I am a theoretical physicist and currently Director of 
June 23, 2006
Free will
Belief in a god rests on a foundation that requires one to postulate the existence of a mind/soul that can exist independently of the body (after all, the soul is assumed to live on after the physical death of the body) and freely make decisions. The idea that the brain is all there is, that is creates our consciousness and that the mind/soul are auxiliary products of that overall consciousness, strikes at the very root of belief in god.
So what about the role of free will? Where does that fit in with this? If the mind is an entity that exists independently of the brain and which can influence the brain, then one can think of free will as a product of the mind. But is free will compatible with the idea that the brain is all there is?
The idea that we have free will came under attack with the development of materialistic models of the universe. With the success of Newtonian physics in explaining and predicting the motion of celestial and terrestrial objects, and with the rise of a materialistic philosophy of nature (that everything consists of matter in motion under the influence of natural laws), it became inevitable for people to suppose that the mechanical universe was all there is.
According to the Newtonian model, all you needed to be able to predict the future state of an object was (1) exact knowledge of the current state of the object (known as the initial conditions), and (2) the forces of interaction between the object and its environment, because it these forces, and only these forces, that influenced its subsequent behavior. Since there was no reason to think that these two types of information were unknowable in principle, that implied the future of that object was predetermined. If everything that existed in the universe (including the brain and mind) had this same material basis and consisted of objects in motion, then the logical implication is that the future is predetermined.
Of course, the mere fact of predetermination did not imply that the future was predictable in practice. Since any object other than a few elementary particles is composed of a vast number of constituent elements such as atoms, no program of prediction can be actually carried out, simply because of the enormous complexity of the calculations involved. Since we are not able to predict the future with 100% accuracy in the absence of perfect information, the belief in an undetermined future for anything but elementary particles can be preserved from actual experimental contradiction.
But at a philosophical level, the fact that predetermination existed in the deterministic Newtonian word pretty much killed the idea of free will and the existence of an independent mind, and hence god. So in order to preserve those concepts, one has to find flaws in either or both of the two underpinnings of the Newtonian system given above.
One approach is to argue that we can never know all the forces acting on an object. This is essentially the idea behind the concept of god (or intelligent designer, which is the same thing) whose actions does not conform to any natural laws and hence can intervene in any system in unpredictable ways. There has been no real evidence that such an unknown and unpredictable force exists.
The other approach is to argue that we cannot know, even in principle, what the initial conditions are. This latter view actually has experimental support (at least in some situations) in quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which says that there is an underlying limit (inherent in nature) that limits the precision with which we can know the initial state of a system. The quantum world is not totally unpredictable of course. In fact, there exists a very high degree of predictability but it is a statistical predictability that says that we can state with some certainty what will happen on average, but each individual event is unpredictable. A classical analog is the case of tossing a coin. If I toss a coin a million times, I can predict with a very high degree of confidence that the number of heads will be very close to 50%, but I have only a 50-50 chance of guessing the result on any individual toss. And as I said before, almost everything in nature is made up of a vast number of constituent elements so it is the average motions of all these things that actually matter. This is why the predictions of science tend to be so accurate.
But the fact that there is even this small inherent uncertainty in nature has led some religious scientists to argue that quantum mechanics provides a non-deterministic niche that allows god to act and they have seized on it. For example, Brown University biology professor Ken Miller is a devout Catholic who has been a very strong opponent of the intelligent design movement. In his book Finding Darwin's God he reconciles his belief in god with his belief in the sufficiency of natural selection by invoking the uncertainty principle as the means by which god can act in the world and yet remain undetectable. He doesn't actually suggest a mechanism, he just asserts that quantum mechanics allows a window through which god can act.
So in some sense, the uncertainty principle is playing the role that the pineal gland played for Descartes, providing a point of intersection for the intersection of the nonmaterial world with the material world.
Those, like Jeffrey Schwartz and William Dembski, who are looking for new ways to preserve their intelligent design idea, have also tried to use the uncertainty principle to create room for it.
Frankly, this is not convincing. Although the uncertainty principle does assert an inherent limit, set by nature, on some kinds of knowledge, the limitation is highly restricted in its operation, significant only for very small objects at very low temperatures, and does not allow for the wide latitude required to believe in the kind of arbitrary intervention of god in the physical world that is favored by religious people. As the article Religion on the Brain (subscription required) in the May 26, 2006 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (Volume 52, Issue 38, Page A14) says:
Last year Dr. Schwartz and two colleagues published a paper on their quantum theory in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. They are not the first to try linking quantum mechanics to concepts of consciousness, but such efforts have failed to win over either physicists or neuroscientists, who discount the role that quantum effects would play at the size and temperature of the human brain. In discussions of consciousness, "the only reason people involve quantum mechanics is because of pure mysticism," says Christof Koch, a professor of cognitive and behavioral biology at the California Institute of Technology.
