though I’ve read enough of his interviews and commentary to be familiar with his fundamental philosophical views. It’s something of a failing on my part that I haven’t read his most famous tome, Consciousness Explained (1991). Paul Davies once nominated it among his top 5 books, along with Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel Escher Bach. But then he gave a tongue-in-cheek compliment by quipping, ‘Some have said that he explained consciousness away.’
 
Speaking of Hofstadter, he and Dennett co-published a book, The Mind’s I, which is really a collection of essays by different authors, upon which Dennett and Hofstadter commented. I wrote a short review covering only a small selection of said essays on this blog back in 2009.
 
Dennett wasn’t afraid to tackle the big philosophical issues, in particular, anything relating to consciousness. He was unusual for a philosopher in that he took more than a passing interest in science, and appreciated the discourse that axiomatically arises between the 2 disciplines, while many others (on both sides) emphasise the tension that seems to arise and often morphs into antagonism.
 
What I found illuminating in one of his YouTube videos was how Dennett’s views of the world hadn’t really changed that much over time (mind you, neither have mine), and it got me thinking that it reinforces an idea I’ve long held, but was once iterated by Nietzsche, that our original impulses are intuitive or emotive and then we rationalise them with argument. I can’t help but feel that this is what Dennett did, though he did it extremely well.
 
I like the quote at the head of Hutto’s obituary: “The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.”

 

Why you need memory to have free will

 This is so obvious once I explain it to you, you’ll wonder why no one else ever mentions it. I’ve pointed out a number of times before that consciousness exists in a constant present, so the time is always ‘now’ for us. I credit Erwin Schrodinger for providing this insight in his lectures, Mind and Matter, appended to his short tome (an oxymoron), What is Life?
 
A logical consequence is that, without memory, you wouldn’t know you’re conscious. And this has actually happened, where people have been knocked unconscious, then acted as if they were conscious in order to defend themselves, but have no memory of it. It happened to my father in a boxing ring (I didn’t believe him when he first told me) and it happened to a woman security guard (in Sydney) where she shot her assailant after he knocked her out. In both cases, they claimed they had no memory of the incident.
 
And, as I’ve pointed out before, this begs a question: if we can survive an attack without being consciously aware of it, then why did evolution select for consciousness? In other words, we could be automatons. The difference is that we have memory.
 
The brain is effectively a memory storage device, without which we would function quite differently. Perhaps this is the real difference between animals and plants. Perhaps plants are sentient, but without memories they can’t ‘think’. There are different types of memory. There is so-called muscle-memory, whereby when we learn a new skill we don’t have to keep relearning it, and eventually we do it without really thinking about it. Driving a car is an example that most of us are familiar with, but it applies to most sports and the playing of musical instruments. I’ve learned that this applies to cognitive skills as well. For example, I write stories and creating characters is something I do without thinking about it too much.
 
People who suffer from retrograde amnesia (as described by Oliver Sacks in his seminal book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, in the chapter titled, The Lost Mariner) don’t lose their memory of specific skills, or what we call muscle-memory. So you could have muscle-memory and still be an automaton, as I described above.
 
Other types of memory are semantic memory and episodic memory. Semantic memory, which is essential to learning a language, is basically our ability to remember facts, which may or may not require a specific context. Rote learning is just exercising semantic memory, which doesn’t necessarily require a deep understanding of a subject, but that’s another topic.
 
Episodic memory is the one I’m most concerned with here. It’s the ability to recount an event in one’s life – a form of time-travelling we all indulge in from time to time. Unlike a computer memory, it’s not an exact recollection – we reconstruct it – which is why it can change over time and why it doesn’t necessarily agree with someone else’s recollection of the same event. Then there is imagination, which I believe is the key to it all. Apparently, imagination uses the same part of the brain as episodic memory. In effect, we are creating a memory of something that is yet to happen – an attempt to time-travel into the future. And this, I argue, is how free will works.

Philosophers have invented a term called ‘intentionality’, which is not what you might think it is. I’ll give a dictionary definition:
 
The quality of mental states (e.g. thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes) which consists in their being directed towards some object or state of affairs.
 
Philosophers who write on the topic of consciousness, like Daniel C Dennett and John Searle, like to use the term ‘aboutness’ to describe intentionality, and if you break down the definition I gave above, you might discern what they mean. It’s effectively the ability to direct ‘thoughts… towards some object or state of affairs’. But I see this as either episodic memory or imagination. In other words, the ‘object or state of affairs’ could be historical or yet to happen or pure fantasy. We can imagine events we’ve never experienced, though we may have read or heard about them, and they may not only have happened in another time but also another place – so mental time-travelling.
 
As well as a memory storage device, the brain is also a predictability device – it literally thinks a fraction of a second ahead. I’ve pointed out in another post that the brain creates a model in space and time so we can interact with the real world of space and time, which allows us to survive it. And one of the facets of that model is that it’s actually, minisculy ahead of the real world, otherwise we wouldn’t even be able to catch a ball. In other words, it makes predictions that our life depends on. But I contend that this doesn’t need episodic memory or imagination either, because it happens subconsciously and is part of our automaton brain.
 
My point is that the automaton brain, as I’ve coined it, could have evolved by natural selection, without memory. The major difference memory makes is that we become self-aware, and it gives consciousness a role it would otherwise not possess. And that role is what we call free will. I like a definition that philosopher and neuroscientist, Raymond Tallis, gave:
 
Free agents, then, are free because they select between imagined possibilities, and use actualities to bring about one rather than another.
 
