file "with einstein material"
Chapter 4: Quantum Puppets
and Autonomous Brains:
Determinism, Randomness, Chaos and Free Will
The great mathematician-physicist Laplace, based partly on work done by Newton, presented to the King of France what was then considered to be a complete account of a mechanical universe, operating completely according to fixed 'Laws of Nature'. He was also not without a sense of the theatrical. When asked by the King where God fit into his purely-mechanical model of the cosmos Laplace's immortal reply was "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis".
Introduction
Scientists from the time of Newton and on may well have felt that we may not be in control of our actions and thoughts, that we are indeed deluded conscious machines, puppets of fate, not morally responsible for our actions.
However, quantum physics introduced about seventy years ago, chaos theory and the mathematical notion of incomputability developed more recently, have significantly revised the Newtonian view of nature, and some have proposed that they open the way to the existence of free will.
We intend however to burst that bubble.
We will see that just as free will can be defined as existing when it is felt that it exists, but this is not the type of free will we are interested in this book, so too we will show that the type of free will allowed by quantum physics, chaos and incomputability are not the type of free will which interests us. We are interested only in a free will which would allow an 'outsider' viewing our universe to ascribe purpose and meaning to our existence, and quantum physics and all the rest do not suffice to provide this. Therefore, rather than being based on these, free will of the type we are interested in will have to be based on more radical phenomena.
In some sense, the much-touted shining knight of quantum physics and all the other developments turn out not to be a rescuer but rather a croaking frog; we are left with the fear that when we feel that there is moral responsibility and our actions and lives have meaning, these may be just the delusions of a conscious machine.
Determinism
The workings of the human brain were considered to be machine-like according to the old Newtonian model of nature. According to the world-view prevailing at the time, the state of any physical system at any given moment totally determines the next state of the system - given what the situation is, the entire exhaustive description of all the relevant details, things can happen in only one way. In the same way, at the largest scale, where the entire universe is the system under scrutiny, the state of the universe at any given moment totally determines the next state of the universe.
Following this logic, one can conclude that since each state of the universe is determined totally by the state of the universe at the preceding instant, a chain of cause and effect can be constructed back to the initial instant, so that the state of the universe at any time is actually totally determined by the initial state of the universe. In this sense, everything that occurs anywhere was inherent in the big bang.
This means that all right and wrong actions committed by people and perhaps all thoughts as well, are actually inherent in the big bang, that humanity cannot control its thoughts or actions - they are all written in to the big bang.
Since there is no unequivocal scientifically accepted evidence that human brains operate outside the realm of physical laws (i.e. under laws different than those governing the rest of the universe) indeed all human actions and thoughts are the result of natural law rather than human choice.
Einstein: Despite his great sensitivity to ethics, Einstein strongly believed in determinism:
"The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature."
"We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough to nevertheless sense at least the rule of fixed necessity...."
".... the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary as the past." "everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper." A. Einstein
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Determinism and the Human Brain
[To avoid this slightly technical section, skip to page....]
To understand how human brain states can be considered as determined, let us consider an analogy with a billiard table operating in a deterministic (non-quantum) universe. Imagine striking a ball, and watching it careen about striking others which then collide with yet others, forming a pattern of chain reaction collisions. The entire activity is totally described by the laws of nature - once the first ball is hit, the speed and direction imparted to it totally determine which balls will be hit, to what degree, where they will end up, what chain reaction will be caused. Different initial speeds and directions will result in different overall patterns of chain reaction.
Imagine now that the balls are electrified and glow, with a constantly increasing brightness. Photos are taken of the activity, with not quite fast enough exposure, and then the frames are laid down side by side. Each photo shows a pattern of billiard balls, each ball somewhat fuzzy because the exposure was not quite fast enough. From the photo we can tell where each ball is and from the fuzziness and the fact that the fuzziness is brighter at one end than at the other (the light in the ball was getting brighter all the time), we can tell in what direction the ball is traveling. Each photo therefore captures a particular state of the billiard balls, and the collection of photos captures the development of the states from one to another. The laws of nature totally determine which state shall follow from a given state - the balls have no choice in how to act. Each pattern of balls determines the following pattern unequivocally.
Picture these balls now as parts of the electronic components in a computer, and that each pattern of balls corresponds to a particular pattern of electric activity in the components. Each pattern of electric activity then determines the next pattern unequivocally, forming a chain of patterns. Given any pattern, the next pattern following that in the computer is totally determined. It is not the computer which decides what to do, but rather the components of the computer are forced by the laws of nature and the structure of the computer along a certain pattern. The computer is designed in such a way that the laws of nature will move it along patterns which correspond to logical activity, so that the output is for example a mathematical calculation. Given a particular program and data, and a particular structure for the computer's electronics, every input will have a specific output, and this is because every state of the electronics in the computer can have only one next-pattern, and so on down the chain, so that given the input, there is a unique first-state that leads eventually to a unique last-state, which is the unique result.
Determinism of Human Brain States
We now associate to each pattern of balls a particular thought, so that the changing pattern of the balls corresponds to a chain of thought. If the billiard balls together collectively have a mind, the thought in that mind at any given moment will be that one corresponding to the physical pattern of the balls. The mind of the billiard balls would then be thinking a chain of thoughts, without knowing that the chain of thoughts was determined by the laws of mechanics governing the interactions of billiard balls.
What about the human brain?
The thoughts in a person's mind are affected by the events in the world about them, by memories they have, by other thoughts they have had. According to materialist approaches to the human brain, all these thoughts correspond directly to patterns of electrically active neurons in the brain. The universe including the brain is like the billiard table - imagine that these balls are neurons in the brain, and that each pattern of balls corresponds to a particular pattern of electrically-active neurons. Given a pattern of events in the physical universe including the pattern of electrical activity in the brain, there is only one next-pattern for the brain, just as there is only one next-pattern for the billiard balls. Each pattern of neurons determines the next pattern unequivocally, forming a chain of patterns of neurons.
Therefore if brains operate according to the known laws of nature thoughts are something like patterns of electrically active neurons, and therefore given any thought, the next thought following that in the brain is totally determined. It is not 'the mind' which decides what to think, but rather the brain is forced by the laws of nature along a certain pattern of neurons, and the mind then thinks the corresponding thoughts. One of the thoughts it is made to think is the familiar one that goes something like "I am deciding this of my own free will".....
Every thought in the brain is determined by the prior state of the universe (including the prior state of the brain), and each state of the universe is determined by the prior state of the universe. Therefore the first state of the universe - the big bang - determines all the next states of the universe, and therefore it determines also all the eventual brain states of all the beings who arise in the universe.
Some have maintained that ours is indeed such a universe, but that nevertheless humans have a free will and moral responsibility for their actions:
insert quotes
However, we do not here mean by free will what these writers mean. The type of free will they speak of is not such that an outsider would consider it free, and is not sufficient to support moral responsibility, meaning and purpose from the outsider viewpoint.
In a universe in which brains operate according deterministic laws of nature, all the human actions ever perpetrated, good or bad, all the decisions as to how to act, were not the result of a choice by the perpetrator, but rather they are merely elements in the path of history inherent in the initial state of the universe.
People may of course have an illusion that they possess a free will, and that somehow they have acted in a manner which was not solely the result of natural law. In fact, the complexity of interactions in the brain involved in producing a thought may well preclude any possible method of even computer-aided prediction of a future thought or act, so that this illusion might never be disproven. In such a universe in which thoughts cannot be predicted, we can say that humans have a 'calculationally-free' will; further, if people feel they possesses a free will, we can say that they have a 'psychologically free' will. However in such a universe, there is no 'inherently-free' will: regardless of whether or not thoughts are predictable, or whether or not humans 'feel' free, in actuality humans have no say over what they will think or do - they only think they do.
Quantum Physics and Human Brains
Introduction: The branch of physics which deals with the most fundamental particles and fields known in the universe is quantum physics, and the basic postulates of quantum physics have ramifications to the issue at hand.
Quantum physics, introduced near the beginning of the 20th century, brought with it a drastic change in this deterministic viewpoint (that every event in the universe occurred as an inevitable and necessary result of previous events). Each event was now understood to be able to occur in a number of ways, with the actual way that it does occur left to 'chance'. Despite the fact that chance ruled each individual event, however, when numerous similar events occur, the pattern which emerges resembles the results one would expect from pre-quantum physics.
What of events in the brain, the events which underlie our thoughts and decisions? Of course a full theory of the human brain and of the processes in it is only a distant goal, and neither physics nor physiology can state categorically that free willed processes in the brain are physically possible or impossible. However (many) physicists dealing with quantum physics (have in the past often) assumed that eventually this theory will be able to describe even the human brain, leading them to assume that eventually science may be able to prove that free will does not exist. The fact that humans believe that they have free will, that they feel that they are exercising a free will in their decisions is generally not considered sufficient indication to postulate that there are processes which are not random in the quantum mechanical sense.
Probabilistic Determinism
In order to understand the basic concepts of quantum physics required here, we shall explore as an example the quantum theory of light.
It is a fact of nature that when a beam of light is shone through a slit, it spreads out on the other side of the slit, making a well-defined pattern on a screen placed behind the slit.
It is also a fact of nature that if the light is turned lower and lower (less and less light) there is not a continuous decrease of light, but a decrease in jumps - which means that the light is discrete 'pieces of light'. One can even reduce the beam so low that only one 'piece' of light comes through.
It is also a fact that various pieces of light aimed at the center of the slit, after passing the slit, often lands at different angles away from the center, rather than all hitting the center of the screen, and rather than all hitting at the same angle. There is no way to predict where an individual piece of light will impact. Nevertheless, when sufficient pieces are sent through, the expected pattern begins to assert itself.
Each individual event, though occurring 'at random', nevertheless contributes somehow to a pattern, in the aggregate, which can be exactly determined beforehand. This combination of random and determined behavior is termed here "probabilistically determined randomness" (PDR) or "probabilistic determinism". However, this 'random' aspect seemed at first to be contrary to the 'spirit of physics'. Much inquiry was directed to the question of whether or not the chance aspect was only apparent, because of our lack of sufficient scientific knowledge and adequate instrumentation, or if it was an actual physical requirement. It was shown that indeed the nature of the physical universe is such that intrinsically, at the most fundamental level, events are probabilistic and not deterministic.
How do the individual pieces conspire to make the pattern? According to the understanding of science, the path of an individual piece of light, or any other fundamental particle, is not describable in ordinary concepts - only the aggregate is describable. Each microscopic particle travels along a randomly chosen path, and science can predict only the pattern made by many particles, not the path of an individual particle. When there are sufficient paths involved for a statistical statement to be relevant, science can make exact predictions regarding the patterns which will develop.
In the same way that in the case discussed above the individual event is random but the overall pattern is determined, quantum physics teaches that all sub-microscopic events occur as a combination of determined and random effects (PDR) - and that any such event can occur in a number of possible ways. According to the theory of quantum physics, there is no way to determine the exact outcome of quantum events; what can be determined is only the overall pattern, the relative probabilities of the various possible outcomes.
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PROBABILISTIC DETERMINISM
Prior to the advent of quantum physics, science believed that every event in the universe occurred as an inevitable and necessary result of previous events. The state of the universe at any one instant was believed to be totally determined by the states of the universe in the past, and in turn the present state totally determined what all future states of the universe would be.