Using the quantum mechanical uncertainty principle to sneak in god into the world is not tenable. Those who know anything about quantum mechanics, even those sympathetic to religion, see this as a futile maneuver, serving only to awe those who are intimidated by quantum mechanics.
Many other scientists have been highly critical of Dr. Schwarz; even some researchers interested in exploring spirituality discount his theory. The Templeton Foundation, a philanthropy devoted to forging links between science and religion, rejected a grant proposal by Dr. Schwartz, says Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president of the foundation. A cosmologist by training, Mr. Harper says the proposal was turned down because "it had to do with a lot of hocus-pocus on quantum mechanics."
So that is where things stand. To retain a belief in god and free will and soul requires one to postulate not just one non-material entity (god) interacting with the material world, but to suggest that each one of us also possesses a non-material entity (the soul/mind) that exists independently of us and interacts only with our own material brain (and with no one else's brain) in some unspecified way. The mind-body interaction must have a blocking mechanism that prevents such cross-over since, if one person's mind/soul can interact with another person's brain, that can cause all kinds of problems.
Is this a plausible picture? Again, plausibility is something that each person must judge. For me personally, it just seems far too complicated, whereas assuming that the brain is all there is makes things simple.
In my own case, I had already begun to seriously doubt the existence of god before I even thought about the brain/mind relationship. When I started looking closely at how the brain works, I became convinced that the idea of a mind that has an existence independent of the brain was highly implausible. The dawning realization that the brain is all there is sealed the conviction that there is no god.
POST SCRIPT: Running on empty
Money was hard to borrow in Sri Lanka when I was growing up. So we got used to the idea that we had to live within our means or have to (embarrassingly) borrow from friends and relatives. One of the things that took me a long time to get used to in the US was the ease of credit and that people would go so willingly and easily into debt, even for things like unnecessary luxury goods or taking vacations. I am still not used to that actually, even after all these years here. I cannot imagine borrowing money except for absolute necessities.
As we all know, the saving rate in America is non-existent and even (by some reports) negative, which means that as a whole, the people in the nation are spending more than they earn. We also know that the government is racking up huge budget deficits, and record-breaking debt.
Why is this happening? How long can it continue? Why is everyone seemingly oblivious to this?
Danny Schecter has created a new documentary In Debt We Trust: America before the bubble bursts (coming out in June 2006) where he talks about how the rise in debt is being deliberately driven by people who make money off increasing indebtedness.
You can read about it and see the trailer here.
Comments
“The anthill is the ant’s world, the open savanna its universe”
At the outset, I must concede that I enjoyed reading most of your articles a great deal, and found them both stimulating and to a relative degree, informative. I do pray (with no pun intended) you should continue with this journal. However, with all due respect I would like to comment on your articles in general and specifically to your entry on freewill.
My educational background is limited to jurisprudence and elements of theology, so I am quite aware of the fact that my comments may contain inaccuracies.
But that is exactly the point I wish to make. Human beings have since time immemorial attempted to explain life and the position we occupy in the universe. However, it is seldom that one begins to appreciate the inescapable truth that human beings like all other life forms on Earth, are inherently limited to what they are able to perceive. I call this the inevitable deficiency in perception. When an individual chooses to observe something within his natural environment and thereupon arrive at certain conclusions, such observations and conclusions are inherently restricted in its accuracy to the very ability of such an individual to perceive his natural environment and corroborate his findings with either preconceived knowledge or values. Whether one wishes to acknowledge it or chooses to remain oblivious to it, everything we as human beings know and believe is only true as far as human perception would allow it to be so. Every minute detail of our existence is subject to this inescapable truth. This therefore begs the questions of how you, notwithstanding your vast knowledge on a variety of subjects and disciplines, may be attributed with an opinion any more accurate than something contrary to it.
Now the question arises as to how I can be certain that your views on religion are flawed. I refer to this as the concept of truth derived from probability. If one is to accept the theory of evolution for instance (though I my self am not convinced due to its failure to provide a reasonable explanation of the concept of irreducible complexity), human beings are still in the process of evolving, and therefore are ‘less evolved’ than the stage of evolution that lies ahead. If one is to accept the concurrent theory of natural selection (also slightly dubious owing to a series of unanswered questions which I shall not dwell on at this juncture), then our species would give way to a more sophisticated and biologically ‘successful’ species at some point in the future. If we are to believe that the Sun is in the process of continuous expansion, then it is a reasonable assumption that Earth’s temperature would at some point grow too high for human beings (as they are now) to inhabit in. All these widely accepted scientific truths seem to point in one direction: the relative insignificance of humankind in comparison to the deep and infinite chasm of the universe. It is therefore safe to presume that human perception, in consideration of the probabilities in relation to the insignificance of our existence, is inherently flawed. There is no way of proving this, but then again, the probabilities of thinking otherwise seem logically puerile. The relative concept of truth would therefore suggest that we are more likely wrong, than right.