So, as I said earlier, I think imagination is key. Free will requires imagination, which I argue is called ‘aboutness’ or ‘intentionality’ in philosophical jargon (though others may differ). And imagination requires episodic memory or mental time-travelling, without which we would all be automatons; still able to interact with the real world of space and time and to acquire skills necessary for survival.
 
And if one goes back to the very beginning of this essay, it is all premised on the observed and experiential phenomenon that consciousness exists in a constant present. We take this for granted, yet nothing else does. Everything becomes the past as soon as it happens, which I keep repeating, is demonstrated every time someone takes a photo. The only exception I can think of is a photon of light, for which time is zero. Our very thoughts become memory as soon as we think them, otherwise we wouldn’t know we exist, yet we could apparently survive without it.
 
Just today, I read a review in New Scientist (27 April 2024) of a book, The Elephant and the Blind: The experience of pure consciousness – philosophy, science and 500+ experiential reports by Thomas Metzinger. Apparently, Metzinger did an ‘online survey of meditators from 57 countries providing over 500 reports for the book.’ Basically, he argues that one can achieve a state that he calls ‘pure consciousness’ whereby the practitioner loses all sense of self. In effect, he argues (according to the reviewer, Alun Anderson):
 
 That a first-person perspective isn’t necessary for consciousness at all: your sense of self, of a continuous “you”, is part of the content of consciousness, not consciousness itself.
 
A provocative and contentious perspective, yet it reminds me of studies, also reported in New Scientist, many years ago, using brain-scan-imagery, of people experiencing ‘God’ also having a sense of being ‘self-less’, if I can use that term. Personally, I think consciousness is something fundamental with a possible independent existence to anything physical. It has a physical manifestation, if you like, purely because of memory, because our brains are effectively a storage device for consciousness.
 
This is a radical idea, but it is one I woke up with one day as if it was an epiphany, and realised that it was quite a departure from what I normally think. Raymond Tallis, whom I’ve already mentioned, once made the claim that science can only study objects and phenomena that can be measured. I claim that consciousness can’t be measured, but because we can measure brain waves and neuron activity many people argue that we are measuring consciousness.
 
But here’s the thing: if we didn’t experience consciousness, then scientists would tell us it doesn’t exist in the same way they tell us that free will doesn’t exist. I can make this claim because the same scientists argue that eventually AI will exhibit consciousness while simultaneously telling us that we will know this from the way the AI behaves, not because anyone will be measuring anything.

 

Addendum: I came across this related video by self-described philosopher-physicist, Avshalom Elitzur, who takes a subtly different approach to the same issue, giving examples from the animal kingdom. Towards the end, he talks about specific 'isms' (e.g. physicalism and dualism), but he doesn't mention the one I'm an advocate of, which is a 'loop' - that matter interacts with consciousness, via neurons, and then consciousness interacts with matter, which is necessary for free will.

Basically, he argues that consciousness interacting with matter breaks conservation laws (watch the video) but the brain consumes energy whether it's doing a maths calculation, running around an oval or lying asleep. Running around an oval is arguably consciousness interacting with matter - the same for an animal chasing prey - because one assumes they're based on a conscious decision, which is based on an imagined future, as per my thesis above. Also, processing information uses energy, which is why computers get hot, with no consciousness required. I fail to see what the difference is.

Can AI have free will?

This is a question I’ve never seen asked, let alone answered. I think there are good reasons for that, which I’ll come to later.
 
The latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 159, Dec 2023/Jan 2024), which I’ve already referred to in 2 previous posts, has as its theme (they always have a theme), Freewill Versus Determinism. I’ll concentrate on an article by the Editor, Grant Bartley, titled What Is Free Will? That’s partly because he and I have similar views on the topic, and partly because reading the article led me to ask the question at the head of this post (I should point out that he never mentions AI).
 
It's a lengthy article, meaning I won’t be able to fully do it justice, or even cover all aspects that he discusses. For instance, towards the end, he posits a personal ‘pet’ theory that there is a quantum aspect to the internal choice we make in our minds. And he even provides a link to videos he’s made on this topic. I mention this in passing, and will make 2 comments: one, I also have ‘pet’ theories, so I can’t dismiss him out-of-hand; and two, I haven’t watched the videos, so I can’t comment on its plausibility.
 
He starts with an attempt to define what we mean by free will, and what it doesn’t mean. For instance, he differentiates between subconscious choices, which he calls ‘impulses’ and free will, which requires a conscious choice. He also differentiates what he calls ‘making a decision’. I will quote him directly, as I still see this involving free will, if it’s based on making a ‘decision’ from alternative possibilities (as he explains).
 
…sometimes, our decision-making is a choice, that is, mentally deciding between alternative possibilities present to your awareness. But your mind doesn’t always explicitly present you with multiple choices from which to choose. Sometimes no distinct options are present in your awareness, and you must cause your next contents of your mind on the basis of the present content, through intuition and imagination. This is not choice so much as making a decision. (My emphasis)
 
This is worth a detour, because I see what he’s describing in this passage as the process I experience when writing fiction, which is ‘creating’. In this case, some of the content, if not all of it, is subconscious. When you write a story, it feels to you (but no one else) that the characters are real and the story you’re telling already exists. Nevertheless, I still think there’s an element of free will, because you make choices and judgements about what your imagination presents to your consciousness. As I said, this is a detour.
 
I don’t think this is what he’s referring to, and I’ll come back to it later when I introduce AI into the discussion. Meanwhile, I’ll discuss what I think is the nub of his thesis and my own perspective, which is the apparent dependency between consciousness and free will.
 