Quantum physics, introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century, brought with it a drastic change in this viewpoint. Each event was now understood to be able to occur in a number of ways, with the actual way that it does occur left to “chance.” Despite the fact that chance “ruled” each individual event, however, when numerous similar events occurred, the pattern that emerged resembled the results one would have expected using pre-quantum physics.
That is, each individual event, though occurring “at random,” nevertheless contributes somehow to a pattern, in the aggregate, which can be determined beforehand. This combination of random and determined behavior is called here probabilistic determinism or probabilistically determined randomness.
Physicists were troubled since this “random” aspect seemed to be contrary to the “spirit of physics.”
Much inquiry was directed to the question of whether the chance aspect was only apparent—i.e. due to our lack of sufficient scientific knowledge and adequate instrumentation—or if it was an actual physical requirement. With the accumulation of more experimental evidence it was shown that, indeed, the nature of the physical universe appears to be such that intrinsically, at the most fundamental level, events are probabilistic and not deterministic.
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Free Will, Quantum Physics, and Causality
Some writers have claimed that in the same way that determinism seemed to put to rest the idea of free will, quantum physics resurrects it.
Insert quotes
However, although quantum physics posits a new type of causal relationship of events, it is not sufficiently radical an innovation in causality to allow for the operation of free will of the type we are interested in.
According to quantum physics, events occur in a probabilistically determined random manner. If underlying every physical process there are random events, then the result of these events can also be judged to be inherently random.
In terms of the relevance to free will, although it is true that quantum physics reduces the determinism of the earlier physics, what it introduces is randomness instead, and not a freedom of the type suitable as a basis for free willed choice.
If all events at the most basic level of interaction are random in nature there is no room for freedom even in brain events ( AR: Duplication?: If indeed all of nature obeys this type of quantum physics at its most fundamental levels, then free will would be impossible). Therefore if free will does exist, this type of quantum physics cannot be valid as a prescriptive formalism at the most fundamental levels of natural processes.
In order for a true free will to exist, there must not only be more than one alternative available at each free-willed decision point, there must also be a choice of alternative which is made "freely". Although according to quantum physics the first condition is possible, the second condition is not - rather than being made by choice, the choice of alternative is not freely willed but rather is random at its most fundamental level. Since a random choice is not a "free" choice, quantum physics of this type is not compatible with free will. That is, if everything including thought is actually governed by quantum physics, by PDR, then true free will is impossible.
MESH
,. To encompass free will there must therefore exist some interaction which has a level of acausality yet more radical than that of quantum physics.
The very concept of free will seems to be undefineable and even self-contradictory. In order for free will to be conceptualized in a non-self-contradictory manner, in addition to modifying quantum theory to account for free will, one would possibly have to modify the concept of causality itself - the idea underlying all of science that one event causes another according to some law.
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Inherent Randomness and Free Will: Uncertainty as a Limit on Physical Theories
It may however be that quantum physics does not actually conflict with free will as it does not truly require that events are PDR. Quantum theory is perhaps more an expression of limits on what can be known rather than a description of what occurs. This theory states that overall the pattern emerging from large amounts of microscopic events will be identical to that of a random distribution, and that we cannot determine the result of individual events, but it does not describe the individual events themselves. One can claim that according to quantum physics individual microscopic events need not occur in any specific manner - for example 'randomly' - as long as they add up in the end, in the aggregate (the totality), to a random distribution.
In this interpretation, scientific theories can deal only with large numbers of events rather than with individual events. About an individual microscopic event nothing at all can be said, not even that it occurs at random. Rather, one can only say that however it is that these events occur, large amounts of events will in the aggregate form according to a probabilistic distribution.
Rather than accepting quantum theory as a statement that all events occur randomly according to a determined probability distribution, one can see it as a statement of the limits of scientific theories.
This would mean that it is not impossible that the individual events can occur in accordance with a free willed decision - there is simply no way science can tell us anything about the individual event and so the speculation or belief that the event occurs in accordance with the choice of a free will can be neither scientifically supported nor refuted.
Although quantum physics can really only make statements about ensembles, if one could extrapolate these to the individual occurrences also, then this 'strong quantum physics' would postulate that all individual events are random, rather than just the aggregate being PDR. If all of nature obeys the strong form of quantum physics at its most fundamental levels, then free will would be impossible. However this version of quantum physics is not currently believed to be valid, and so the question remains open as to the nature of individual events, especially of allegedly-free mental decisions.
We are left nevertheless with an uncomfortable feeling: even though individual events can occur even in a free willed manner quantum physics can still somehow describes statistical distributions of such free willed choices. Although individual decisions are free willed, nevertheless the statistical distribution of results - the number of positive and negative choices etc - is totally predetermined. If all choices are free, how can they possibly conspire together to fit the predetermined pattern?
Insurance Statistics and Free Will
Human activity does seem to follow statistical patterns, with crime and accident statistics being roughly constant. Insurance companies know how many people will die of each disease each year, how many people will be killed in accidents, how many fires there will be; if these events are random, it is interesting that they fall into such clear statistical patterns, but that is the same as quantum physics - random at he individual level, predictable in the aggregate. However, police also know approximately how many murders to expect in a given year. If each of these the events occur in accordance with a free willed choice, it would be rather strange that a large amount of such free choices lead in the aggregate to a determined probabilistic distribution. After all, if the choices are free, what is there to cause them always to form these determined patterns in the aggregate?
Marriages, the taking of vacations, committing murder or other crimes would all seem to be freely willed. In fact if crime is not freely willed, there can be no true responsibility for the crime. On the other hand, it has been observed that the number of murders committed in any one city remains roughly constant, or changes at a certain well defined rate. And the same for marriages, vacationers and so on. If these events are not the result of free willed choice, then nothing probably is, and free will does not exist. On the other hand if they are the result of free willed choice, how is it that in the aggregate free willed choices are so predictable?
This situation is quite mystifying to the proponent of free will, but there are possible answers, such as that the types of people and their situations are distributed in a probabilistic manner, and this is reflected in the results. However, this merely takes the question one step further.
[It may also be that not all actions that we presume are free-willed, but only some of these are: some choices are truly free, and the rest arrange themselves to complete the requisite pattern imposed by quantum statistics. Or that for some reason the statistics of quantum physics are not an accurate reflection of free willed moral decisions, are not valid for free willed events.]
In any event, if one can accept that statistics tell us about the aggregate of criminal decisions and yet these individual criminals are responsible for their individual decisions, ie these were freely taken, then the existence of an overall determinism is not felt by us to be a refutation of the freedom at the individual level - if so, then quantum physics provides an exact analogy to this, describing the overall pattern without dealing with the nature of the individual event.
However strange this combination of freedom and determinism is, we can see that quantum uncertainty and PDR mirror exactly the expected results of free willed behavior as observed in the actual world. Nevertheless as a theory only of the limits of what we can know, and of the overall patterns in the aggregate, quantum physics in this interpretation tells us nothing about individual events and therefore nothing about free will itself other than its overall aggregate behavior.
Quantum physics does not deny the possibility of free will however it in no way provides a theory of how individual decisions are made in a free-willed manner.
The Interaction Underlying Free-Willed Phenomena
What is the mechanism whereby individual free decisions are in fact made? Since quantum theory cannot answer this in this respect it is insufficient as a complete description of nature.
Even if there is true free will even of a statistically limited type so that somehow quantum statistics are not violated, so that quantum physics correctly describes the limit of possible scientific knowledge about the free-willed system, quantum physics is not describing at all the operation of free will, the means whereby free willed choices are made: the very existence of some truly free willed choices requires the existence of interactions far more subtle and basic than those postulated and dealt with by quantum physics.
If this is the case, then ordinary quantum physics could be considered as having validity limited to non-mental events, or to events in arenas of lesser complexity than the human brain, or as being an approximation to a more fundamental theory just as classical physics is an approximation of quantum physics, or as a theory which tells of the limits beyond which physics cannot enter - limits beyond which lie mental phenomena.
In the early-mid 20th century Bohr proposed that the mental events involved in producing a thought are quantum-level events and so it would be impossible to physically trace mental events with any instrument without interfering with the mental events being traced. If such were the case physics could not hope to describe mental events, and this quantum nature of interactions in the brain would preclude any possible method of prediction of a future thought or act. Consequently an illusion of free will might never be disproved and thus physics could not rule out the existence of free will.
Indeed, it has been proposed that somehow the existence of the illusion may be due to the very phenomenon which ensures that the events in the brain are unpredictable.
However, many disagree because they feel that the processes underlying a thought are too complex to depend on single quantum events and a thought itself is too ordered to depend on a single quantum event, and therefore these processes would be sufficiently macroscopic to resist the disturbance created by a minimally-disturbing measurement. Thus they conclude that physics could eventually describe human thought processes. Indeed scientists are now perhaps succeeding in tracing individual brain events.
However the interaction underlying free-willed choice may be so subtle that perhaps it is not scientifically describable. Indeed, a scientifically describable free will would probably mean a scientifically predictable free will, which would likely mean that it is not free at all. True free will may by definition be beyond scientific analysis, or 'non-modelable'.
It would therefore seem that if true free will exists, it is necessarily based on interactions fundamentally other than those underlying anything else known to science today, including quantum physics.
Quantum Determinism and the 'Universal History Video Library'
Introduction
According to present scientific understanding, based on the ideas of quantum physics, the state of the universe at any given time determines not the actual state of the universe at the next instant, but rather determines what the possible next states might be, and also determines the relative probability of each such possible outcome. The actual next-state of the universe is 'chosen' randomly by nature from among the possible next-states. Therefore, the first state of the universe - namely the conditions obtaining at the initial singularity or the big bang - determines the entire range of quantumly possible future states of the universe.
Would it be possible to predict the future? If all the laws of nature were known, then it might be possible to predict the future development of any physical system to some degree. For example, given the conditions at the big bang, all the possible future states of the universe could be known. However, due to the randomness inherent in physical processess, as described by quantum physics, the actual future state is chosen at random from the possible future ones, and it cannot be known in advance which one will be chosen.
One could therefore say that if a sufficiently powerful computer is given the design for the big bang, all the minute details of all its possible future histories can be known - however the one actual history which would result from among all the possible ones would be unknown.
[There is the possibility however that the computations would prove to be so complex that for a computer to be powerful enough to perform the calculations it would have to be larger than the whole universe. In such a case, one could say that prediction is quantitatively impossible, and such a quantitative limitation could also be interpreted as a qualitative limitation. If instead of prediction before the fact one demands only knowability, so that a computation which takes longer than the real time development qualifies, .....So it may be that only an outsider computation can be qualified even to retrodict. However there is no way of knowing if the concept of an outsider is meaningful at all.]
Actualization of A Particular Universe-History
Let us assume that for a particular big bang there are for example 100100100 possible future histories differing significantly from each other, and that all the details of all these histories are recorded in the computer and labeled from one to 100100100.
If such a big bang were to be created, its future history would be identical to one of the recorded and labeled histories, however it would not be known which one of these it will act out. Since the big bang would develop according to the laws of quantum randomness, the choice of which history would appear would be decided randomly, as though by the toss of a die. Indeed, one toss of a die with 100100100 sides, or choosing one number from 1 to 100100100, is the same as the combination of random choices produced by the quantum randomness of the developing universe. The development of the universe from a big bang to its final conclusion is essentially the same as if the big bang had tossed a die and chosen its entire future history.
