The Retroactive Universe: introduction, epilogue, and excerpt
Excerpt from "The Retroactive Universe": a book whose condensed version appeared in parts, in articles such as: "Free Will"
Introduction
Are we in control of our own destiny? Does our existence have “meaning”, a purpose? [Is there more to us than just our bodies - and if so does some aspect of our selves survive death?] à
Clearly without free will we would be mere puppets, and so would not bear moral responsibility for the actions our bodies execute. However there is difficulty in defining the concept of free will in accordance with known scientific and philosophical principles. As a result philosophers reject the conception of human freedom, moral responsibility, meaning and purpose; consequently the meaning assigned to these fundamental metaphysical concepts by philosophers is not quite the same as our intuitive understanding of them. Their definitions are tailored by scientists and philosophers to fit the laws of nature and the rigor of ordinary logic, and in the process lose what to our intuitive understanding may be their very essence.
In this book we travel the reverse road. Rather than trying to fit these concepts into the frame of the accepted laws of nature and logic, we first define the type of free will, moral responsibility, meaning and purpose which we feel is reflective of our deepest intuitions. We then determine what must be true about the nature of reality in order for these concepts to be valid as we intuit them, and attempt to extrapolate to discover what are the ramifications of this reality to physics, cosmology and philosophy.
[1]Generations of thinkers have struggled with such questions and have devoted lifetimes to investigating enigmas such as the origin of the universe, the origins and nature of humanity, the basis of moral obligation, the meaning of life and the purpose of existence. Various cultures and individuals have over the millennia explored different approaches to these issues, and often the paths taken seem mutually incompatible.
Our own cultural heritage on these issues and concepts includes perspectives as diverse as those of science and of metaphysics, of the Bible and of philosophy, of mysticism and of mathematics. However these disciplines deal so differently with these issues that accepting their relevance, and certainly integrating them into a coherent world-view, is often difficult or even declared to be impossible.
In this work we shall endeavor to fashion a partial integration of some of these approaches. We will especially explore the idea of free willed consciousness and its ramifications, finding it to be a pivotal factor for many key concepts and a unifying theme underlying the various perspectives on these issues.
The earliest surviving treatment of these themes is perhaps found in the Bible. The creation and Eden accounts - the opening chapters of Genesis (the first book of the Bible) - deal with the origin of the universe, humanity, free will and moral obligation. These accounts have contributed greatly to our cultural conceptions and beliefs on these matters and shall play a prominent role in our discussions.
Although these issues are treated rather differently by science and by Genesis, we shall attempt the development of a perspective from which the scientific origin theory and the creation account are complementary rather than contradictory. [2]
Understanding the creation and Eden accounts in the context of our discussions on free will and universal purpose can aid us in appreciating the meaning of these accounts, and in discerning a logic behind the juxtaposition of two such very different accounts. These connections will also help motivate the otherwise perplexing implications in Genesis that the universe was created not so long ago and that the first human being lived only thousands rather than hundreds of thousands - or even millions - of years ago.
Besides the various insights and speculations on philosophy metaphysics and Genesis, a number of original ideas are presented regarding the nature of free will and its relevance to various fundamental issues in physics, philosophy and metaphysics.
Epilogue
The universe is a wondrous place to those capable of wonder, and the depth and sophistication of its workings and underlying principles are matched only by their simplicity and beauty.
Speculations into the meaning of existence and contemplation of the night sky do not lead to a unique conclusion. Investigation of the mysteries of the universe has different effects on people's beliefs, and the conclusions reached as a result of such contemplation often mirror the particular prior beliefs of those individuals.
From the perspective explored here, humanity is unique - among all that is as yet known in the universe, from fundamental particles to galaxies, from amoebas to the largest of creatures, only humanity posesses a free-willed consciousness and a moral sense. This, together with the intelligence to comprehend - to some degree at least - the implications and of its actions, bestows on humanity the unique burden and privelege of moral responsibility.