If conscious causation is not real, why did consciousness evolve at all? What would be the function of awareness if it can’t change behaviour? How could an impotent awareness evolve if it cannot change what the brain’s going to do to help the human body or its genes survive? (Italics in the original)
 
This is a point I’ve made myself, but Bartley goes further and argues “Since determinism can’t answer these questions, we can know determinism is false.” This is the opposite to Sabine Hossenfelder’s argument (declaration really) that ‘free will is an illusion [therefore false]’.
 
Note that Bartley coins the term, ‘conscious causation’, as a de facto synonym for free will. In fact, he says this explicitly in his conclusion: “If you say there is no free will, you’re basically saying there is no such thing as conscious causation.” I’d have to agree.
 
I made the point in another post that consciousness seems to act outside the causal chain of the Universe, and I feel that’s what Bartley is getting at. In fact, he explicitly cites Kant on this point, who (according to Bartley) “calls the will ‘transcendental’…” He talks at length about ‘soft (or weak) determinism’ and ‘strong determinism’, which I’ve also discussed. Now, the usual argument is that consciousness is ‘caused’ by neuron activity, therefore strong determinism is not broken.
 
To quote Hossenfelder: Your brain is running a calculation, and while it is going on you do not know the outcome of that calculation. So the impression of free will comes from our ‘awareness’ that we think about what we do, along with our inability to predict the result of what we are thinking. (Hossenfelder even uses the term ‘software’ to describe what does the ‘calculating’ in your brain.)
 
And this allows me to segue into AI, because what Hossenfelder describes is what we expect a computer to do. The thing is that while most scientists (and others) believe that AI will eventually become conscious (not sure what Hossenfelder thinks), I’ve never heard or seen anyone argue that AI will have free will. And this is why I don’t think the question at the head of this post has ever been asked. Many of the people who believe that AI will become conscious also don’t believe free will exists.
 
There is another component to this, which I’ve raised before and that’s imagination. I like to quote Raymond Tallis (neuroscientist and also a contributor to Philosophy Now).
 
Free agents, then, are free because they select between imagined possibilities, and use actualities to bring about one rather than another. (My emphasis)
 
Now, in another post, I argued that AI can’t have imagination in the way we experience it, yet I acknowledge that AI can look at numerous possibilities (like in a game of chess) and 'choose' what it ‘thinks’ is the optimum action. So, in this sense, AI would have ‘agency’, but that’s not free will, because it’s not ‘conscious causation’. And in this sense, I agree with Bartley that ‘making a decision’ does not constitute free will, if it’s what an AI does. So the difference is consciousness. To quote from that same post on this topic.
 
But the key here is imagination. It is because we can imagine a future that we attempt to bring it about - that's free will. And what we imagine is affected by our past, our emotions and our intellectual considerations, but that doesn't make it predetermined.
 
So, if imagination and consciousness are both faculties that separate us from AI, then I can’t see AI having free will, even though it will make ‘decisions’ based on data it receives (as inputs), and those decisions may not be predictable.
 
And this means that AI may not be deterministic either, in the ‘strong’ sense. One of the differences with humans, and other creatures that evolved consciousness, is that consciousness can apparently change the neural pathways of the brain, which I’d argue is the ‘strange loop’ posited by Douglas Hofstadter. (I have discussed free will and brain-plasticity in another post)
 
But there’s another way of looking at this, which differentiates humans from AI. Our decision-making is a combination of logical reasoning and emotion. AI only uses logic, and even then, it uses logic differently to us. It uses a database of samples and possibilities to come up with a ‘decision’ (or output), but without using the logic to arise at that decision the way we would. In other words, it doesn’t ‘understand’ the decision, like when it translates between languages, for example.
 
There is a subconscious and conscious component to our decision-making. Arguably, the subconscious component is analogous to what a computer does with algorithm-based software (as per Hossenfelder’s description). But there is no analogous conscious component in AI, which makes a choice or decision. In other words, there is no ‘conscious causation’, therefore no free will, as per Bartley’s definition.
 

Consciousness, free will, determinism, chaos theory – all connected

 I’ve said many times that philosophy is all about argument. And if you’re serious about philosophy, you want to be challenged. And if you want to be challenged you should seek out people who are both smarter and more knowledgeable than you. And, in my case, Sabine Hossenfelder fits the bill.
 
When I read people like Sabine, and others whom I interact with on Quora, I’m aware of how limited my knowledge is. I don’t even have a university degree, though I’ve attempted a number of times. I’ve spent my whole life in the company of people smarter than me, including at school. Believe it or not, I still have occasional contact with them, through social media and school reunions. I grew up in a small rural town, where the people you went to school with feel like siblings.
 
Likewise, in my professional life, I have always encountered people cleverer than me – it provides perspective.
 
In her book, Existential Physics; A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions, Sabine interviews people who are possibly even smarter than she is, and I sometimes found their conversations difficult to follow. To be fair to Sabine, she also sought out people who have different philosophical views to her, and also have the intellect to match her.
 
I’m telling you all this to put things in perspective. Sabine has her prejudices like everyone else, some of which she defends better than others. I concede that my views are probably more simplistic than hers, and I support my challenges with examples that are hopefully easy to follow. Our points of disagreement can be distilled down to a few pertinent topics, which are time, consciousness, free will and chaos. Not surprisingly, they are all related – what you believe about one, affects what you believe about the others.
 
