FREE WILL AND CATS

Do we have free will? And if we do, is it because of Quantum Mechanics?

Everything is governed by the immutable laws of nature. When you put a steak on the barbecue, the proteins in the muscle tissue of the steak begin to denature and unwind. They become brown and opaque and this is what you want them to do when you are cooking a steak. There is no steak in the world that can sit on the top of the barbecue and refuse to be cooked. The chemical reactions caused by heating the muscle tissue of the steak are inescapable.

When you see that it is going to be sunset at 8 pm, if you want to watch the sunset you walk outside at 8 pm and it will definitely be sunset. There is no way that that can change because the laws of gravitation and the properties of mass and acceleration are inviolable, and yet you can refuse to go outside and look at the sunset or you can decide not to eat the steak so it would seem that you have the ability to rise above all of the natural laws that govern everything that happens in the universe.

It seems that way but maybe it is not. Maybe there is no free will. Maybe we just don’t understand the complexity of the web of causations that make us do what we do, thinking that we have a freedom that we don’t have, but let’s have a look at that using reductio ad absurdum. Let’s have a look at how things would be if there was no free will.

In the Principia Mathematica, Newton formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation that became the dominant scientific paradigm for centuries until it was tweaked by the Theory of Relativity. Newton used his mathematical description of gravity to derive Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, account for tides, the trajectories of comets, the precession of the equinoxes and other phenomena, eradicating all doubt about the Solar System’s heliocentricity.

He demonstrated that the motion of objects on Earth and out in space could be explained by the same principles. Newton’s laws put a man on the moon and got the New Horizons spacecraft all the way to Pluto. The Theory of Relativity accounted for some of the inconsistencies that occur at very high speeds or in proximity to very massive objects but the fundamental idea of a consistent set of laws of motion remained.

Under these laws, if you knew all of the velocities, positions, directions, masses, momenta etc., of all the bodies in a given system, then the future of all of those bodies could be determined. The whole system is perfectly deterministic and in a system such as this, real free will would be impossible, so now you must either believe that free will does not exist or that if it does, there must be something beyond Newtonian mechanics that allows it to exist.

Whether you believe in God or evolution the situation is the same. Suppose there is no free will and everything is purely deterministic. In this case, eventually every predator would work out exactly how it’s prey behaved and it would hunt successfully every time until there were no more prey animals left, or the prey animals would be the first to work out exactly how the predators operated and would avoid them every time and so eventually all the predators would die from starvation.

By the same logic, human behaviour would be deterministic and would therefore operate on universal principles with predictable consequences. For example, there would only be one supermarket chain across the entire globe and it would be the one that had first worked out exactly how to predict consumers’ behaviour so that by its advertising, presentation and range of products, it would appeal perfectly to all of the consumers’ desires and all the consumers would go to that one particular supermarket.

Similarly, either by chance or design, at some stage an automobile manufacturer would have found out exactly what makes automobiles most appealing to a purchaser and the first manufacturer who discovered this formula would obviously apply it to all their models and their advertising and the result would be that everyone would want the same brand of car.

We would all be shopping at exactly the same shop, driving exactly the same brand of car, and we would be living in exactly the same kinds of houses, in countries that all had the same kinds of governments. We would all be wearing the same kinds of clothing and listening to the same type of music and eating the same favourite foods and it would be an absolute nightmare because every day all you would do is meet people exactly like yourself and you would discuss the same things and look the same and be the same and go absolutely crazy in the same way and overpopulate the same mental hospitals where the staff would become patients as well, and then even children would begin to realise the inevitability of what was going to happen and they would commit themselves into mental homes immediately instead of bothering about going to school first where in any case they would all have been taught the same things by the same crazy teachers.

And if there were any fringe groups remaining like the LGBTQ community they would have to live like hermits, but because everybody else would have the same kind of house in the same kind of suburban sprawl occupying pretty much all of the inhabitable land on every continent, then the amount of space for the hermits would be quite restricted and they would have to form their own community, which would conflict with the desire of hermits to be alone and so the hermits would go crazy as well and they would have to join all the other crazy people in the mental hospitals, then the mental hospitals would need more space and they would have to annex suburb after suburb until entire countries became mental hospitals where everyone would be a patient.