As far as we can imagine the 'outsider' perspective of a creator of this universe, the only actions which would be non-determined, non-random, perhaps even unforeseeable, are those which result from free-willed activity. The only events not resulting from the input of this creator, but rather originating outside the realm of activity for which the creator was directly responsible, are free-willed events. As a result, human intuition can consider only moral activity of this type as meaningful and purposive from the creator's outsider perspective (See discussion in the book itself).
From the kabbalisitic perspective, the universe derives from a prior blueprint of spiritual forms, is a concretization of these in physical terms, a shadow cast into the realm of space-time-matter-energy. Interactions among the forms of the spiritual realm are determined by that which is beyond the physical - free-willed moral choice.
In our interpretation of quantum metaphysics, it is free-willed moral consciousness which brings full physical reality to the universe, mirroring the bringing into existence of the cosmos as a whole via the free-willed choice of the creator to create.
By its very nature free will is unmodelable, non-physical, and possibly forever beyond scientific analysis. Indeed the self-causative nature of free-will reflects the nature of existence itself, and of the coming into existence of the universe.
According to the Biblical accounts and their mystical interpretations, it was free willed choice on the part of the creator which led to the creation of the universe, and this creation was achieved at the price of a voluntary withdrawal of the divine from the realm which would thereupon become material existence, and with a premeditated shattering of the monopoly of divine will to endow humanity with an independent will.
This shattering and withdrawal and the concomitant reduction in the apparent unity and symmetry of the divine as perceived from within the universe, are reflected by cosmology in similar processes of symmetry breaking within the evolution of the physical cosmos. From the creation of existence, the universe underwent an apparent progressive decrease in symmetry, descending into the chaos of entropic increase. Simultaneously however it evolved in a highly organized mode, an evolutionary direction designed to produce life and eventually moral beings - though the actual emergence of free-willed moral consciousness is beyond the parameters of scientific description.
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An integrative Quantum Kabbalistic view of creation-bigbang/evolution
excerpt from “The Retroactive Universe”
Three options:
Option A
The universe arose by itself, via chance. Life emerged from non-life and humans evolved from ‘lower’ life forms. Qualitatively human, animal, vegetable and mineral follow identical physical law, and human mental activity is no exception.
All events including mental events occur in a PDR way, and thus free will is physically impossible. In addition, if causality is valid, then free will is logically impossible, Therefore, man has no control over his actions and thought and cannot logically be held responsible for them. Of course people are not logical, and thus many people feel that they are responsible for their actions, and have invented the words "moral responsibility" to describe this emotion.
Our feeling that we have free will is real-it is a real feeling-but free will itself does not exist. Free will is a chimera, and our belief in moral responsibility is an erroneous belief.
Option B
God created the universe and instituted a system of "natural law" to run it. All events occur in accordance with this natural law, except when God intervenes in nature. If quantum physics is correct, then the state of the universe at any time follows in a probabilistically determined random way from the initial created state of the universe. Therefore, everything that occurs does so as a direct result of some combination of God's choice of initial state, God's choice of system of natural laws, and randomness. Clearly, God cannot expect humans to act differently than they do since all follows determinedly from God’s initial creation, and so humanity cannot be held responsible for its actions. Those who do not realize that they really do not have free will and believe that they are responsible, i.e. that they do have free will, are wrong.
Option C
God created the universe in such a way that except for consciousness it follows the PDR laws of quantum physics. Humans are conscious and have free will and are responsible for their actions.
[ie: Quantum physics (PDR) does not hold in the realm of human mental processes, and a causality-defying process allows one to freely choose actions in a rational way without this choice being determined due to its rationale.]
The belief that humans are purely physical beings and consciousness is a physical phenomenon as any other is incompatible with our most deeply held beliefs about moral responsibility. Indeed, if one had to choose deterministic and materialistic science or moral responsibility, most scientists would choose the latter. Belief in human moral responsibility implies rejection of the universality of quantum physics and of the seemingly logical demands of causality.
The assumption that humans are purely physical is not only unproven but is also logically incompatible with those beliefs we are most sure of. These assumptions are not science but rather are part of a mechanistic/atheistic philosophy.
....