The import of this is different when it is realized that there are ramifications to the question of whether humans are the playthings of fate, or are masters of their own fate. If brains operate under laws no different than those governing the rest of the universe, then every decision in any brain, every thought, is simply a pattern of electrically-active neurons - or more fundamentally, a particular combination of elementary particles. According to quantum physics, each thought - each pattern of electrically active neurons - has various possible next-states rather than only one, however these states are those decided by the laws of nature rather than by the mind of the person whose brain is being considered, and the decision as to which of these states is activated is left to chance. Thus, for each thought or sensory input in the brain, there are various possible next-thoughts, and one of these is actualized, 'chosen at random by nature'. In other words, every time that a person decides to carry out a certain action, the decision to do so is simply one of the possible such decisions that nature chose at random from among all the possible decisions. The mind has control neither over the range of possible decisions, nor over the choice as to which decision is chosen
We could then say that whichever future is realized from among the quantumly-possible ones inherent in the initial universe state, all the human actions, thoughts and decisions contained in that history are the result of natural law rather than human choice, elements in the path of history that nature chose at random from among all the possible history paths that were inherent in the initial state of the universe.
The illusion of possessing a free will which transcends natural law and quantum randomness in some measure might never be disproved, especially since only probabilities can be predicted.
In a universe governed by the laws of physics as we know them, as soon as the big bang exists, all future quantumly-possible histories are written therein - any conscious being in such a universe is but a puppet acting out the particular history randomly chosen by nature from among all the possibilities. All events which occur in such a universe, all actions seemingly initiated by the conscious beings, are in actuality attributable to the initial state of the universe, the laws of nature, and randomness.
If humanity exists in a universe without free will, then even if humans are convinced that they bear moral responsibility for their actions, they are puppets who falsely believes they pull their own strings - people can no more decide whether to be 'good' or 'evil' than they can decide whether or not to be born. All their actions are written into the fabric of the universe and its laws, and they are not responsible for their actions or thoughts.
Of course people could always define themselves as 'free' if they feel free. Whether this is only a subjective perspective, or can be considered objective is discussed in the next chapter.
Chaos, Unpedictability and Freedom
Many writers have intimated that the results of chaos theory are relevant to the question of free will, just as others before them had claimed that quantum physics is significant in that respect.
Insert quotes
In this chapter we will analyze those aspects of chaos theory of relevance to this question, and show that it is actually of no relevance to free will as defined by us.
Chaos and Instability
In some situations, a large effect can result from a small cause - for example if a train is balanced on the edge of a precipice, a relatively small push might tumble it down. In this way, due to an inherent instability in the situation, the effect of the small cause can be 'multiplied' far beyond what it would achieve otherwise.
Weather conditions are very sensitive to small causes. A sneeze creates a tiny breeze which can divert a section of air which then causes.....etc etc until a thousand miles away the resulting chain of events is sufficient to nudge a wind pattern into a cyclone formation, which then destroys a town.
The situation is chaotic in the sense that every instant new small causes join the fray, multiplying up and constantly changing the pattern. On the other hand, when a small nudge gives the final twist to a strong wind changing it into a cyclone, the small cause has given rise to a very ordered effect - changing an unordered wind into a circular pattern with a life of its own.
Prediction and Free Will
As long as it is impossible to predict who will sneeze when, and all other such small causes, it is impossible to completely predict the weather. The weather is 'unstable' in the sense that it is very sensitive to small causes. Similarly, many physical systems are sensitive to small causes, and due to the 'multiplication' of small causes in these systems, and the many possible small causes which can affect them, it is almost impossible to predict what will happen to these systems. Chaos theory studies systems in which there is a multiplication of small causes, and also the emergence of ordered patterns from unordered ones via small causes.
In some systems, even if it is known exactly which small causes are present, and how they affect the system, it is still practically impossible to predict the result since the calculations are so difficult - it would require a supercomputer to compute, and even then, the computation would likely take so long that the result would arrive after the event occured, giving a 'prediction' only after the fact.
In some instances, it may be that even if in order to study a certain event the rest of the universe were utilized to construct a universal computer, the 'prediction' could not be made faster than the occurrence of the event being studied. In such a case the event is quantitatively unpredictable. Perhaps one could even consider it to be unpredictable in principle, a more qualitative statement.
Would we say that such a system exhibits 'free will' because it is unpredictable? Certainly in the sense that we will define free will, this will not qualify, since the fact that the 'prediction' can be made at all means that the system developed according to well-defined patterns and laws rather than being free. The fact that no prediction could be made, even if this is so in principle, does not affect this judgment.
Quantum Chaos
We now add in quantum physics to the picture. As we saw, according to quantum physics microscopic events occur at random in inherently unpredictable ways. In unstable systems, these random microscopic events are multiplied up into large scale events, so that there is an added element of unpredictability in such situations - on the one hand it is in principle impossible to predict the small causes if they are quantum random, and on the other hand - due to chaotic instability - it may be in principle impossible to predict the multiplied effect of these small causes.
Are such events 'free-willed'?
In our definition they are not, since they are fundamentally no different than other random quantum events - except that these random microscopic effects are multiplied into large scale random events. They are not free, they are merely unpredictable - their unpredictability derives from a combination of randomness and calculational complexity rather than from an inherent 'freedom'.
If producing a thought involves (quantum) chaos, so that no prediction of a thought or act will be possible, the illusion of a transcendent free will might never be disproved; we could say that humans have a 'calculationally-free' and a 'psychologically free' will without this implying the existence of an 'inherently-free' will.
Thus chaos whether of the deterministic or quantum variety does not give rise to freedom, only to unpredictability and the illusion of free will, which is irrelevant to moral responsibility will, and therefore it has no fundamental relevance to our discussion in this book.
Incomputability
In mathematical theory, there is a concept called 'incomputability' which has some relevance to the issue of free will. It has been found that.......
INSERT DESCRIPTION OF INCOMPUTABILITY
There have been speculations that incomputability may not be merely a mathematical curiosity, but that incomputable physical processes might exist as well. (See Komar, Pour-El etc.) Recently, Roger Penrose has written books with the speculation that quantum gravity may turn out to be such an incomputable physical process, and he has further speculated that this will provide a basis for free will. However, we can see that for the type of free will which is of interest to us here, incomputability in not sufficient.
Incomputability by itself is not sufficiently radical to support an inherent free will. Instead, one can see that free will must of course be based on an incomputable process, however incomputability alone guarantees only non-predictability, but is not sufficient to provide the freedom of a true inherently-free will. It is interesting nevertheless to see how novel ideas in mathematics stretch out conceptions of what is possible in the physical universe, and even if they are not sufficient to found on them a theory of free will, they do pave some of the stones along the path.
Inherently Free Will, Morality, Purpose and Meaning
If all brain processes are PDR human actions would be determined/random at the same level as the irruption of a volcano or the sting of a bee, and as the rising and setting of the sun. Because volcanoes do not have a choice as to how to act, we do not consider the volcano to have moral responsibility to prevent danger from its lave flows, nor do we describe it as evil if it causes death and destruction. We do not feel that the sun is good or bad, rather that its effects on us are sometimes beneficial and sometimes harmful.
If human brain processes are PDR, humans have no choice in the decision as to which actions their brains will have the illusion that it is 'choosing' to do, and so neither the worst and most murderous dictators nor the best and most generous and religious saints are responsible for their actions, and therefore they cannot truly be described as 'evil' or 'holy'. In such circumstances, most people would feel that the concept 'moral responsibility' would lose most of its meaning. If humans are puppets of PDR, most people would agree that there is no true meaning to their lives, and if all follows from the big bang and the laws of nature, and from randomness, most would feel that there is no deep purpose to the existence of the universe.
However, even for a PDR universe a being can argue that if it feels it is morally responsible for its actions then it is so by definition. Whether this can be considered an objective definition or not is discussed in the next chapter. In any case, the type of moral responsibility, meaning and purpose which can be defined in a PDR universe is not the type which most people intuitively mean in our universe.
All this changes if there is true free will. Free will is radically other than all other interactions, and if humans possess free will, then a radical difference exists between the actions of man and that of the rest of the universe. If humans possess an 'inherently free' will they can decide on their activity and thoughts in a partially autonomous manner; using free will a human can free themselves from the deterministic/random universe and initiate activity (partially) independently of the prior state of the universe.
Even if all else operates in accordance with the ordinary laws of physics, free-willed decisions by definition do not. The brain processes involved in making decisions between moral alternatives of right and wrong are in this view unique and significant in that they are autonomous, and are perhaps the only non random/deterministic processes in the universe. In a universe with free will, human actions can be attributed to the perpetrator of the action, and not to the universe, nor to a creator. Therefore, in such a universe, it is not meaningless to claim that man may have a moral responsibility to choose the good over the evil. In a universe with free will, there is the potential for meaning and purpose.
The Creation and Eden Account
It is the creation of this type of universe and with this type of free will which is presented in Genesis.
To understand the creation and Eden accounts, one must understand the perspective from which they are presented - that of the creator of the universe. Thus, we must understand what relevance human free will would have to the issues of moral responsibility, meaning and purpose as considered from the perspective of the creator of a universe. We shall consider this idea in the next chapter.
Conclusion
If as postulated by science all physical systems including the brain operate according to the known laws of nature - quantum chaos, entropy increase and so on - then we are indeed conscious robots, with no control over our actions and thoughts, only the illusion of control. We may be satisfied with this illusion, and with the sense of moral responsibility, and of meaning and purpose, afforded us by this illusion, some may find it satisfying even if they realize that it is an illusion, and define free will as existing as long as they feel they are free.
There is after all no contradiction to natural law involved in a creature finding satisfaction in a known illusion - indeed if most people are in this category then one can see in this mass satisfaction with illusion the operation of a law of human psychology.
In the next chapter we shall investigate what subjective or objective criteria can be put forward in various scenarios for judging whether beings can have moral responsibility, whether their life can have meaning, whether a universe can have a purpose - and what type of free will would be necessary for such definitions to be valid.
Appendix 1: Quantum Field Theory and the Human Brain
Ten subjects answered an ad of a pschologist - the typical student-lure of "earn $20 by participating in a one hour experiment". They are milling about in the room while the psychologist peers at them through a one-way mirror. The experiment is meant to analyze 20 emotion-categories of interest. If each person will display only one emotion during that hour, then only 10 emotions maximum will be observed. In fat, it may be that some of the participants will have the same emotion and so only 8 or fewer of the 20 emotions will be on display. Scratch that experiment.
Clearly to study an ensemble (an aggregate) one needs at the very least as many participants as there are states. And since some may be duplicates, likely are, one needs perhaps twice the amount of participants as there are states. And if one wishes to study several examples of the same state in order to find patterns, then one need have many times the amount of participants as there are states.
Similarly in physics. Quantum physics can make statements only about aggregates of particles rather than individual particles, and the same for complicated systems of interacting particles; quantum physics can deal only with aggregates of systems of interacting particles rather than an individual system of interacting particles. Since quantum field theories can only consider large amounts of similar systems rather than individual systems, for there to be a quantum field theory of a specific type of system, there must exist large amount of such systems (an 'ensemble' of such systems).