Sabine is very strict about what constitutes a scientific theory. She argues that so-called theories like the multiverse have ‘no explanatory power’, because they can’t be verified or rejected by evidence, and she calls them ‘ascientific’. She’s critical of popularisers like Brian Cox who tell us that there could be an infinite number of ‘you(s)’ in an infinite multiverse. She distinguishes between beliefs and knowledge, which is a point I’ve made myself. Having said that, I’ve also argued that beliefs matter in science. She puts all interpretations of quantum mechanics (QM) in this category. She keeps emphasising that it doesn’t mean they are wrong, but they are ‘ascientific’. It’s part of the distinction that I make between philosophy and science, and why I perceive science as having a dialectical relationship with philosophy.
 
I’ll start with time, as Sabine does, because it affects everything else. In fact, the first chapter in her book is titled, Does The Past Still Exist? Basically, she argues for Einstein’s ‘block universe’ model of time, but it’s her conclusion that ‘now is an illusion’ that is probably the most contentious. This critique will cite a lot of her declarations, so I will start with her description of the block universe:
 
The idea that the past and future exist in the same way as the present is compatible with all we currently know.
 
This viewpoint arises from the fact that, according to relativity theory, simultaneity is completely observer-dependent. I’ve discussed this before, whereby I argue that for an observer who is moving relative to a source, or stationary relative to a moving source, like the observer who is standing on the platform of Einstein’s original thought experiment, while a train goes past, knows this because of the Doppler effect. In other words, an observer who doesn’t see a Doppler effect is in a privileged position, because they are in the same frame of reference as the source of the signal. This is why we know the Universe is expanding with respect to us, and why we can work out our movement with respect to the CMBR (cosmic microwave background radiation), hence to the overall universe (just think about that).
 
Sabine clinches her argument by drawing a spacetime diagram, where 2 independent observers moving away from each other, observe a pulsar with 2 different simultaneities. One, who is traveling towards the pulsar, sees the pulsar simultaneously with someone’s birth on Earth, while the one travelling away from the pulsar sees it simultaneously with the same person’s death. This is her slam-dunk argument that ‘now’ is an illusion, if it can produce such a dramatic contradiction.
 
However, I drew up my own spacetime diagram of the exact same scenario, where no one is travelling relative to anyone one else, yet create the same apparent contradiction.

 My diagram follows the convention in that the horizontal axis represents space (all 3 dimensions) and the vertical axis represents time. So the 4 dotted lines represent 4 observers who are ‘stationary’ but ‘travelling through time’ (vertically). As per convention, light and other signals are represented as diagonal lines of 45 degrees, as they are travelling through both space and time, and nothing can travel faster than them. So they also represent the ‘edge’ of their light cones.
 
So notice that observer A sees the birth of Albert when he sees the pulsar and observer B sees the death of Albert when he sees the pulsar, which is exactly the same as Sabine’s scenario, with no relativity theory required. Albert, by the way, for the sake of scalability, must have lived for thousands of years, so he might be a tree or a robot.
 
But I’ve also added 2 other observers, C and D, who see the pulsar before Albert is born and after Albert dies respectively. But, of course, there’s no contradiction, because it’s completely dependent on how far away they are from the sources of the signals (the pulsar and Earth).
 
This is Sabine’s perspective:
 
Once you agree that anything exists now elsewhere, even though you see it only later, you are forced to accept that everything in the universe exists now. (Her emphasis.)
 
I actually find this statement illogical. If you take it to its logical conclusion, then the Big Bang exists now and so does everything in the universe that’s yet to happen. If you look at the first quote I cited, she effectively argues that the past and future exist alongside the present.
 
One of the points she makes is that, for events with causal relationships, all observers see the events happening in the same sequence. The scenario where different observers see different sequences of events have no causal relationships. But this begs a question: what makes causal events exceptional? What’s more, this is fundamental, because the whole of physics is premised on the principle of causality. In addition, I fail to see how you can have causality without time. In fact, causality is governed by the constant speed of light – it’s literally what stops everything from happening at once.
 
Einstein also believed in the block universe, and like Sabine, he argued that, as a consequence, there is no free will. Sabine is adamant that both ‘now’ and ‘free will’ are illusions. She argues that the now we all experience is a consequence of memory. She quotes Carnap that our experience of ‘past, present and future can be described and explained by psychology’ – a point also made by Paul Davies. Basically, she argues that what separates our experience of now from the reality of no-now (my expression, not hers) is our memory.
 
Whereas, I think she has it back-to-front, because, as I’ve pointed out before, without memory, we wouldn’t know we are conscious. Our brains are effectively a storage device that allows us to have a continuity of self through time, otherwise we would not even be aware that we exist. Memory doesn’t create the sense of now; it records it just like a photograph does. The photograph is evidence that the present becomes the past as soon as it happens. And our thoughts become memories as soon as they happen, otherwise we wouldn’t know we think.
 
Sabine spends an entire chapter on free will, where she persistently iterates variations on the following mantra:
 
The future is fixed except for occasional quantum events that we cannot influence.
 
But she acknowledges that while the future is ‘fixed’, it’s not predictable. And this brings us to chaos theory. Sabine discusses chaos late in the book and not in relation to free will. She explicates what she calls the ‘real butterfly effect’.
 
The real butterfly effect… means that even arbitrarily precise initial data allow predictions for only a finite amount of time. A system with this behaviour would be deterministic and yet unpredictable.
 
Now, if deterministic means everything physically manifest has a causal relationship with something prior, then I agree with her. If she means that therefore ‘the future is fixed’, I’m not so sure, and I’ll explain why. By specifying ‘physically manifest’, I’m excluding thoughts and computer algorithms that can have an effect on something physical, whereas the cause is not so easily determined. For example, In the case of the algorithm, does it go back to the coder who wrote it?
 
