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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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