What does 'large amounts' mean in this context? Imagine a system with ten million possible different states. Having two systems or one hundred such systems is not sufficient. For the ensemble to give an adequate representation, and be useful for the purposes of quantum field theory, there must be many more than ten million such systems. There must be enough systems in the ensemble so that one can assume that each possible state is represented a few times. That is, there must be many more systems in the aggregate of systems than there are states in each individual system.
A bunch of non-interacting entities, no matter how many, can be considered individually, and the theory of the bunch of them can be obtained as a simple result of the theory of an individual one. For example, a theory of a gas of particles can often deal with the component particles as non-interacting, and the result is that the system is very simply described, even if it has trillions upon trillions of component particles.
The brain is highly complex, however this is not because it has many neurons, but rather due to the fact that - as distinct from the case of an aggregate composed of non-interacting parts as in the case of the gas described above - the brain has very many interconnections between its component neurons.
It may be that a thought involves billions of interconnecting neurons, and that to form a scientific theory of thought, one has to study systems of billions of interconnected neurons. These interconnections can form in many different ways, giving rise to different brain states, each brain state corresponding to one particular configuration of interaction between the billions of interconnected neurons.
Some of the brain states will be essentially similar, but many of them will be significantly different from each other. There are possibly many trillions of different possible brain states or thoughts - or at least thoughts differing from each other in significant ways. Thus, one needs to study systems (of billions of interconnected neurons) which can have many trillions of different states. However, to study a system which has trillions of different states, one needs an ensemble of many trillions of systems.
According to physicist D. Christodoulou, since there are more brain states in one brain than there are brains in the world, no ensemble of brains can be used to construct a field theory of brain interactions. As a result, standard physical theory may prove inadequate to the task of ever formulating a scientific theory of brains and therefore of thoughts. Therefore, standard physical theories will never be proven to apply to the brain, and there will remain the logical possibility that there may exist phenomenon in the brain - such as free willed interactions - which exist nowhere else.
deleted from previous ch bec of ref to outsider. Should these be reimserted somewhere?
We do so by constructing different cosmic scenarios - universes with or without free will, with or without a creator - and seeing if our intuition can point up which types of universes would or would not have meaning and purpose to an 'insider' and to an 'outsider'.
there can be meaning to human life from an outsider's perspective, for example the perspective of the creator of the universe, especially one who has brought about the existence of the universe for some purpose.
We shall first analyze scenarios where humans play the part of 'outsider', and then adapt the discussions to the case where the humans are the subjects and the perspective is that of an 'outsider' to the physical universe, in particular the perspective of the creator of the universe.
What however would be the perspective of the creator on this charade? Would a PDR universe seem purposive to its creator, would human activity have meaning, would the creator consider humans to be morally responsible for their actions and thoughts?
What if humans in fact possess a free will in an otherwise PDR universe, how would this change matters?
Chapter 5:
Designer Universes, and Purposeful Existence
Albert Einstein:
"[T]he idea of the existence of an omnipotent, just, and omnibeneficient personal God....[has] decisive weaknesses...
[I]f this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishments and rewards he would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him"
Introduction
We have seen that without free will, there can be no intuitively unambiguous moral responsibility, meaning and purpose. We then saw that science seems to negate the possibility of the existence of a truly independent free will. Instead there is raised the possibility that we only feel that we have free will. Indeed, as a result of science's seeming 'nay', some - including perhaps Einstein - have defined free will in this way.
In spite of this, we will try to define a free will which is in consonance with our intuitive understanding of what a free will is.
It turns out that the particular type of free will, moral responsibility, meaning and purpose which we intend here is most easily illustrated by appeal to a particular model: assuming the existence of an entity 'outside' our universe and then finding what conditions have to be filled in order that humans have moral responsibility, and the universe have a purpose, from the perspective of this 'outsider'.
We will then claim that whether or not such an outsider exists, only the existence of these conditions give true meaning to these concepts, the meaning we intuit for them.
A second motivation for considering an outsider perspective is that we are concerned with the creation and Eden accounts, and of course the Bible in its traditional understanding presents itself as having been transmitted from a being "outside" the physical universe, and refers to the transmitting entity as the creator of the universe itself. Therefore when analyzing the issues of moral responsibility, the meaning of existence and the purpose of the universe as seen from the Biblical perspective, we must consider this "outsider's" perspective.
The Outsider's Perspective
What would an 'outsider' mean in our scenario? What would it mean in the Biblical context?
If by definition the word 'universe' includes all that physically exists, it is meaningless to speak of the existence of more than one universe, and therefore one could not meaningfully refer to a being inhabiting 'another' universe. Similarly, if 'universe' includes all, it would be meaningless to posit the existence of a being who inhabits a realm physically 'outside' of the universe. In addition even if 'universe' only includes our physical existence and there is a being who is 'outside' this universe, if it is truly an 'outsider' it could not interact with the universe and therefore could not perceive events within it, so that the term 'outsider's perspective' is self-contradictory.
One could of course speak intuitively of such an 'outsider perspective', but because of the inherent self-contradiction, there is no guarantee that the conclusions reached are not nonsense. Attempts can be made to define the 'outside' in mental or spiritual terms, however any being existing in a non-physical realm would perhaps be unable to interact with the beings in a physical realm.
The Biblical Perspective
From the Biblical perspective the creator does not exist in physical space, inside or 'outside' the universe, and so is an outsider with respect to the physical space-time of the universe, but is at the same time aware of all that occurs within the universe (and indeed intervenes in the occurrence of events within it).
Whatever the problems with defining 'an outsider's perspective', the Bible represents itself as being presented from such a perspective, and therefore to understand it as it was meant, it is best considered from within such a perspective. Whether or not such a perspective can be rigorously defined is not important in this context - what is relevant is to consider what might be the intent of the Biblical accounts. In our interpretation, the Bible is saying in effect "use your intuition to imagine the perspective of an outsider, and then look at the Bible as presented from such a perspective."
Designer Big Bangs
Perhaps we can develop some intuition regarding what would be the outsider perspective of a creator of our universe, by analyzing the outsider perspective of humans in a similar relational situation - that of a creator of a universe.
Some of the recent articles in professional physics journals have titles like 'can a universe be created in the lab?': future technologies are already being discussed which will produce sufficient energy concentrations to cause space-time to develop bumps which could break off to form other universe.
Humanity might yet one day find itself in the role of creator, designing big bangs, and might then find itself as the 'outsider' relative to this new universe. We can attempt to develop some intuition regarding the outsider perspective of the creator of our universe by speculating as to what would be the outsider perspective of humans relative to a universe they had created.
A Quantum-Determined Universe: The Human Outsider Perspective
To illustrate our conception of the concepts of free will meaning and purpose we will assume here a scenario in which humans with a super computer can arrange for the production of conditions such that a big bang emerges.
Given the design for the laboratory-induced big bang, all its possible future histories can be computed on the super-computer; however, choosing the history to appear would need to be decided randomly.
Essentially then, from the perspective of the humans forming the big bang once the design of the big bang is known all the possible future histories can be computed. The only unknown is which one of the possibilities will emerge. Instead of actually creating the big bang and allowing it to develop for billions of years, the same informational effect can be obtained by simply throwing a suitable die, saving all the bother of actually creating the big bang, and waiting about to see how it would develop to the end. Indeed one can consider the entire unfolding of the universe's history from a big bang to its final conclusion as completely equivalent to one individual throw of a die - as if 'Nature' had tossed a die and chosen its entire future history.
Effectively, once it is decided on what should be the design of the big bang, all is known except the outcome of the one die-toss. If humanity ever gets to this stage, where not only can universes be created, but all their potential outcomes be completely specified, then creating universes and watching their development would be no more interesting than rolling dice. It would be far more reasonable to roll dice for this purpose than to create a big bang and wait about for its inevitable though random development.
Free Will, Meaning and Purpose: A Creator's Perspective
One can imagine that quantumly determined universe can be designed to eventually produce conscious beings, all according to the natural law operating in that universe.
If such a universe were to be created, then from the creator's perspective there would be no greater meaning to the actions of conscious beings in that universe than to the motion of a stone or an atom, since all of these would simply be results of the same natural law.
We will consider here a scenario which is fundamentally different than that of the outsider scenario considered previously. Here we consider a creator who is not merely an outsider, and is not only the fashioner of the universe from preexistent laws of nature, but rather is the very source of the natural law and the initial conditions of the universe. In this scenario creation is a result of the creator's free willed decision to create, and the laws and initial conditions are chosen.
In such a case all actions of the created conscious beings and all other events in the universe follow from these created laws of nature and initial conditions, and are directly attributable to the creator rather than to the created entities. If there is a being which bears moral responsibility for the events in the universe, for the actions perpetrated by one being on another, it would be the creator, and not the beings themselves.
If the beings which inhabit a universe do not possess an 'inherently free' will, then all acts and thoughts in that universe derive solely from the creator's own initial act of creation of the universe and its laws of nature, and from the randomness of quantum events. Their unfolding may be predictable, or just random, and therefore of little interest to the creator.
That is, in a universe without free will, the actions of conscious beings are no more meaningful to the creator of the universe than the motions of a mote of dust and there is no inherent moral activity. For an omniscient creator who can predict all possible paths of universe development, watching the actual history unfold is informationally equivalent to rolling dice.
Free Will, Meaning and Purpose in a Quantumly Determined Universe:
The "Insider's Perspective"
Scenario: A being feels that its life is meaningful, but from the outsider perspective it is not in control of its destiny, and events proceed as they do according to the dictates of natural law and randomness, rather than as a result of free willed decisions. Despite living in a PDR universe as a conscious robot created by a deity the being has the illusion that it possesses a free will, and feels that its actions are meaningful, that it is morally responsible for its actions.
Ironically, although the deity has no particular purpose in creating this universe and for the existence and actions of this being, nevertheless the being believes deeply that its actions are contributing to the achievement of some purpose related to the moral choices of humanity or to a course of history affected by human freely willed choices. Is it true by definition that its life is in fact meaningful since it feels it to be so - or is it necessary that there be something else besides the feeling of meaning?
We might regard with pathos the feeling this being has of moral responsibility and meaningful existence, of a great purpose behind the pattern of event; from our outsider perspective in considering such a universe, we might feel that it was somehow deluded.
We would agree that although the events in that universe were automatic, they can seem meaningful to the beings within the universe, the "insiders". However since to hypothetical 'outside observers' their universe is not meaningful, perhaps the meaning of their universe is in some sense subjective rather than objective.
A Created Universe With Free Will : The Outsider's Perspective
Since a morally-relevant free will operates neither according to randomness nor according to deterministic law, it is not the same as the operation of a machine, nor equivalent to the toss of a die. Thus moral activity resulting from free willed choices cannot be predicted, and cannot be simulated, and therefore it has the potential to be inherently interesting.
That is, a universe which evolves beings possessing brains of a complexity such that they can support a phenomenon as unique as free-willed consciousness can have a history which is of interest even to the designer of the big bang from which the universe evolved, since the moral activity is autonomous, deriving from the moral beings themselves, rather than from the design of the big bang.