My go-to example for chaos is tossing coins, because it’s so easy to demonstrate and it’s linked to probability theory, as well as being the very essence of a random event. One of the key, if not definitive, features of a chaotic phenomenon is that, if you were to rerun it, you’d get a different result, and that’s fundamental to probability theory – every coin toss is independent of any previous toss – they are causally independent. Unrepeatability is common among chaotic systems (like the weather). Even the Earth and Moon were created from a chaotic event.
 
I recently read another book called Quantum Physics Made Me Do It by Jeremie Harris, who argues that tossing a coin is not random – in fact, he’s very confident about it. He’s not alone. Mark John Fernee, a physicist with Qld Uni, in a personal exchange on Quora argued that, in principle, it should be possible to devise a robot to perform perfectly predictable tosses every time, like a tennis ball launcher. But, as another Quora contributor and physicist, Richard Muller, pointed out: it’s not dependent on the throw but the surface it lands on. Marcus du Sautoy makes the same point about throwing dice and provides evidence to support it.
 
Getting back to Sabine. She doesn’t discuss tossing coins, but she might think that the ‘imprecise initial data’ is the actual act of tossing, and after that the outcome is determined, even if can’t be predicted. However, the deterministic chain is broken as soon as it hits a surface.
 
Just before she gets to chaos theory, she talks about computability, with respect to Godel’s Theorem and a discussion she had with Roger Penrose (included in the book), where she says:
 
The current laws of nature are computable, except for that random element from quantum mechanics.
 
Now, I’m quoting this out of context, because she then argues that if they were uncomputable, they open the door to unpredictability.
 
My point is that the laws of nature are uncomputable because of chaos theory, and I cite Ian Stewart’s book, Does God Play Dice? In fact, Stewart even wonders if QM could be explained using chaos (I don’t think so). Chaos theory has mathematical roots, because not only are the ‘initial conditions’ of a chaotic event impossible to measure, they are impossible to compute – you have to calculate to infinite decimal places. And this is why I disagree with Sabine that the ‘future is fixed’.
 
It's impossible to discuss everything in a 223 page book on a blog post, but there is one other topic she raises where we disagree, and that’s the Mary’s Room thought experiment. As she explains it was proposed by philosopher, Frank Jackson, in 1982, but she also claims that he abandoned his own argument. After describing the experiment (refer this video, if you’re not familiar with it), she says:
 
The flaw in this argument is that it confuses knowledge about the perception of colour with the actual perception of it.
 
Whereas, I thought the scenario actually delineated the difference – that perception of colour is not the same as knowledge. A person who was severely colour-blind might never have experienced the colour red (the specified colour in the thought experiment) but they could be told what objects might be red. It’s well known that some animals are colour-blind compared to us and some animals specifically can’t discern red. Colour is totally a subjective experience. But I think the Mary’s room thought experiment distinguishes the difference between human perception and AI. An AI can be designed to delineate colours by wavelength, but it would not experience colour the way we do. I wrote a separate post on this.
 
Sabine gives the impression that she thinks consciousness is a non-issue. She talks about the brain like it’s a computer.
 
You feel you have free will, but… really, you’re running a sophisticated computation on your neural processor.
 
Now, many people, including most scientists, think that, because our brains are just like computers, then it’s only a matter of time before AI also shows signs of consciousness. Sabine doesn’t make this connection, even when she talks about AI. Nevertheless, she discusses one of the leading theories of neuroscience (IIT, Information Integration Theory), based on calculating the amount of information processed, which gives a number called phi (Φ). I came across this when I did an online course on consciousness through New Scientist, during COVID lockdown. According to the theory, this number provides a ‘measure of consciousness’, which suggests that it could also be used with AI, though Sabine doesn’t pursue that possibility.
 
Instead, Sabine cites an interview in New Scientist with Daniel Bor from the University of Cambridge: “Phi should decrease when you go to sleep or are sedated… but work in Bor’s laboratory has shown that it doesn’t.”
 
Sabine’s own view:
 
Personally, I am highly skeptical that any measure consisting of a single number will ever adequately represent something as complex as human consciousness.
 
Sabine discusses consciousness at length, especially following her interview with Penrose, and she gives one of the best arguments against panpsychism I’ve read. Her interview with Penrose, along with a discussion on Godel’s Theorem, which is another topic, discusses whether consciousness is computable or not. I don’t think it is and I don’t think it’s algorithmic.
 
She makes a very strong argument for reductionism: that the properties we observe of a system can be understood from studying the properties of its underlying parts. In other words, that emergent properties can be understood in terms of the properties that it emerges from. And this includes consciousness. I’m one of those who really thinks that consciousness is the exception. Thoughts can cause actions, which is known as ‘agency’.
 
I don’t claim to understand consciousness, but I’m not averse to the idea that it could exist outside the Universe – that it’s something we tap into. This is completely ascientific, to borrow from Sabine. As I said, our brains are storage devices and sometimes they let us down, and, without which, we wouldn’t even know we are conscious. I don’t believe in a soul. I think the continuity of the self is a function of memory – just read The Lost Mariner chapter in Oliver Sacks’ book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. It’s about a man suffering from retrograde amnesia, so his life is stuck in the past because he’s unable to create new memories.
 
At the end of her book, Sabine surprises us by talking about religion, and how she agrees with Stephen Jay Gould ‘that religion and science are two “nonoverlapping magisteria!”. She makes the point that a lot of scientists have religious beliefs but won’t discuss them in public because it’s taboo.
 