With this conceptual backdrop, I find that your articles, though infinitely scholarly and very much enjoyable, must be appreciated with a firm belief that all it contains is merely another hypothesis, which due to deficient perception and truth relative to probability, is bound to be flawed. I cannot accept your position of atheism since I find that atheism is merely a juxtaposition of knowledge, with the absence of knowledge. It is no better than the obstinate statement of “I find no evidence to prove something ‘is’, so therefore I conclude that it ‘is not’.” What I find curious about your conclusions (similar to numerous others before you), is that you seem to assign a profile to God, regardless of whether He exists or not. Even though you argue that there cannot be a god, you have already established what God should be like, if He were to exist. This is a flaw attributable to most atheists, and unfortunately I find that you have similarly misdirected yourself. In even the feeblest of attempts to understand God, we must first remind ourselves that the persona we choose to attribute to Him, is limited to our deficiency in perception and is, as all probabilities would suggest, incorrect. We simply lack the capacity to understand His nature, His will or in fact even whether He is good or bad, which again is limited to our own understanding and perception of morality.
I refer to your comment: “the dawning realization that the brain is all there is sealed the conviction that there is no god.”
In your article on freewill, you suggest that the deterministic nature of the universe disproves the existence of free will. I assume you are also referring to the fact that quantum physics suggests that time is a notion which one ‘arrives at’, and therefore future occurrences are predetermined. I am in partial agreement with your conclusions on this matter since I find that regardless of the nature of the universe (which I might add, humankind will never succeed in understanding let alone theorizing), there must be a certain concoction of elements which go into the makings of a human being, which needless to say, he has neither power nor opportunity to determine. We cannot choose our characters, or our personalities, or the circumstances in which we live. We have no authority whatsoever over how our brain functions or how it responds to stimulus. Even if one is to accept the notion of a mind, I would still be tempted to insist that we do not, in reality, have control over how the mind perceives. There is, quite simply, no such thing as freewill per se, but rather a clever illusion of it. All one needs to do to demonstrate this probable truth is to consider a particular action and then ask oneself whether absolutely identical knowledge and absolutely identical external circumstances influencing the action would cause one to repeat one’s actions. Any truthful answer would suggest that a human being has programmed responses, predetermined by the biological and neurological elements which make up his being.
Where I vehemently disagree with you however pertains to your conclusion that the absence of freewill points to the non-existence of God. Let me first reiterate that this would only be true so far as a god who gives us freewill is concerned. However, the notion of God, as a supreme being who eludes definition and about whom we know nothing substantial, cannot be disproved conclusively merely by pointing out the absence of freewill. I find that the concept of God is very much compatible with the absence of freewill since He may be attributed with the design and order of things which govern us in its stead.
I however cannot personally ascribe to one particular view or understanding of God, thus the hypothesis of a god who gives us no freewill, may only be regarded as one possibility amongst a million others. It may be equally reasonable to argue that the lack of intervention in human suffering does not prove the non-existence of God, since God may be one who chooses not to intervene or simply lacks the time!
In conclusion, I wish to urge readers to think outside the trappings of conventional wisdom and examine some of the flawed presumptions and premises we often base our conclusions on. Simply put, we can neither attribute omnipotence nor omniscience to our creator with any empirical certainty since, the possibility of our creator being a creation himself cannot be brazenly ruled out. Similarly, we cannot prove His non-existence merely by presupposing that the lack of freewill or evidence for a human soul or proof of divine intervention logically brings us to the conclusion that God cannot exist. We must quietly challenge our own arrogance in presuming to possess the capacity to obtain infallible ‘truth’, and accept the inherent limitations of our own understanding. Paradoxically, we must therefore never conclude on any matter except under the thoughtful resolve of faith, something which in turn can never be proved in itself.
Pleasant regards,
Gehan.
Gehan,
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. You may be surprised to hear that I agree with most of what you say, and where we differ it may be because I did not express myself clearly.
I agree that we are vastly ignorant. I cannot dispute your assertion that because of this there may be god somewhere acting in some unfathomable ways. I do not even try to disprove the existence of god because it is impossible to prove such a negative.
As I have said before, I have no need for the god hypothesis and so live my life without it. I have argued that the burden of proof lies with those who propose the existence on an entity, and I have seen no evidence for god. So for me god is like unicorns and fairies. I live without taking them into account. If someone says unicorns exist in a remote jungle but are clever at avoiding detection, I cannot argue with that person but do not find it sufficient to not accept the existence of unicorns.
The free will issue is different. I am not sure if we have free will or not. That aspect of the brain's workings are not well understood. What I was saying was that accepting that the brain is all there is and that all people's ideas about god, consciousness, etc are due to the workings of the brain, sealed for me the idea that god does not exist. It is not a proof, mind you. But accepting the finality of the brain is consistent with there being no god.