Only while the universe is a 'moral universe' with freedom of development - as opposed to a random/determined universe - is it likely to be of interest to a purposive creator. Therefore the development of the big bang from its initial state until the emergence of moral beings would be no more interesting than that of the big bangs which would not produce moral beings. The interesting action of a universe would begin with the first free-willed intelligent choice in it, and true history would begin then. Indeed, in a universe designed to produce moral beings, the prior events involving determined and random interactions of physical and biological systems would be irrelevant.
Moral Beings and Purposive Activity
Moral activity could begin only upon the emergence of the first true 'moral being' - a being possessing sufficient intelligence and foresight to understand the consequences of its actions, equipped with a moral sense to know the difference between good and evil actions, and endowed with the free will to choose between the two. Clearly also there can be no moral choice in a being lacking consciousness and self-consciousness.
With regards to our universe, inasmuch as is known to us, life exists here on earth, where as the eminent evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky writes, self awareness is quite possibly unique to human beings:
"Self-awareness is, then, one of the fundamental, possibly the most fundamental characteristic of the human species. This characteristic is an evolutionary novelty: the biological species from which humanity has descended had only rudiments of self-awareness, or perhaps lacked it altogether."
Self-awareness has seemingly arisen only in humans, and although not everyone might agree on definitions of intelligence, consciousness, morality, and so on, and on how much these may be present in a rudimentary form in 'the species from which humanity has descended', certainly no-one would consider any animal - even the highest ape - as morally responsible for its actions . No species other than man seems to posses the requisite combination of free will, intelligence, and analytic ability which can allow us to consider their actions as freely chosen, and thus the feeling that moral consciousness seems to have arisen only in the human species.
According to Darwin - in agreement with earlier writers:
"of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense of conscience is by far the most important."
The emergence of moral consciousness was a turning point in the evolutionary process itself and biologically speaking, due to it humans can be classified as a completely new phenomenon qualitatively different than any evolutionary forebears.
Free Will, Moral Responsibility, Meaning and Purpose
From our discussions it emerges that the type of free will, moral responsibility, meaning and purpose which is intuited by most people is of the type which would exist in a created universe with true free will. In this type of universe, these concepts have meaning not only from the insider perspective but from the outsider perspective as well. When we will refer throughout this book to free will, we will mean it to be of this type - irrespective of whether there does or does not actually exist any 'outsiders' to our universe.
The Creation and Eden Accounts
The type of moral responsibility meaning and purpose which is closest to the author's intuition - and perhaps closest to that intuited by most people - is exactly that which would exist if there was a creator, with these concepts defined according to this creator's outsider perspective. Thus the metaphysical scenario which is implied by what are for many of us the most basic human intuitive concepts actually conforms to the scenario presented in the Bible - namely the existence of a creator who designed the universe to fulfill some purpose.
We are therefore interested in the Biblical perspective on these concepts, and on how the form and content of the accounts reflect this perspective.
The Bible presents itself as having been communicated by a being 'outside' - in this case that of the creator of our universe - and for the creation and Eden accounts to be comprehended as they are presented in the context of the rest of the Bible, it is necessary to view them from this perspective.
We have seen that until the emergence of humans there was no moral activity on earth, no free willed choice. Therefore from the Biblical perspective of the creator of a purposive universe, until the emergence of free-willed conscious beings capable of moral choice there was no true purpose to the existence of the universe. Creation of a universe would not take place if moral beings would not be part of it, indeed creation is designed so as to produce moral beings. Therefore, from the Biblical perspective, the creation of the universe is directly related to the emergence within it of a moral being
This relationship between creation and the emergence of moral beings is reflected in the literary structure of the opening accounts in Genesis. The creation account describes the creation of the universe and the Eden account relates of the emergence of moral humanity: while from most perspectives these are two very different and not directly-related subjects, from the Biblical perspective as understood here these two accounts in the Bible are intimately related, and this interdependence can explain why the two accounts are juxtaposed.
In the Biblical perspective, the universe was designed specifically to produce moral beings, and this explains the preoccupation of Genesis with the moral activity of humans after the Eden account - for example with the stories of Noah, Abraham, Joseph and so on. The universe was created for a purpose, and events within it can have objective meaning because a non-random, non-deterministic element involving intelligent activity - free will - was injected into the universe.
The universal history of interest to the creator commences with the emergence of the first moral beings - the events referred to in the Eden account - and thus the beginning of Genesis serves as an introduction to the history of humanity, rather than as a history of the formation of the sun, or of the dinosaurs, or even of pre- moral humanity.
As to the creation account, the formation of galaxies or of atoms or mountains and of other beings, whether dinosaurs or apes or Neanderthalers, are not of relevance to the moral perspective. Only moral beings are relevant and therefore only they are of direct interest to the Biblical perspective, and therefore only they are of necessary inclusion in the Biblical creation and Eden accounts. These accounts describe in general the overall aspects of creation, the emergence of various species of fish, land animals, birds, the formation of the sun, moon and stars, as background to the most important event from the perspective of the creation account, the emergence of moral beings.
We are not chauvinists, and do not insist that we are the most significant entities in the cosmos (see discussion later in the book re alien civilizations, and Rambam's views on the significance of other intelligences), however from the perspective of the creation account directed towards humanity it is humanity which takes central stage. We are dust, star dust, but our potential for conscious moral activity makes us more significant - even from the outsider perspective - than all the stars in the universe.
Appendix I: Quantum Cosmology and The "Outsider's Perspective".
We are interested in the question of how a physical being who is in some sense 'outside' the physical universe we inhabit might consider the question of the purpose of our existence and of the universe as a whole. We will explore the limits of science and logic in this respect to obtain a feeling for what might be the perspective of a partial outsider, and when these reach their limits we will use intuition to develop this idea further to obtain an intuitive picture of a 'full outsider's' perspective.
To obtain the closest thing to an 'outsider's' perspective in science we turn to modern cosmology. This area of physics explores - among other topics - scenarios of non-interacting universes and superspaces of many universes, constructs which arise from some of the implications of quantum physics as applied to the laws of general relativity. It is not clear what it means that there is another universe outside our own. However, if indeed there is meaning to statements about 'other universes', then there may be meaning to statements regarding the meaning or purpose of our universe as seen from the perspective of a being 'outside' our universe.
We will here explore the concepts of meaning and purpose as seen by beings inside and outside some universe, and apply these insights to a consideration of the creation and Eden accounts as related from such an outsider perspective.
General Relativity and Space-Time Curvature
The theory of special relativity teaches that space and time are intermingled, as are matter and energy. Furthermore, the general theory of relativity shows that matter-energy causes space-time to 'bend'. Indeed, all that we observe as the operation of 'the law of gravity' is actually a manifestation of the curvature of space-time in the presence of matter-energy. For example, when we let go of an object it falls to the ground, and we say that this is due to the force of gravity. In actuality though, the motion is due to the curvature of space-time caused by the presence of the Earth, by its matter-energy.
Indeed, in considering the physical universe as a whole, all its matter-energy and all its space-time, there is a relationship between the overall curvature of space-time and the total universal content of matter-energy. If there is more than a certain density of matter-energy, the entire space-time of the universe can be so affected that it curves in on itself so tightly that it forms a ball - closing in on itself. In such a case, travelling in any direction eventually leads back to the starting point, and the universe becomes a finite entity even though it has no boundaries or ends.
This is vastly different than the similar-sounding statement that travelling on the earth in any direction brings one eventually back to one's starting point - the earth is curved, and it is evident to anyone who sees the horizon and understands its implication, or who is watching from space, that this is what would happen. However, there is no vantage point from which space-time could be seen to be a ball - we are all part of the universe, and could never go 'outside' of it to see that it is curved.
Cosmology
If one considers the entire matter-energy-space-time of the universe as a unit, the equations of general relativity show that the space-time is dynamic - that is, the size and curvature of space as a whole changes. From observation - together with extrapolations based on certain assumptions - it seems that the universe is expanding, and indeed the theory of general relativity predicts that this should be the case. If so, then long ago it was far smaller than it is now, and at some point the entire univere was the size of an electron, and even smaller.
Cosmology is the study of the entire universe as a system, and of how this system developped over time, and perhaps of its origin as well.
Quantum Cosmology
According to the laws of quantum physics, at the smallest scale of existence - for example that of the electrons and protons of which all atoms are composed - the ordinary concept of defining a location or a state of motion is meaningless. It is simply incorrect to say that a particular electron has a particular location and particular state of motion - or state of rest - at a particular time. Predictions based on calculations which assume that they do, will always turn out to be incorrect when compared to experimental results. Instead one must apply the quantum theory, which then provides exactly correct predictions.
An interesting application of quantum physics results when one considers the initial state of the universe, at the time of the big bang, when the universe was very small. At such a scale, the ordinary concepts of location and state of motion are inapplicable as quantum physics teaches, but also due to the fact that the system contains so much matter-energy - indeed it is the system containing all existent matter-energy - the considerations of general relativity theory are indispensable as well. Theories which apply quantum physics to the universe as a whole are called quantum cosmologies.
Although there is as yet no successful theory of quantum cosmology, many very interesting partial results have been obtained. For example, it is clear that the very concept of space-time must be revised when dealing with the universe in its initial stages, and space-time could have developed all sorts of strange bumps an holes in those stages. One of the possible implications of this is that the initially existent space-time split into various pieces - creating 'baby universes' - and perhaps these did the same. Thus, there may be some sense in which there are different separate universes, which are inaccessible to each other now, but which derive from a common source.
Possibly, these universes can be accessible to each other at some level beyond that of ordinary space-time, for example via the mental realm of thought or intuition, the level on which reside such mental concepts as meaning and purpose.
Appendix II: An Outsider's Perspective
It is not clear whether universes which separated from each other can ever interact, whether a being existent in one such universe can communicate with another in a different universe, or can even obtain information about the existence of any othr universe. If not, then the concept of 'other universe' is meaningless. However if physics implies that these are existent, then by definition there is information about these other universes, and the possibility arises that perhaps more information can also be available.
Perhaps there is a realm beyond that of space-time in which there can be communication, or knowledge of one another. In such a case one can speak of beings 'outside' a particular universe, and of their knowledge of 'other' universes. Indeed, cosmology today speaks of the possibility that there are other universes, and that some of these may have laws of physics which are different than those of our own universe.
For example, it may therefore be that although in our universe free willed phenomena are possible, they not be possible in other universes, and vice versa.
Objective and Subjective Perspectives
In considering such a universe, even though we are aware that from the perspective of the inhabitants of this universe there is indeed meaning and purpose to their existence, we might nevertheless feel that it would be rather empty of meaning and purpose.
On the other hand, the subjective can be objective in a sense: If one defines 'universe' as 'all that exists', then there can be no perspective from 'outside' the universe, since there is nothing other than the universe. As a result, it may be that the feeling of meaning and purpose of a being in a universe is actually an objective statement in the sense that no other perspective exists.
Nevertheless, there is some possibility of defining space-times which although they do interact, are so different that they are justifiably termed different universes. In such an instance it may be that one can define 'the perspective from outside the universe'. Furthermore, possibly statements from this 'outsider' perspective about the other universe can perhaps legitimately be considered as 'objective' when compared to statements made about a universe made from 'within' that universe.
