Saturday, June 03, 2023

Physics has ruled out free will

 By Mathew Goldstein


There are very smart people who claim we have free will (or who claim there is a need to claim that we have free will). They cite unpredictability of outcomes, emergent properties from large quantities, human psychological dependency on ideological pre-commitments, and the always available option of changing the definition of the concept so that it becomes impervious to criticism. In this ten minutes video, Has Physics Ruled Out Free WillSabine Hossenfelder does a good job of explaining why the conclusion that there is no free will has the most integrity. A modern understanding of how the universe operates rules out life after death, talking serpents and donkeys, an Eve created from the rib of an Adam, a flying winged horse, etc., and free will (contra-causal, libertarian free will because these traits are generally considered central to the free will concept). 


Having said that, I need to back peddle some and concede that it is possible to get free-will within the constraints set by physics via strong emergence. However, most physicists reject strong emergence. Sabine Hossenfelder defines strong emergence as “the hypothetical possibility that a system with many constituents displays novel behavior which cannot be derived from the properties and interactions of the constituents.” She states that although this is logically possible, there is not a single known example for this in the real world. She also states that strong emergence is “incompatible with what we already know about the laws of nature” and that strong emergence is “in conflict with the standard model in particle physics.”


One of the biggest problems humanity has are the myriad problems we ourselves create by our tendency to selectively toss out facts about how the universe works when we consider those facts to be inconvenient. We desire to achieve particular outcomes, or avoid particular outcomes, and there are other people who can interfere with realizing that goal. Our desired goal may be idealistically motivated. For what may be good reasons, including this tendency for people to disregard, or deny, inconvenient facts, we distrust others to share our goal or we are cynical about the willingness or ability of others to adjust their attitudes and behaviors so as to realize the preferred goal. We place ourselves in the role of manipulator, saying and doing whatever we think is most likely to achieve our goals (“motivated reasoning”). Argument is not for the sake of respecting and recognizing what the relevant facts are. Argument is instead for the purpose of convincing others to believe what we want them to believe for the sake of achieving or avoiding some particular outcomes (“confirmation bias”). We are competing to have power, because either power is ours and we win, or it is someone else’s and we lose. We then see how dysfunctional this is and become more cynical and distrustful. This takes us in an authoritarian, ideology over facts, power over truth, downhill spiral. 


The way out of that spiral is for humanity to favor a facts first orientation that is rooted in a competent, empiricist epistemology. To favor a commitment to undertaking the effort needed to suss out, and reject, non-factual ideology. To favor objectivity more than doxastically closed faith, cynical manipulation, or partisan advantage. With this context it becomes more honorable to accept compromise in the face of sincere disagreement whenever the result moves us forward overall, without holding out for nothing less than unachievable victory now. That is a practical way towards an uphill spiral of more mutual understanding, trust, and progress. 


“A lot of people seem to think it is merely a philosophical stance that the behavior of a composite object (for example, you) is determined by the behavior of its constituents—that is, subatomic particles. They call it reductionism or materialism or, sometimes, physicalism, as if giving it a name that ends in-ism will somehow make it disappear. But reductionism—according to which the behavior of an object can be deduced from (“ reduced to,” as the philosophers would say) the properties, behavior, and interactions of the object’s constituents—is not a philosophy. It’s one of the best established facts of nature.”

— Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions by Sabine Hossenfelder

3 comments:

Harrison Dinsbeer said...

"We are competing to have power, because either power is ours and we win, or it is someone else’s and we lose. [...] The way out of that spiral is for humanity to favor a facts first orientation that is rooted in a competent, empiricist epistemology."

Well said. It's sometimes tiresome trying to overcome my own unwillingness to accept reality--not to mention how hard it is to coax others out of this unwillingness!

But help me understand: why is empiricism the way out? I think it makes intuitive sense, but my only caution is that it relies on human beings to collect the evidence (I think we're OK at that) and to put all the pieces together (I have my doubts about our competence there). Spiritual worldviews rely on something outside of themselves to help them make sense of the data--what would you say makes empiricism more facts-first?

Harrison Dinsbeer said...

Not my "only caution" necessarily. My current caution :)

Explicit Atheist said...

Spiritualism is sourced entirely from within ourselves with no outside reference. You are simply wrong to claim spiritualism somehow relies on something outside of ourselves. It is empiricism that seeks and obtains direction from outside of ourselves. There is no such thing as 100% externally sourced direction. Sometimes we are lucky and we can approach 100%, but there is always some element of internally sourced direction, some ignorance, some ambiguity, some uncertainty, some indirectness, some assumptions. Technically, we cannot be 100% certain we are always absolutely right about anything. In practice we do very well by the practical measure of “it works” without unattainable, instant, total, absolute, knowledge. Persisting in falsely claiming we obtain external guidance via spiritualism, as if that somehow fills in the gaps that empiricism cannot fill, is a mistake. Spiritualism has an important role in our day to lives as social animals, but it is not an alternative way of knowing.