John Horgan at the Scientific American blogs interviews George Ellis , a cosmologist who worked with Hawking, physicist, a Quaker, and winner of the controversial Templeton Prize, and in the interview they touch upon, among other topics, the nature of free will, recently discussed here and, briefly, here:
Horgan: In some of your writings, you warn against excessive determinism in physics, and science. Could you summarize your concerns?
Many scientists are strong reductionists who believe that physics alone determines outcomes in the real world, This is demonstrably untrue – for example the computer on which I am writing this could not possibly have come into being through the agency of physics alone.
The issue is that these scientists are focusing on some strands in the web of causation that actually exist, and ignoring others that are demonstrably there – such as ideas in our minds, or algorithms embodied in computer programs. These demonstrably act in a top-down way to cause physical effects in the real world. All these processes and actual outcomes are contextually dependent, and this allows the effectiveness of processes such as adaptive selection that are the key to the emergence of genuine complexity.
At first, I wasn’t quite certain how this is demonstrably untrue. However, I think he sees the contents of the brain as operating in a reality separate from our tangible reality. The Wikipedia article on Ellis states that he is a platonist:
… refers to the philosophy that affirms the existence of abstract objects, which are asserted to “exist” in a “third realm” distinct both from the sensible external world and from the internal world of consciousness, and is the opposite of nominalism (with a lower case “n”).[1]
Keeping that in mind, it becomes clear how he could justify his assertion that free will comes from thoughts in the mind, since they, in his view, are not subject to the laws of physics. His further assertion that an algorithm implemented in a computer is also in a different realm must derive from the idea that algorithms are a construct of our minds, and an implementation of such also comes from a realm differing from our physical reality.
I am not a platonist, so I find these assertions to be dubious.
As I stated above, mathematical equations only represent part of reality, and should not be confused with reality. A specific related issue: there is a group of people out there writing papers based on the idea that physics is a computational process. But a physical law is not an algorithm. So who chooses the computational strategy and the algorithms that realise a specific physical law? (Finite elements perhaps?) What language is it written in? (Does Nature use Java or C++? What machine code is used?) Where is the CPU? What is used for memory, and in what way are read and write commands executed? Additionally if it’s a computation, how does Nature avoid the halting problem? It’s all a very bad analogy that does not work.
This should appeal to my Arts Editor, who enjoys baiting the occasional mathematician; and it’s true, in my humble view, that mathematics is a subset of logical systems in which the behavior of the operations is chosen to mimic reality. While it seems like an obvious truism, a few mathematicians have disagreed, suggesting,
Our external physical reality is a mathematical structure.
(from Wikipedia’s article on Mathematical universe hypothesis.) While that’s a fascinating thought, I currently am inclined to the former view, partially for reasons found later in this post. Now, with regard to physics-as-algorithm, it’s interesting that he claims physical laws are not algorithms: how does he know that? He doesn’t say, quite understandably.
But here we might learn something from Noson Yanofksy’s book, mentioned in this post: The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell us. If we take his assertions to be true, that some problems embodied in physical phenomena cannot be solved using mathematics, then that suggests they are not mathematical at all; their essential nature is only partially understandable through mathematics. They are something else. As something else, they may in fact have a stochastic component … thus leading to the unpredictability which would refute the reductionism necessary to proclaim a lack of free will.
Horgan: Einstein, in the following quote, seemed to doubt free will: “If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the Earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord…. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.” Do you believe in free will?
Ellis: Yes. Einstein is perpetuating the belief that all causation is bottom up. This simply is not the case, as I can demonstrate with many examples from sociology, neuroscience, physiology, epigenetics, engineering, and physics. Furthermore if Einstein did not have free will in some meaningful sense, then he could not have been responsible for the theory of relativity – it would have been a product of lower level processes but not of an intelligent mind choosing between possible options.
I find it very hard to believe this to be the case – indeed it does not seem to make any sense. Physicists should pay attention to Aristotle’s four forms of causation – if they have the free will to decide what they are doing. If they don’t, then why waste time talking to them? They are then not responsible for what they say.
This is a fascinating conundrum – if a physicist truly believes in the lack of free will, then why award them any prizes for their discoveries? After all, they were predestined. So why bother?
Of course, one can argue the prizes were predestined as well. However, at this juncture I’m beginning to feel like an ant in an ant-farm – or part of a large computer simulation (given the similarity of the smartphone addicts to a network of processors, I can say, with nary a grin, that I’m not joking). We can either begin speculating on the nature and motivations of whatever has set our Universe in motion, or we can accept that free will does exist, but is perhaps not yet understandable, and move on to trying to understand it.
In case you’re interested in Ellis’ thoughts on causation, he discusses this in a separate interview, available at IAI News:
A key question for science is whether all causation is from the bottom up only. If forces between particles are the only kind of physical causation, then chemistry, biology, and even our minds are emergent, bottom-up properties of physics. On the other hand, it might be that these emergent higher level structures, such as cells, neurons, and the brain, have causal powers in their one right.
In the first instance, all the higher levels are epiphenomena – they have no real existence – and so the idea that you are responsible for your actions is false. But in fact top-down causation takes place all the time, with the higher levels controlling the lower levels, not by any magic force, but by setting constraints on lower level interactions. This means that higher levels such as cells, neurons, and your brain have real causal powers, and this means you can indeed be held accountable for your actions.
By whom?
(h/t Discover Magazine)