This is especially the case when referring to the mental realm of thought and concept - the realm in which meaning and purpose arise - for this realm is beyond that of space-time-matter-energy, and therefore possibly provides for interconnections between universes which are distinct at the purely physical level.
In any case, as we stated previously, whether or not such a perspective can be rigorously defined is not important in this context. What is relevant is to consider what is our intuitive understanding of free will, moral responsibility, meaning and purpose in this context, to compare this to the outsider's perspective, and to investigate what might be the intent of the Biblical accounts in this context.
Part II: Context
Chapter 6: The Creation and Eden Accounts: the Context of Biblical Text
Teleology, Metaphysics, and Moral History
The book you are now reading was written by God.
A startling claim like that made above will not be taken at face value by most readers. The mere fact that a book makes the claim to be a record of God's word to man is certainly not sufficient reason to accept it as such. Claims made by a book about itself - its contents, origin, authorship, history and so on - will not, if unsubstantiated, convince most readers.
Of course, a text itself may contain what is to some people convincing evidence of the truth of its claims it makes. For example, upon reading a particular book which claims divine origin some people may feel convinced by its insight that it is indeed of divine origin. Generally though instead of simply accepting or rejecting the claim of a book regarding its authorship, we might ask others if they know where the text originated, when it was written, by whom. We look for the cultural context of the book.
Modern approaches of deconstruction and the post-modernist attitude to interpretation of history and of texts provide important insights. However in this work we are more concerned with free will of the type implied by the traditional understanding of the Bible; it is that which has informed our cultural conception of free will and moral responsibility. We are not concerned here with historical, critical or deconstructionist readings of the Biblical text.
For our purposes here the relevant cultural context of the Bible is provided by the Tradition claiming to stretch back to the time the Bible was written. Consequently in our discussions we consider the written text of the Bible to be simply an element of the oral tradition (see appendix below for more discussion of this point), and our interpretation of the creation and Eden accounts will follow the interpretations provided by this tradition.
The Creation and Eden Accounts
The first chapters of Genesis present two separate stories relating to the central mysteries of human existence. The first - that of the six days of creation - relates to the fundamental questions of why the universe exists at all, how it came to exist, how life came into being, and the origin of the human race. In the second account - that of the Garden of Eden - the central event is the onset of free-willed consciousness and of moral choice, represented in the Bible by the incident of the Tree of Knowledge.
To understand the creation accounts, one must also understand the literary background of the people to whom the Bible was initially given. Analyzing the creation accounts that were current at the time provides us with insight into the meaning of the creation account for those who first received it. Indeed, comparisons with the creation accounts of the Babylonians and other ancient nations show up distinctive and significant differences between them, which allows us to see what special meaning the creation and Eden accounts had for those who first heard them, and were perhaps familiar with the current Babylonian and other creation stories.
The central message conveyed by the contrast between the creation account in Genesis and the other creation accounts is that from the Biblical perspective the universe is Purposive, having been created by an Omnipotent God rather than having been eternally existent and governed by various competing gods. God consciously chose to create, freely deciding on each step of the design of the universe, proceeding only when and because the prior stage met divine approval. There is a moral order in the universe, God is not capricious, and man was created 'in the image of God' - a conscious being endowed with free will and the moral responsibility to choose the good.
Creation is itself an act of will, and the creation account is accordingly about an act of divine will. Indeed, the method of creation in Genesis exhibits choice and thought rather than caprice or predestination, and the culmination of the process is both an expression of will and its attendant creation of will - according to some traditional Biblical commentators, [God is the quintessential Will and therefore] the creation of a being who is made 'in the image of the creator' means the creation of a free willed being.
While the creation account leads up to the creation of humanity, this in turn leads up to the eating of the tree of knowledge in the Eden account. Thus, there is a progression from the initial creation of existence to the emergence of free-will and of moral choice - with the being which was created in the free-willed image of its creator acting in defiance of the will of its creator.
This second account, that of the Garden of Eden, relates to the fundamentals of the human condition; human mortality, existential loneliness, and the burden of moral choice. It also involves the central philosophical paradoxes of human existence such as the emergence of free-will, the mind-body problem (discussed in later chapters), and the soul/body and God/man dichotomy.
The significance of the creation and Eden accounts derive from their interpretations on various thematic levels, and in this work we explore these accounts from the perspective of the metaphysical, philosophical, religious and scientific centrality of free willed consciousness. We will explore the connection between the two accounts , as well as the connection between the themes of existence, purposive creation, free-willed consciousness, and moral choice.
The knowledge gained from scientific origin theories makes the creation and Eden accounts particularly enigmatic when interpreted as a cosmogony. However, the understanding of these accounts as being an ordinary cosmogony is actually somewhat limiting, and possibly inappropriate to its intent, as we shall discuss later. At various junctures throughout the book (eg in the appendix to this chapter), we will discuss the relationship of these accounts to the teachings of modern cosmology.
As we stated in the preface, understanding the connections between the two accounts will aid us in appreciating their meaning and their juxtaposition, and can also help motivate the implications in Genesis of a 'recent' creation.
The Creation and Eden Accounts, and their Connection to the Rest of the Bible
The underlying theme reappearing at various junctures in the present book is that of free-willed moral consciousness, and this theme also underlies most of the Bible.
The Bible is concerned with moral instruction and regulation, with rights and duties, and its stories are concerned always with the moral actions of humanity. All the Biblical commandments and prohibitions, all the praise and censure, all talk of reward and punishment, are predicated on the fact that humans are moral beings - that they have a free will, the intelligence to understand the consequences of their actions, and an understanding of the distinction between right and wrong. The Bible is about the actions of moral beings, and is addressed to moral beings.
The other half of the equation is that of the source of all the above - of the moral beings themselves, and of the book- the Bible - that is addressed to them. According to the tradition which presents the Bible, the universe as a whole is the product of design, the moral beings are part of this design, and the book derives from the author of the design. The universe is the product of free-willed conscious design, and it contains within it a free-willed conscious being, a being which when sufficiently developed can even employ its moral consciousness to challenge that of its creator, as the book tells us Abraham did.
Thus the Bible is prefaced with the two central ideas underlying its entire content. First, a description of a deliberate, willed, planned creation; creation of a universe via the design of a free-willed consciousness, concluding with the creation of free-willed humanity. Then an account of the emergence within this universe of an independent free-willed moral consciousness, derived of a mixture of dust and divine spirit.
The rest of the Bible is then a dialogue between the creating free-willed consciousness and this creature of dust and divine spirit, whose autonomy extends to the use of its free-will to defy the will of its creator who has granted it this very autonomy.
As advertised, we will find that an understanding of the Bible as based on the concept of free-willed conscious moral activity will allow us to better understand some of the perplexing issues relating to the creation and Garden of Eden accounts. Furthermore, with insights provided by modern physics and cosmology especially as relating to the idea of free-willed consciousness, we will find a better appreciation of the relationship between the ideas presented in Genesis and those of science and cosmology itself.
Genesis as Teleology rather than Chronology
The creation account should not be expected to contain a chronological description of the development of the universe, but rather it is a reference to the underlying purpose for which the universe was created. And, as in the Biblical perspective this purpose involves the fulfillment of the Bible's moral ethical and religious commands, and it is man's free-willed consciousness which qualifies him for this challenge, the creation and Eden account are less concerned with the development of the physical universe and the animal kingdom, and more with the emergence of man and of free-willed consciousness.
The Bible is not primarily a history book, and the text itself makes no overt claim to be one. Nor does it claim to be a science text. Tradition does view the text in this way to some degree however this is not necessarily its essential fous. Rather, it is to be seen as a record of divine revelation regarding moral history, and moral ethical and legal imperatives, with the creation and Eden accounts as introductory chapters.
Rather than stressing the physics of planetary formation, Genesis stresses that the universe was carefully designed to produce life; rather than dealing with biology, it speaks of a purposive universe in which a creature formed from the dust of the earth is infused with the divine spirit and charged with the challenge and obligation of moral action.
The entire course of Biblical narrative points to the fact that from the Biblical perspective the universe is a stage for the drama of moral activity, that its purpose is the fulfillment of the imperatives outlined in the Bible, that the meaning of life and of existence of the universe itself is tied to the action of free-willed conscious choice.
In the Biblical perspective, it is not the actions of non-sentient animals which are of interest, it is not the evolution of stellar systems which are relevant, but rather only the moral activity of free-willed beings are significant. In this world-view, history - as a record of events of significance - begins not with the big bang or with the dinosaurs or even with early hominids, but rather with the emergence of the first free-willed conscious being, the drama of the first moral choices.
This understanding of the meaning of history for the Bible, and of its preoccupation with events of moral significance, allows an appreciation of the historical-chronological structure of the first few chapters of Genesis.
Traditional Genesis presents a description of the careful and purposeful creation of the universe culminating in the formation of the first humans, followed by an account of the emergence of free-willed consciousness and of moral activity.
It declares that contrary to those who may claim that the universe is the product of random chance, or exists in of itself from eternity, the universe is actually the creation of a Mind, and is the product of careful design. In contrast to those who may insist on the cosmic insignificance of humanity in comparison to the vast physical universe and the myriad species of life on earth, the creation account stresses the crucial role of humanity in the universe as derived from the potential for moral choice which distinguishes humanity from the inanimate no matter how vast, and from the non-sentient, no matter how numerous.
When understood in this context, and with this understanding of their role, the opening chapters of Genesis resonate not only with the rest of the Bible, but also with many of the speculative ideas which have arisen in the wake of modern physics and cosmology; in turn these ideas shed light on the structure and content of the opening sections of Genesis.
Part III: Chapter 6: The Ineffability of Free Will: Why it may be that a scientific theory of true free will is impossible. The appropriateness of the Eden account's style and format given the nature of free will.
Chapter 7: Additional Material Not Yet Inserted
Chapter 6:
The Ineffability of Free Will
Introduction
In Part I we saw that without free will there could be no moral responsibility, meaning and purpose. We also saw that if we limit free will only to processes known to science, then there is no inherently free will and all our seeming free willed decisions are actually PDR.
As discussed there, one could still claim that by definition that if one felt free, one was free, and if one felt that one had moral responsibility for one's action then one did and if one intuited that life had meaning, it did. However, we concluded there that the type of moral responsibility we (the author, and many other people) intuit is not compatible with this, nor is the sense of meaning or freedom we intuit.
We found that the type of meaning we felt was that which would exist if there was an outsider perspective from which life indeed had meaning, that the type of moral responsibility and freedom we intuit is that which would exist if we were responsible and free from this outsider perspective - indeed even from the perspective of a creator who had instituted the laws of nature themselves.
From the outsider perspective that we intuit the existence of a moral being - a being with intelligence, a moral intuition and an inherently free will - is crucial to the existence of the universe: without free will there would be no moral reponsibility from the outsider perspective, no meaning to human activity, and no purpose to the creation and continued existence of that universe.
If the assumption is made that indeed there is a true inherently free will, then this is a statement of great relevance to physics, not only to moral philosophy. That is, the implication is that there are interactions in the universe that are not PDR even though according to known science all physical interactions are PDR at their most fundamental level.
Thus the existence of free will has ramifications not only for questions of meaning and purpose, but for scientific issues as well - in particular as we shall see it has important implications for quantum physics and cosmology (Part IV).