I don’t doubt that Sabine has answers to all my challenges.
 
There is one more thing: Sabine talks about an epiphany, following her introduction to physics in middle school, which started in frustration.
 
Wasn’t there some minimal set of equations, I wanted to know, from which all the rest could be derived?
 
When the principle of least action was introduced, it was a revelation: there was indeed a procedure to arrive at all these equations! Why hadn’t anybody told me?
 
The principle of least action is one concept common to both the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. It’s arguably the most fundamental principle in physics. And yes, I posted on that too.

 

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.

What we observe and what is reality are distinct in physics

 I’ve been doing this blog for 15 years now, and in that time some of my ideas have changed or evolved, and, in some areas, my knowledge has increased. As I’ve said on Quora a few times, I read a lot of books by people who know a lot more than me, especially in physics.
 
There is a boundary between physics and philosophy, the shoreline of John Wheeler’s metaphorical ‘island of knowledge in the infinite sea of ignorance’. To quote: “As the island grows so does the shoreline of our ignorance.” And I think ignorance is the key word here, because it’s basically speculation, which means some of us are wrong, including me, most likely. As I’ve often said, ‘Only future generations can tell us how ignorant the current generation is’. I can say that with a lot of confidence, just by looking at the history of science.
 
If this blog has a purpose beyond promoting my own pet theories and prejudices, it is to make people think.
 
Recently, I’ve been pre-occupied with determinism and something called superdeterminism, which has become one of those pet prejudices among physicists in the belief that it’s the only conclusion one can draw from combining relativity theory, quantum mechanics, entanglement and Bell’s theorem. Sabine Hossenfelder is one such advocate, who went so far as to predict that one day all other physicists will agree with her. I elaborate on this below.
 
Mark John Fernee (physicist with Qld Uni), with whom I’ve had some correspondence, is one who disagrees with her. I believe that John Bell himself proposed that superdeterminism was possibly the only resolution to the quandaries posed by his theorem. There are two other videos worth watching, one by Elijah Lew-Smith and a 50min one by Brian Greene, who doesn’t discuss superdeterminism. Nevertheless, Greene’s video gives the best and easiest to understand description of Bell’s theorem and its profound implications for reality.
 
So what is super-determinism, and how is it distinct from common or garden determinism? Well, if you watch the two relevant videos, you get two different answers. According to Sabine, there is no difference and it’s not really to do with Bell’s theorem, but with the measurement problem in QM. She argues that it’s best explained by looking at the double-slit experiment. Interestingly, Richard Feynman argued that all the problems associated with QM can be analysed, if not understood, by studying the double-slit experiment.
 
Sabine wrote an academic paper on the ‘measurement problem’, co-authored with Jonte R. Hance from the University of Bristol, which I’ve read and is surprisingly free of equations (not completely) but uses the odd term I’m unfamiliar with. I expect I was given a link by Fernee which I’ve since lost (I really can’t remember), but I still have a copy. One of her points is that as long as we have unsolved problems in QM, there is always room for different philosophical interpretations, and she and Hance discuss the most well-known ones. This is slightly off-topic, but only slightly, because even superdeterminism and its apparent elimination of free will is a philosophical issue.
 
Sabine argues that it’s the measurement that creates superdeterminism in QM, which is why she uses the double-slit experiment to demonstrate it. It’s because the ‘measurement’ ‘collapses’ the wave function and ‘determines’ the outcome, that it must have been ‘deterministic’ all along. It’s just that we don’t know it until a measurement is made. At least, this is my understanding of her argument.
 
The video by Elijah Lew-Smith gives a different explanation, focusing solely on Bell’s theorem. I found that it also required more than one viewing, but he makes a couple of points, which I believe go to the heart of the matter. (Greene’s video gives an easier-to-follow description, despite its length).
 
We can’t talk about an objective reality independent of measurement.
(Which echoes Sabine’s salient point in her video.)
 
And this point: There really are instantaneous interactions; we just can’t access them.
 
This is known as ‘non-locality’, and Brian Greene provides the best exposition I’ve seen, and explains how it’s central to Bell’s theorem and to our understanding of reality.
 
On the other hand, Lew-Smith explains non-locality without placing it at the centre of the discussion.
 
If I can momentarily go back to Sabine’s key argument, I addressed this in a post I wrote a few years back. Basically, I argued that you can only know the path an electron or photon takes retrospectively, after the measurement or observation has been made. Prior to that, QM tells us it’s in a superposition of states and we only have probabilities of where it will land. Curiously, I referenced a video by Sabine in a footnote, where she makes this point in her conclusion:
 
You don’t need to know what happens in the future because the particle goes to all points anyway. Except…  It doesn’t. In reality, it goes to only one point. So maybe the reason we need the measurement postulate is because we don’t take this dependency on the future seriously enough.
 
And to me, that’s what this is all about: the measurement is in the future of the wave function, and the path it takes is in the past. This, of course, is what Freeman Dyson claims: that QM cannot describe the past, only the future.
 
And if you combine this perspective with Lew-Smith’s comment about objective reality NOT being independent of the measurement, then objective reality only exists in the past, while the wave function and all its superpositional states exist in the future.
 
So how does entanglement fit into this? Well, this is the second point I highlighted, which is that ‘there really are instantaneous reactions, which we can’t access’, which is ‘non-locality’. And this, as Schrodinger himself proclaimed, is what distinguishes QM from classical physics. In classical physics, ‘locality’ means there is a relativistic causal connection and in entanglement there is not, which is why Einstein called it ‘spooky action at a distance’.
 
