Wednesday, September 8, 2021

Physics and Free Will

In the January 2021 issue of Physics World appeared an article entitled Why free will is beyond physics. This article, written by British science writer Philip Ball, is clearly anti-reductionist and says things like these:

“Free will” is not ruled out by physics – because it doesn’t stem from physics in the first place.

If physics can disprove free will, then it must override everything else too, even evolution.

But is free will really undermined by the determinism of physical law? I think such arguments are not even wrong; they are simply misconceived. They don’t recognize how cause and effect work, and by attempting to claim too much jurisdiction for fundamental physics they are not really scientific but metaphysical.

CC 4.0 Alain Houle
(Harvard University)

Clarification: a common mistake among people studying physics is to believe that physical laws and equations can be the cause of something. They cannot. They are simple descriptions of what we observe is happening, created by the human mind. To say that something was caused by the laws and equations of physics is the same as saying that my description of a landscape was the cause of the landscape.

Of course, the previous paragraph is philosophy, not science (or rather it is philosophy of science). They are often confused. Thus, when Stephen Hawking wrote these words at the beginning of his book The Grand Design:

Philosophy is dead… Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

he was doing philosophy, and incidentally proving that what he was saying here is false.

I continue quoting from Philip Ball's article:

If the claim that we never truly make choices is correct, then psychology, sociology and all studies of human behaviour are verging on pseudoscience. Efforts to understand our conduct would be null and void because the real reasons lie in the Big Bang.

Reducing all behaviour to deterministic physics unfolding from the Big Bang offers us no genuine behavioural science at all, as it denies choice and puts nothing in its place that can help us understand and anticipate what we see in the world.

It is not because of the sheer overwhelming complexity of the calculations that we don’t attempt to use quantum chromodynamics to analyse the works of Dickens. It is because this would apply a theory beyond its applicable domain, so the attempt would fail.

Free will is not a putative physical phenomenon on which microphysics can pronounce.

Philip Ball argues that reductionist monism does not work when it tries to handle free will, which undoubtedly exists, otherwise all of human history is meaningless. It is true that his philosophy seems to be a form of emergentist monism, because he says that this type of phenomena must be studied in a top-down way, rather than bottom-up. That it makes no sense to think that particle physics can explain everything, since there are complex systems whose behavior is independent and cannot be deduced from the lower levels.

Of course, another alternative is dualism: the claim that the universe is not based on just one fundamental principle (matter), but on two (matter and spirit), as I explained in another post in this blog. And although the spirit turns out to be practically undetectable in many beings of the universe (particles, atoms, molecules, stars, galaxies), it becomes more and more visible as life evolves towards greater complexity, until it hatches in the form of consciousness in man, who is not just another species of the animal world, but a kingdom of nature.

René Descartes

In turn, dualism can be divided into two different forms:

  • Cartesian: The spiritual part of man (the soul) can subsist separately from the material part (the body), so it survives after death. The soul would live separate from the body until the resurrection.
  • Neurophysiological: The soul and the body are different, but they are so intimately united that they constitute a unit, they are two complementary and unique parts of the same organism. The spiritual part of man cannot subsist separate from the body, but it can come back to life with the resurrection.

Personally, I would introduce a third dualistic option, which can be considered intermediate between the previous two: like neurophysiological dualism, I would say that the soul and the body are so intimately united that they cannot be separated. But I would add that at the moment of death we are resurrected in another universe, not this one, on another axis of time, different from ours. Thus we wouldn’t need to suppose that the soul must live apart from the body until the resurrection. I talked about this in another post.

The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Philosophy and Logic: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca

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