In this section (Part III) we will demonstrate some of the dfficlties involved in defining an inherently free will. After doing so we will determine the general category of the interaction underlying the operation of an inherently free will, and will find it to be a form of acausality.
We will also see that various aspects of the creation and Eden accounts, and of Biblical philosophy, mesh well with this elucidation of the basic nature of free willed interaction, and also with the above-mentioned implications for science.
We will then investigate in the next section what implications the existence of such an acausal interaction holds for physics and for the universe as a whole.
Undefineable Concepts in Science
One of the difficulties with free will involves the difficulty involved in a definition of what it actually involves. However, some of the most familiar of concepts are similarly difficult or impossible to define, but are nevertheless intuitively understood, and therefore we will not be deterred by these difficulties of definition when approaching the concept of free will.
An example of a famliar yet unprovable concept is provided in the following.
The Origin of the Universe and Unprovability
Not even all "physical events" can be dealt with by science. Since the scientific method requires an analysis of regularities, and an extrapolation from large amounts of similar events, science cannot deal with one-time unique phenomena - as for example the origin of the universe.
Indeed, even the concept 'the universe' is itself undefined. All entities which exist can be said to exist by virtue of the fact that there are other entities which are not it. One can in theory point to an entity, or set up an experiment which will detect that entity. However, the universe as a whole includes all measurement apparatus, and all observers as well. Therefore there is no way to point to the universe (from outside it), or to detect it using some measuring device, since all are part of it.
For example, if one speaks of the development of the universe as a whole over time, then since time is part of the universe, this is somewhat paradoxical. Furthermore, even if there were discovered a law that governs the development of the universe as a whole, it is not clear what it is that would regulates which laws operate, and whether or not they shold change or remain the same - the laws of nature are part of the universe, and cannot govern themselves.
Therefore, in a basic sense, 'the universe' is not defined scientifically, and therefore one cannot have a truly scientific theory of 'the universe'. Nevertheless, speculations regarding the universe a s a whole have given rise to theories which gave correct predictions, verified by measurement. Even where the roed is tricky regarding definitions, sometimes progress can be achieved nevertheless. We shall see that the same is true regarding the concept of free will.
The Complexity of the Concept of Free Will
There are some basic arguments which can be presented to the effect that free will is perhaps impossible to define, and which highlight the inherent difficult of the very concept of free will.
The Unprovability of Free Will: The Operational Argument
Neither determinism, nor randomness, nor free will can be proven.
If one can consistently predict the result of a process using a certain formula, we feel the event proceded in accordance with the formula - though even then one cannot prove that it will always be so, or that the event is 'forced' to do so even when it does follow the formula. For example, one cannot disprove the contention that the event decided freely to occur as it did, and for whatever reason it always decides the same way, so that it occurs always in accordance with a set formula (perhaps it chooses to follow that formula).
Just as one cannot prove that a process is determined, one can similarly not prove that an event is free or random.
Whatever event occurs in the universe, no matter how carefully it is monitered by the most delicate instruments, after the event occurs there is no way in which one could conceivably prove that the event could have happened differently than it actually did.
As P. W. Bridgman, the proponent of the philosophy of operationalism, wrote:
"I defy you to set up a single objective criterion by which you can prove after you have made the [choice]...that you might have made [a different choice]."
Since there is no way that one can prove that one could have chosen differently than one actually did, no indisputable proof of free will could ever be offered, and so according to the philosophical approach of operationalism there is no scientific meaning to the statement that humans possess a free will.
Even if one makes many measurements of the same type of event and finds that each time it occurs differently, nevertheless there is no way to prove about an individual event that it 'could have' happened otherwise than it actually did.
If no predictions are correct, or if it is shown that the results form a random pattern, then one still cannot say that any individual event 'could have occured ' differently than it did. Each event may well have only one way of occuring, the next time it occurs there is also only one way it could occur, and so on, and altogether the pattern is random. That is, all the events are determined, and they are correlated in such a way as to guarantee a random distribution.
The same for an allegedly freely willed decision. Even if the brain making the decision is carefully monitored, and it is found that there is no scientific explanation for the process, one cannot prove that it is free will - instead it may well be some as-yet-unknown phenomenon other than free will, which determines the result. And, there is no way in which one could conceivably prove after the fact that the decision could have been made differently than it was actually made.
The assumption of free will is therefore unprovable, and indeed is 'less provable' than that of determinism or randomness. A prediction of events which is always correct, whether it is about individual events or about the patterns that form in the aggregate, is quite convincing to us, and we can accept it as true even though not truly proven that events happen that way and could not have been otherwise, so that although unprovable, determinism can be intuitively convincing.
However, the case for free will is less convincing. Even if it is shown that no predictive statement can be made at all beforehand, then rather than concluding that free will is involved, one is only convinced that one does not know the mechanism involved - this lack of predictive ability need be nothing more than a proof of the unpredictability of the phenomenon, it need not be a proof that it is a free will process.
Although it may be intuitively true to us that we have a free will while other events are determined or random, none of this can be proven, and when we attempt to construct a picture of reality in which these are accepted as fact, we arrive at paradox. Our intuition that we possess a free will can be accepted as true, yet we cannot expect that reality should be such that this unprovably true statement should be consistent with all the provably true statements about reality.
This 'inherent unprovability' of free will illustrates one of the inherent difficiulties in rigorously defining 'true (inherent) free will'.
The Metaphysical Many-Universes Argument
When we say that we have true inherent free will, we mean that if we are faced with a moral dilemma, and must make a choice, there is nothing which determines our choice.
The question can be asked: If faced with the exact same dilemma under the same conditions exactly, would one again make the same choice? If time were rolled back, and we had no memory of the rolled-back time, would we again choose exactly as we did in the past?
Answering that we would always choose the same under the same circumstances seems to carry the implication that it is the circumstance which determines our response, rather than the operation of our free will. One would imagine that if we were placed in the same situation other times, we might choose differently.
To make more clear the problem this raises for free will, imagine that a creator creates an infinite amount of identical universes, so that every moral dilemma we have ever faced has been faced by an infinite amount of duplicates of us in these infinite universes.
If we do not have free will, and the process of choice-making in the brain is a determined one, then it would be expected that all our duplicates will act and choose exactly as we do.
If we do not have free will, but instead the choices we make are based on PDR interactions, then one would expect that in the otherwise identical universes, as an expression of the inherent randomness of the process underlying the choices, all possible choices will be represented. If these universes are only imagined in God's Mind, and then one is chosen at random and created from its mental picture, this universe will seem like one in which free will operates, but in actuality the choices are based on randomness.
Now consider an alternate scenario: all the duplicates in all the universes have a true inherent free will. In this scenario as well, one would expect that the choices in the various universes will not be identical. Indeed, if the individuals are truly free to make any decision, one could expect here as well that in an infinite range of universes, all possible choices will be represented.
Now choose one universe at random, and look at the choice made there. To the duplicate individual, the choice was truly freely willed. However to an outside observer who can see all the infinite number of universes, this scenario seems identical to the one with an infinite number of random-choice universes. To this observer, the free willed choice of the inhabitant of of one of the duplicate universes chosen at random, is simply one of the possible choices, chosen at random from among all the possible choices. Although free willed choice carries significance due to its unqueness, its non-determined or random charachter, when it is allowed to express itself to the fullest in an infinite collection of universes, the choices seem to lose their uniquness and therefore their significance.
Is there any significance to free willed action in any one universe, or in the whole, if all free willed choices are made in the totality of universes?
One could also imagine now that all the universes are destroyed except for one, chosen at random. Are the choices made in that universe free? Are the choices significant to the creator - after all, if the universe is chosen at random from among the infinite group of universes, then the choices are essentially chosen at random from among all the possible choices? From the creator's perspective, can there be meaning and purpose to such a universe?
We stated previously that if God creates a free willed universe, it is capable of possessing meaning and purpose. Imagine that after the universe comes to its end, another is created, and then over and over an infinite amont of times. Eventually every possible universe will have existed, and every possible individual will have existed and will have made every possible free willed decision. In what way is this collection of universes meaningful? And if only one is created, what makes it meaningful?
This argument illustrates the dependence of the value of free will on other issues, and is an exmple of the diffculties faced when attempting to get a handle on the nture of free will.
The Argument from Intuition
It is difficult if not impossible to understand how an event can be neither determined nor random. Especially a choice which is to be a rational and moral one would seem to necessarily involve careful reasoning, and therefore a determined chain of brain events.
If a free willed choice is caused by anything, then it is not free, whereas if it is not caused by prior thoughts and events then it is random and not reasoned. This is the crux of the problem - freedom of the will is actually counterintuitive.
Certainly, as a non-causal phenomenon, one could not necessarily expect that it would be modelable, mathematically describable. Therefore, no physical theory can ever be expected to encompass or describe free will. Indeed there may even be phenomena less radically nonmodelable than free will which will also never be modelable - such as a non-computable physical process - let alone free will which is inherently acausal.
As a result, there will possibly always exist some non-meshing of scientific concepts - concepts encompassable by scientific description - and that of free will, which science itself may eventually recognize yet consider out of its purview.
The Mind Body Problem
By definition, that which can be affected by the physical is itself physical. If the mind knows what the brain senses, what it feels, then it is necessarily physical itself. However, mind is by definition not physical. This paradox forms the crux of the mind-body problem.
The existence of non-physical phenomena in themselves present no paradox. One can imagine a universe which contains consciousness and physicality, and where there exists a paralellism between the two so that although there is no connection between the two, they are nevertheless correlated. This indeed was Leibnitz's solution.
However, if it is assumed that there is some interaction between the two realms, then the paradox arises. This interaction comes in two basic forms.
One form is the interaction of consciousness with the physical universe via the mechanism of free will. As the active ingredient of consciousness, it is free will which crosses the barrier between physical and non-physical, allowing the non-physical consciousness to affect the physical universe in a manner causing it to develop along a path which it would not have followed had it been affected only by the causes present in the physical universe by itself.
The other form of interaction is the emergence of consciousness where none was before, as a result of physical conditions - for example the evolution of a conscious being where none existed previously, or the development of a conscious being from non-conscious material, specifically a sperm and an egg.
Evolution and Consciousness
If all entities including atoms are conscious, then the consciousness associated with human brains is simply the combined effect of all the component consciousneses. In such a case, the consciousness in human brains is merely of greater degree than that in rocks or animal brains, and this is due to the greater complexity of the human brain. Similarly so if consciousness is inherent in the universe and was infused into the human when the human brain achieved the requisite level of complexity.
Conscious people originate in non-conscious sperm and eggs - the question arises as to at which point in the development of humans their consciousness emerges, and as to what physical cause this might have had.
The eminent Nobel prize-winning physiologist Sir John Eccles states that no purely materialist theory will be able to account for consciousness. In his words the theory of evolution is 'defective' in that it ignores the phenomenon of consciousness. Furthermore Eccles states that no purely materialist theory will be able to account for consciousness: "It is of the greatest importance to science that there be from time to time a critical examination of established theories, particularly when they tend to harden into dogmas. The amazing success of the theory of evolution has protected it from significant critical evaluation in recent times. However it fails in a most important respect. It cannot account for each one of us as unique self-conscious beings."
If conscious beings behave in a way that is different than non-conscious beings, this means that consciousness is not simply the passive registering of impressions, but that intentions which would not arise in a non-conscious brain can originate in a conscious brain and can be acted upon.