Bell’s theorem effectively tells us that non-locality is real, supported by experiment many times over, but you can’t use it to transmit information faster-than-light, so relativity is not violated in practical terms. But it does ask questions about simultaneity, which is discussed in Lew-Smith’s video. He demonstrates graphically that different observers will observe a different sequence of measurement, so we have disagreement, even a contradiction about which ‘measurement’ collapsed the wave function. And this is leads to superdeterminism, because, if the outcome is predetermined, then the sequence of measurement doesn’t matter.
 
And this gets to the nub of the issue, because it ‘appears’ that ‘objective reality’ is observer dependent. Relativity theory always gives the result from a specific observer’s point of view and different observers in different frames of reference can epistemically disagree. Is there a frame of reference that is observer independent? I always like to go back to the twin paradox, because I believe it provides an answer. When the twins reunite, they disagree on how much time has passed, yet they agree on where they are in space-time. There is not absolute time, but there is absolute space-time.
 
Did you know we can deduce the velocity that Earth travels relative to absolute space-time, meaning the overall observable Universe? By measuring the Doppler shift of the CMBR (cosmic microwave background radiation) in all directions, it’s been calculated that we are travelling at 350km/s in the direction of Pisces (ref., Paul Davies, About Time; Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution, 1995). They should teach this in schools.
 
Given this context, is it possible that entanglement is a manifestation of objective simultaneity? Not according to Einstein, who argued that: ‘The past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion’; which is based on the ‘fact’ that simultaneity is observer dependent. But Einstein didn’t live to see Bell’s theorem experimentally verified. Richard Muller, a prize-winning physicist and author (also on Quora) was asked what question he’d ask Einstein if he could hypothetically meet him NOW. I haven’t got a direct copy, but essentially Muller said he’d ask Einstein if he now accepted a ‘super-luminal connection’, given experimental confirmation of Bell’s theorem. In other words, entanglement is like an exception to the rule, where relativity strictly doesn’t apply.
 
Sabine with her co-author, Jonte Hance, make a passing comment that the discussion really hasn’t progressed much since Bohr and Einstein a century ago, and I think they have a point.
 
Mark Fernee, whom I keep mentioning on the sidelines, does make a distinction between determinism and superdeterminism, where determinism simply means that everything is causally connected to something, even if it’s not predictable. Chaos being a case-in-point, which he describes thus:
 
Where this determinism breaks down is with chaotic systems, such as three body dynamics. Chaotic systems are so sensitive to the initial parameters that even a slight inaccuracy can result in wildly different predictions. That's why predicting the weather is so difficult.
Overall, complexity limits the ability to predict the future, even in a causal universe.
 
On the other hand, superdeterminism effectively means the end of free will, and, in his own words, ‘free will is a contentious issue, even among physicists’.
 
Fernee provided a link to another document by Sabine, where she created an online forum specifically to deal with less than knowledgeable people about their disillusioned ideas on physics – crackpots and cranks. It occurred to me that I might fall into this category, but it’s for others to judge. I’m constantly reminded of how little I really know, and that I’m only fiddling around the edges, or on the ‘shoreline of ignorance’, as Wheeler described it, where there are many others far more qualified than me.
 
I not-so-recently wrote a post where I challenged a specific scenario often cited by physicists, where two observers hypothetically ‘observe’ contradictory outcomes of an event on a distant astronomical body that is supposedly happening simultaneously with them.
 
As I said before, relativity is an observer-dependent theory, almost by definition, and we know it works just by using the GPS on our smart-phones. There are algorithms that make relativistic corrections to the signals coming from the satellites, otherwise the map on your phone would not match the reality of your actual location.
 
What I challenge is the application of relativity theory to an event that the observer can’t observe, even in principle. In fact, relativity theory rules out a physical observation of a purportedly simultaneous event. So I’m not surprised that we get contradictory results. The accepted view among physicists is that each observer ‘sees’ a different ontology (one in the future and one in the past), whereas I contend that there is an agreed ontology that becomes observable at a later time, when it’s in both observers’ past. (Brian Greene has another video demonstrating the ‘conventional’ view among physicists.)
 
Claudia de Rahm is Professor of Physics at Imperial College London, and earlier this year, she gave a talk titled, What We Don’t Know About Gravity, where she made the revelatory point
that Einstein’s GR (general theory of relativity) predicted its own limitations. Basically, if you apply QM probabilities to extreme curvature spacetime, you get answers over 100%, so nonsense. GR and QM are mathematically incompatible if we try to quantise gravity, though QFT (quantum field theory) ‘works fine on the manifold of spacetime’, according to expert, Viktor T Toth.
 
Given that relativity theory, as it is applied, is intrinsically observer dependent, I question if it can be (reliably) applied to events that have no causal relation to the observer (meaning outside the observer's light cone, both past and future). Which is why I challenge its application to events the observer can't observe (refer 2 paragraphs ago).

 

Addendum: I changed the title so it's more consistent with the contents of the post. The previous title was Ignorance and bliss; philosophy and science. Basically, the reason we have different interpretations of the same phenomenon is because physics can only tell us about what we observe, and what that means for reality is often debatable; superdeterminism being a case in point. Many philosophers and scientists talk about a ‘gap’ between theory and reality, whereas I claim the gap is between the observation and reality, a la Kant.

What is existentialism?