The human mind is beyond the purely physical, and via creative activity can perhaps reverse the entropic dissipation of the universe into chaos. In addition, the transcendental nature of the human mind manifests itself in the ability to perceive via the intuition truths not accessible to material devices, whether mathematical truths - as shown by Godel - or the fundamental moral truths such as the existence of a good and an evil.
The universe was deliberately created incomplete and imperfect. All in the universe other than moral beings are subject to causality, however humans by virtue of their free will and creativity can add to the net-zero situation of the universe, and raise its spiritual level to the intended level of perfection just as human creativity can counter the dissipitative effect of entropy.
Until the emergence of creative moral beings, our intuition leads us to conclude that the universe was without meaning and purpose from the creator's perspective. Quantum metaphysics indicates that true existence is initiated with the emergence of moral beings, and from the outsider perspective of the creator it is only then that there is meaning to this existence, purpose to the creation.
From the Biblical perspective therefore, it is this stage of moral emergence which heralds the onset of existence: prior physical development from the big bang itself onward is not directly of relevance to the creation and Eden accounts, nor is the emergence of earlier life-forms - whether amoebas, or dinosaurs, or the great apes.
Quantum randomness determines the stage of the emergence of a moral being as representing the jump-off point at which a teleoderived moral universe can begin to function autonomously, allowing self-operation of the universe via its laws of nature. Thus the emergence of a moral being is the initial state of self-operation, and therefore the first stage of the universe's true existence. In the context of Genesis, this means that the account of the creation would not be complete without an account of the emergence of a moral being - as indeed is described in the Garden of Eden account.
It is the concept of free-willed consciousness which allows these ideas to come to the fore, and which provides the perspective to a deeper understanding of various topics in Jewish thought: from the meaning within the Biblical perspective according to Maimonides of the existence of the inanimate and non-human animate world, to a resolution of the paradox presented by the undeniable development of the immutable and pre-prescribed Jewish law, and an understanding of the book of Kohelet as an integrated whole.
The fundamental nature of the universe as a mental construct, the nature of time in the universe, as well as the emergence of the universe into physical reality are all inextricably ralated to the nature of consciousness, and particularly to free-willed consciousness.
The creation and Eden accounts and their juxtaposition symbolizes all this and more, presenting ideas in the literary form of allegorical-imagery appropriate to that which is beyond rational description, that which is not encompassible within scientific discourse.
We have seen how considerations of quantum physics, meaning, purpose and free will lead to an understanding of the structure of the opening chapters of Genesis: an account of a carefully considered purposive creation of the universe, followed by an account of the emergence of the first moral being, and then a continuous record of the moral activity of these beings and their descendants.
When pondering the secrets of nature and of the Bible, the mind steeped in the culture and society which continues unbroken from that society which was first presented with the creation and Eden accounts, sees all as an integrated whole, particularly as the creator of the universe is also the author of the creation and Eden accounts. From the perspective of such a mind, it is this picture of the underlying reality of existence, and this understanding of the creation and Eden accounts, which emerges from contemplation of the universe and its mysteries.
[1] The arguments presented are intended to be quite general, but as they are about intuitive rather than objective concepts, they may not conform to the intuitions of all readers. And, since one cannot prove one's intuitions in these matters to be superior to those of another, these arguments can be viewed more as the author's personal view, or as reflective of a view held by many people, rather than a statement of what the author believes to be a universally accepted objective fact.
Furthermore, we do not claim that this type of free will exists - we merely present what to us seems to be the ramifications of the existence of the type of free will which would support the key metaphysical concepts of moral responsibility, meaning and purpose (MRMP).
[2] Discovering how the approaches of science and the Bible are related is also one of the subjects of the author's upcoming book "A Garden of Edens: the Many Faces of Genesis".
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Partial bibliography
· Burtt, E.A. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (revised edition). N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954, See especially pp. 64-67, 75, 94,
· d'Espagnat, Bernard. "Quantum Theory and Reality," Scientific American, Nov, 1979, pp. 128-140.
· Wheeler, J.A. "Beyond the Black Hole," Some Strangeness In the Proportion. N.Y.: Addison-Wesley, 1980...