Was this blog post written 13.7 billion years ago?
"Take free will. Everything I know about physics and neuroscience tells me it's a myth. But I need that illusion to get out of bed in the morning. Of all the durable and necessary creations of atoms, the evolution of the illusion of the self and of free will are perhaps the most miraculous. That belief is necessary to my survival."From Tuesday's Science Times, see here.
I had a real existential crisis the summer after my junior year in high school. I was attending New Jersey's Governor's School in Science and taking a course on the philosophy of science. I realized that if the universe was a deterministic physical system, then my next action was dependent only on the precise arrangement of the atoms (and subatomic particles) in my body and the system with which I was interacting. Tracing this back to the Big Bang, I reasoned that I had no free will, and all of my actions were predetermined 13.7 billion years ago.
Since it is difficult to function as a human being while thinking about these kind of things on a daily basis, I have mostly chosen to ignore the subject and act as if I had free will. Moreover, many scientists, philosophers, and the like I've talked to over the past few years also seem to have avoided confronting this question.
Obviously I'm not an expert on the philosophy of physics, free will, or consciousness, but I wonder whether it even matters (for our daily lives, at least) if the universe is a deterministic system. Is all that matters that we perceive the existence of free will? I need to read more on these subjects, although I fear extreme disillusionment if I pursue the questions to the end.
UPDATE: Tyler Cowen's alter ego Tyrone writes today about free will. Is the influence of East Meets West spreading? Sadly our Sitemeter stats indicate that Ned and I are pretty much the only visitors to this blog, with a few friends, family, and Facebook profile viewers trickling in. Perhaps this is some sort of synchronicity, which astute readers of my rambling oeuvre will recall I've discussed before.
posted by John V at 8:17 PM
2 Comments:
As my life has been dominated by quantum mechanics for the last week to six months, it's probably my duty to mention the inherent randomness built into the universe. While these effect on the sub-microscopic scale aren't really visibly manifested in everyday life, I think it's significant that the world is governed by the rules of probability and not completely predictable, even with total knowledge of the starting state. I don't really understand how it works, but neither did Einstein (who was in fact shown to be wrong), so I don't feel that bad.
As for it's impact on our perspective of free will, I doubt this view helps us much - in addition to being unsure of our self-determination, now we also have to admit that we're subject to the roll of the dice. No comment on who's doing the rolling.
Thanks for the comments Fez. The universe is indeed stranger than it appears. I don't know if I'll ever be able to accept that things really are probabilistic on quantum scales. I used to think that quantum stuff simply seemed probabilistic because we didn't have full knowledge of the starting state and couldn't measure it impartially, but from more reading I think the argument is that the quantum world really is probabilistic.
Whoever wrote this on the Wikipedia "Determinism" page sums the problem up nicely:
"Even before the laws of quantum mechanics were fully developed, the phenomenon of radioactivity posed a challenge to determinism. A gram of uranium-238, a commonly occurring radioactive substance, contains some 2.5 x 1021 atoms. By all tests known to science these atoms are identical and indistinguishable. Yet about 12600 times a second one of the atoms in that gram will decay, giving off an alpha particle. This decay does not depend on external stimulus and no extant theory of physics predicts when any given atom will decay, with realistically obtainable knowledge. The uranium found on earth is thought to have been synthesized during a supernova explosion that occurred roughly 5 billion years ago. For determinism to hold, every uranium atom must contain some internal "clock" that specifies the exact time it will decay. And somehow the laws of physics must specify exactly how those clocks were set as each uranium atom was formed during the supernova collapse."
I don't think I understand quantum physics enough to shake my gut feeling that the world is deterministic, and like you I have no idea how an indeterministic world works. As for free will, some have claimed that a conscious mind can somehow affect things on the quantum level, but I have no idea how this would work either. I'm still left to conclude that free will is an illusion, for better or for worse.
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