 A few years back, I wrote a ‘vanity piece’, My philosophy in 24 dot points, which I admit is a touch pretentious. But I’ve been prompted to write something more substantive, in a similar vein, whilst reading Gary Cox’s How to Be an Existentialist; or How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop Making Excuses. I bought this tome (the 10^thAnniversary Edition) after reading an article by him on ‘Happiness’ in Philosophy Now (Issue 147, Dec 2021/Jan 2022). Cox is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK. He’s written other books, but this one is written specifically for a general audience, not an academic one. This is revealed in some of the language he uses, like ‘being up shit creek’.

 

I didn’t really learn anything about existentialism until I studied Sartre in an off-campus university course, in my late 40s. I realised that, to all intents and purposes, I was an existentialist, without ever knowing what one was. I did write about existentialism very early in the life of this blog, in the context of my own background. The thing is that one’s philosophical worldview is a product of one’s milieu, upbringing and education, not to mention the age in which one lives. I grew up in a Western culture, post WW2, and I think that made me ripe for existentialist influences without being conscious of it. I lived in the 60s when there was a worldwide zeitgeist of questioning social mores against a background of a religious divide, the Vietnam war and the rise of feminism. 

 

If there is a key word or mantra in existentialism, it’s ‘authenticity’. It’s the key element in my 3 Rules for Humans post, and it’s also the penultimate chapter in Cox’s aforementioned book. The last chapter is on counselling and is like a bookend.

 

As Cox himself points out, existentialism is not a ‘school’ of philosophy in the way ‘analytical philosophy’ or ‘logical positivism’ are. There’s not really a set of rules – it’s more about an attitude and how to live a life without losing your soul or self-respect. It’s not an epistemology, nor an ideology, even though it’s probably associated with a liberal outlook, as I hope will become clear.

 

Many commentators associate existentialism with atheism, the absurd and nihilism. I agree with Cox that it’s actually the opposite of nihilism; if anything, it’s about finding purpose. As I wrote in a post last year:

 

If the Universe has any meaning at all, it’s because it created sentient beings who find meaning against the odds that science tells us are astronomical, both literally and figuratively. Existentialism is about finding purpose in an absurd universe, which is the opposite of nihilism.

 

And that’s the most important lesson of existentialism: if you are to find a purpose, only you can do that; it’s not dependent on anyone else, be they family, a spouse, an employer or a mentor. And logically, one could add, it’s not dependent on God either.

 

Cox doesn’t talk about God at all, but he does talk quite a lot about consciousness and about it being ‘nothing’ (materialistically). He very fleetingly gives mathematics as an example of something else that’s not ‘corporeal’, specifically numbers. Very curious, as I think that both mathematics and consciousness are ‘special’ in that they are distinct, yet intimately connected to the physical world, but that’s another topic.

 

He also talks about consciousness having a special relationship with time. I’ve said that consciousness is the only thing that exists in a constant present, whereas Cox says the opposite, but I believe we mean the same thing. He says consciousness is forever travelling from the past to the future, whereas I say that the future is forever becoming the past while only consciousness exists in the present – the experiential outcome is the same.

 

So how does God enter the picture? God only exists in someone’s consciousness – it’s part of one’s internal state. So, you can be ‘authentic’ and believe in God, but it’s totally an individualistic experience – it can’t be shared. That’s my interpretation, not anyone else’s, I should emphasise.

 

An important, even essential, aspect of all this is a belief in free will. You can’t take control of your life if you don’t have a belief in free will, and I would argue that you can’t be authentic either. And, logically, this has influenced my prejudices in physics and cosmology. To be consistent, I can’t believe we live in a deterministic universe, and have argued strongly on that point, opposing better minds than mine.

 

Existentialism has some things in common with Buddhism, which might explain why Eastern philosophy seemed to have an influence on the 60s zeitgeist. Having said that, I think the commonality is about treating life as a journey that’s transient. Accepting the impermanence and transience of life, I believe, is part of living authentically.

 

And what do I mean by ‘authentic’ in this context? Possibly, I never really appreciated this until I started writing fiction. I think anyone who creates art strives to be authentic, which means leaving your ego out of your work. I try to take the attitude that it’s my characters’ story, not mine. That’s very difficult to explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, but I know that actors often say something similar.

 

In my professional life, my integrity was everything to me. I often worked in disputatious environments and it was important to me that people could trust my word and my work. Cox talks about how existentialism intrinsically incorporates our interactions with others. 

 

Freedom is a much-abused, misappropriated term, but in existentialism it has a specific meaning and an interdependent relationship with responsibility – you can’t divorce one from the other. Freedom, in existentialism, means ‘free to choose’, hence the emphasis on free will. It also means, if you invoke the term, that the freedom of others is just as important as your own.

 

One can’t talk about authenticity without talking about its opposite, ‘bad faith’ (mauvaise foi), a term coined by Sartre. Bad faith is something that most of us have experienced, be it working in a job we hate, staying in a destructive relationship or not pursuing a desired goal in lieu of staying in our comfort zone.

 

Of course, sometimes we are in a situation outside our control, so what do we do? Speaking from personal experience, I think one needs to take ownership of one’s response to it; one needs to accept that only YOU can do something about it and not someone else. I’ve never been a prisoner-of-war, but my father was, and he made 3 attempts to escape, because, as he told the Commandant, ‘It’s my job’.

 

I’ve actually explored this in my own fiction. In my last story, two of my characters (independently) find themselves in circumstances of ‘bad faith’. I only analyse this in hindsight – don’t analyse what you write while you’re writing. In fact, one of those characters is attracted to another character who lives authentically, though neither of them ‘think’ in those terms.

Addendum: Someone asked me to come up with a single sentence to describe this. After sleeping on it, I came up with this:

Be responsible for what you are and who you become. That includes being responsible for your failures. (2 sentences)