If there was intelligent life elsewhere in the universe then it would also be deterministic, and you would have to conclude that it must also follow roughly the same path of discovery and industrialisation that happened here on earth, and that would mean that other intelligent civilisations would also be trying to discover whether or not they were alone and they would also be using some form of radio communication technology to see if they could locate other intelligent civilisations like ours, and it would be highly likely that we would have found each other by now even if we were too far away to visit or be visited.

But all the aliens would be the same as each other as well according to the previous logic and they would also be in the process of going universally crazy so even if we could talk to each other the conversation would be completely pointless.

Then you might question whether it would even get to that point. Perhaps once Newton’s laws revealed that everything was deterministic people would give up and stop raising families, or maybe even millions of years before that the dinosaurs would have realised that everything they do turns out the same way and they might have become so bored that they eventually prayed for the asteroid to come and destroy them and they would be good at praying as well because if you look at those tiny little arms there’s not much else that you could do with them is there?

The lack of will to exist in a deterministic universe might have made everything give up even before that. You could imagine that LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor might have been sitting on its single celled couch thinking to itself that the future looked so bleak there was no point continuing and so it might have committed apoptosis right there and then.

None of this is true, so free will must exist, but how?

For free will to exist there would have to be some kind of uncertainty in the laws that govern the universe. There would have to be some situation in which, at every decision point, two or more different paths were available so that a choice must be made and this choice would be the agency of free will. The idea of Schrodinger’s cat comes to mind as a perfect example.

Before we get to the cat we need to understand some background about Quantum Mechanics. The idea of Quantum Mechanics arose gradually during the early 1900s from theories that were devised to explain observations that could not be reconciled with classical physics, such as Max Planck’s solution to the black-body radiation problem.

The black-body problem dealt with radiation from a heated source and the problem was that as the energy of the heated source increased towards the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, the equation that determined the energy emitted from the source gave results that increased to infinity. This was called the ultraviolet catastrophe and Max Planck’s solution was the proposal that the energy came in discrete, defined packages called quanta. Einstein then completed this solution to the black body problem by postulating that Planck’s quanta were real physical particles that we now call photons, and not just mathematical fictions.

The other problem at the time was called the double slit experiment, in which electrons were fired at a barrier that contained two vertical slits with a screen at the other side and when individual electrons were fired, the screen at the other side displayed a pattern characteristic of wave interference, not of individual particles, and this showed that subatomic phenomenon could exist as waves and particles at the same time and it seemed that only the observation of the system caused it to behave in either one way or the other, and this was called the collapse of the wave function.

Quantum systems have bound states that are quantised into discrete values of energy, momentum, angular momentum, and other properties, in contrast to classical systems where these properties can be measured continuously. Measurements of quantum systems show characteristics of both particles and waves, and there are limits to how accurately the value of a physical quantity can be predicted prior to its measurement given a complete set of initial conditions, and this is called The Uncertainty Principle.

The Uncertainty Principle, also known as Heisenberg’s Indeterminacy Principle, is a fundamental concept in Quantum Mechanics. It states that there is a limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and momentum, can be simultaneously known. In other words, the more accurately one property is measured, the less accurately the other property can be known.

So, the cat. In Schrödinger’s original formulation, a cat, a flask of poison, a radioactive source and a Geiger counter are placed in a sealed box. The occasional decay of an atom in the radioactive source is considered a stochastic event. If this is detected, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which kills the cat. The most widely accepted interpretation of Quantum Mechanics implies that the cat is simultaneously alive and dead whilst the box remains sealed. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead.

This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality resolves into one possibility or the other. Schrödinger’s seemingly paradoxical thought experiment became part of the foundation of Quantum Mechanics. The scenario is often featured in theoretical discussions of the interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, particularly in situations involving the measurement problem. As a result, Schrödinger’s cat has had an enduring appeal in popular culture. The experiment is not intended to be actually performed on a cat, but rather as an easily understandable illustration of the behaviour of atoms.

It now seems that the observer is an integral part in the actual creation of the observed reality. It is as if, on the subatomic scale, you create your own reality moment by moment simply by the act of being a conscious observer, and your decision about what to observe governs the result of the collapse of the waveform and my proposal is that this is the subatomic origin of free will.

You are your own creator.