This however would mean that given the same physical conditions and information the physical output - such as action and behavior - is different for a conscious and a non-conscious brain.
If consciousness is not a physical entity, then a conscious and non-conscious brain can be physically identical. If this is the case, then all the external and internal physical elements leading up to and involved in a decision by a conscious and non-conscious brain are identical, yet nevertheless the resulting decision of the brain and action of the body is different. This is however not in line with physical theory regarding causality, according to which identical causes give rise to identical effects.
Indeed, as soon as one postulates that a non-physical entity can interact with physical entities, one arrives at conclusions at variance with physical theory, and with ordinary intuition.
AR: MESH with the above
Evolution and Consciousness: The Physical Efficacy of Consciousness: If it is assumed that consciousness is a property of complex systems such as the human brain, and that such complex entities evolved much after the initial state of the universe, then consciousness was not present in the universe at its origin, or even near its origin. Therefore it follows that consciousness evolved from what was not conscious.
However, even if consciousness is a physical property which could perhaps have emerged as the result of a random mutation in an evolved being, it would only become a property of an entire race if it gave its possessor a selective evolutionary advantage. To do so however, it must be able to affect physical events. Therefore, if it is assumed that all humans are conscious, the very existence of consciousness in humans indicates that it must be able to affect the brain, to be a factor in the decision-making processes of the brain. This however is highly problematical, and is part of what is called in philosophy 'the mind-body problem' (or 'the psycho-physical problem' etc.).
if consciousness does interact with the physical universe in a way that provides conscious beings with an evolutionary advantage, ; somehow a conscious brain, using the same information, memory and so on that is available to a physically equivalent non-conscious brain, can arrive at a more survivally-correct decision, and act on it. This however would mean that given the same physical conditions, information and so on, the physical output - action, behavior and so on - is different for a conscious and a non-conscious brain.
….
However, if consciousness emerged into existence when brains reached a certain level of complexity, then consciousness must have evolved. But if consciousness is a qualitative phenomenon it cannot evolve unless it can interact with the physical universe.
Furthermore, the problem reperesented by the supposition that consciousness evolved is present as well in the supposition that conscious people originate in sperm and eggs which are non-conscious.
The Significance of Free Will
We have seen various aspects of the complexity of the issue of defining an inherently free will, and doing so within the parameters of science mathematics and logic. Of course the intuition we have of free will can attributed to illusion, and such has been done by some speculations of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. Nevertheless our intuition that we are free willed is in many of us stronger than the belief that all must must be in consonance with present day scientific understanding, and therefore for most people the intuition that free will exists is too strong to ignore or to accept theories which explain it away. We simply believe more strongly in our free will than we do in evolutionary psychology, even if the latter can venture explanations for this too.
Free Will as the Active Ingredient of Consciousness
The significance of an inherently free will goes beyond the issue of moral responsibility. Without an inherently free will, humans are essentially conscious robots.
Can a consciousness interact with the physical universe via a brain-decision in a way which different than the interaction by a non-conscious brain? Would there be any physically measurable difference between a universe of conscious robots having an illusion of free will and a universe of conscious robots with true inherently free will?
If there is a measurable difference between the two, it must be that the difference is due to an interaction which violates causality, and only such an interaction can underlie what we usually mean by a 'free willed' decision: the decision is 'free' only if it does not depend on the input and physical situation as would a process governed by causality, but instead is 'free' of the constraints of causality.
Free will is the way in which consciousness affects the physical universe, acting in an intelligent manner which is independent of causality even though it is non-random.
Without some form of free-will type interaction, when there is nothing in the mind-state which is not a correlate of the brain state, or even if there is but there is no way for it to affect the brain, or the rest of the physical universe, then the mind is irrelevant to physics, to the physical universe. If there can be a mind-state which is not a correlate of the brain state, then this mind state is acausal, and therefore it is what we term 'free-willed type'. Further, if there is a way for this mental state to affect the brain, or the rest of the physical universe, then the mind causes an event in the brain which has no causal roots in the physical universe - it is self-caused from the perspective of the physical universe, a 'free-willed type interaction', and is very relevant to physics, and to the physical universe.
Without free-willed type interactions, no matter what complex and deep thoughts and emotions may arise in consciousness, the only effects of a person on the universe are due to the body, including the brain state - the mind state is essentially irrelevant to the course of events, and there is no effect of consciousness on the physical universe.
We saw previously that to ascribe the type of moral responsibility to human activity which most of us intuit, there must be an inherently free will, which we can see now must be based on non-causal processes. Similarly for the existence of meaning and purpose in the sense we defined them.
We can also now see that furthermore any philosophy which considers humans as more than material, as more than conscious robots, and which considers humans as entities which can affect the physical universe with the non-material aspect must incorporate non-causality in its world view.
The Nature of Free Will
Free Will and Self-Causation
When one makes a free-willed decision, there are many elements of reasoning backing up this decision - one would always be able to provide reasons why one chose that particular choice, so that it would seem that any 'free' choice, in order to be goal-oriented and meaningful, must be derived from a chain of reasoning. However, if this were the case, 'free' decisions are derived from a deterministic chain of cause-effect ( and are not actually free). Thus, in order for free will to be conceptualized in a non-self-contradictory manner, the concept of a chain of cause and effect - the concept of causality - would possibly have to be modified.
Free will can exist only if it is founded on processes which are neither random nor determined. If the processes underlying an allegedly free willed decision are actually random, then the result of these processes, the randomly-arrived-at decision, cannot be said to be the expression of a will, since it is random; if the underlying processes are instead determined ones, then the resulting decision is determined, and therefore by definition is not a free one.
We also saw that incomputability is a necessary but insufficient condition for free will. That is, all free willed processes are incomputable, but not all incomputable processes are free willed. Even if the free willed decisions are inherently unpredictable, for example based on non-computable processes, if these processes are at their fundamental level deterministic/random then the decisions they give rise to may be non-predictable but neither are they free. Therefore, one must look elsewhere for the underlying physical nature of free will, and we will leave aside discussion of incomputability as not directly relevant.
If the brain state corresponding to a decision follows from prior brain states (and universe-states) in a chain of cause and effect following the same natural law governing other events, then even if the decision is inherently non-predictable by science or mathematics, it is no more free willed than is any other predictable or non-predictable event such as the falling of a drop of rain, the growth of a plant, or the orbit of an electron in its path.
Defining free will is very difficult, since our physical intuition is built up from experience with phenomena which are either determined or random, and it is not possible for us to mesh the physical theories we have of the physical universe - which are all based on determinism and randomness - with the operation of an inherently free will.
Even in mental terms the same problem arises. Free willed action needs to be based on logical considerations in order to be will rather than caprice, however if it is so based, then the decision is not free, but is rather dictated by logic. And, to whatever extent it is not logical, it is not will that is deciding, but rather some other factor. The question of the origin of a free-willed choice therefore presents a paradox, since if it is caused, it is not free, yet if it is random, it is not willed.
Even if one posits an extra-physical realm which interacts with the physical in order to produce free-willed phenomena, we are again involved in the mind body problem, the paradox of the physical and non-physical being able to interact. And in any case, the acausality of free will is inherent to the nature of the decision - that it is free - and an extra-physical realm may not provide a solution to this.
When a free-willed choice comes into existence therefore, if it is in fact truly free willed, it is not caused by something outside of itself, and as a result it is either acausal or self-causative.
Free Will and the Ramifications for Science
Consciousness is a phenomenon which by its very nature is inherently "other" than any other in the universe. The "otherness" of consciousness expresses itself in the fact that we can know of the universe at all only through our consciousness, and thus consciousness in a way "contains" the universe, and in a way is "outside" the universe.
Similarly the phenomenon of our consciousness which we call "free will" operates outside the normal laws of nature: in order for free-willed acts to be "free" they must violate the causal laws of the rest of the universe since they are caused by our will rather than by the previous state of the universe (which itself includes the previous state of our mind). Free will without this causality-transcendence is not free will as we mean it - true free will is therefore "self-causative".
It can be postulated that all phenomena in the universe except for free will are subservient to quantum probabilistic causality.
One can see a form of hierarchical structure: free will contains the probabilistic determinism of quantum physics as a special case where the decision of how to occur is taken at random instead of freely willed , while ordinary determinism is a special case of PDR where one particular way has 100% probability of occurring.
Free Will and Self Causation
The crucial point is that free willed decisions are in some sense 'self-caused' as they are neither random nor totally caused by prior events, and this underlays the moral responsibility to choose good over evil.
Summary
Free will is in essence self-causation, and is therefore not encompassable within ordinary logic and physical theory - it is not modelable, nor is it provable or disprovable. Free will is independent of the causal chain of events, and the existence in the mind of an interaction with this self-causative nature and independence endows it with many intriguing properties and has important ramifications for quantum physics cosmology and philosophy as we shall see in the following chapters (Part IV).
The Creation and Eden Accounts
It is the creation of a universe capable of moral responsibility and with this type of non-causal non-scientifically encompassable free will which is presented in Genesis. This inherently non-scientific nature of the free will discussed there is reflected in the form of the account itself.
As we have seen, science cannot truly deal with the universe as a whole, or with one-time unique phenomena as for example the origin of the universe, or 'the actual emergence of the universe into existence', or possibly the origin of consciousness, nor does science yet encompass mental phenomena such as consciousness and free will. All of the above are however of course the subjects of the creation and Eden accounts.
We have seen that free will is seemingly beyond the rational: it is counterfactual and therefore non-disprovable; it is not causal, and therefore is unmodelable (no scientific theory of it can exist).
As unique events, concepts, and phenomena outside the realm of ordinary scientific inquiry, the issues of existence, the existence of the physical universe, the onset of purpose, consciousness, and free will cannot be encompassed entirely via the rational. It is appropriate therefore that the Eden account which deals with the emergence of free will has an imagery-oriented style rather than a rational historical one, and that these issues are dealt with in Genesis through the medium of allegory and allusion in the creation and Eden accounts.
Chapter 4: Quantum Puppets
and Autonomous Brains:
Determinism, Randomness, Chaos and Free Will
The great mathematician-physicist Laplace, based partly on work done by Newton, presented to the King of France what was then considered to be a complete account of a mechanical universe, operating completely according to fixed 'Laws of Nature'. He was also not without a sense of the theatrical. When asked by the King where God fit into his purely-mechanical model of the cosmos Laplace's immortal reply was "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis".
Introduction
Scientists from the time of Newton and on may well have felt that we may not be in control of our actions and thoughts, that we are indeed deluded conscious machines, puppets of fate, not morally responsible for our actions.
However, quantum physics introduced about seventy years ago, chaos theory and the mathematical notion of incomputability developed more recently, have significantly revised the Newtonian view of nature, and some have proposed that they open the way to the existence of free will.
We intend however to burst that bubble.
We will see that just as free will can be defined as existing when it is felt that it exists, but this is not the type of free will we are interested in this book, so too we will show that the type of free will allowed by quantum physics, chaos and incomputability are not the type of free will which interests us. We are interested only in a free will which would allow an 'outsider' viewing our universe to ascribe purpose and meaning to our existence, and quantum physics and all the rest do not suffice to provide this. Therefore, rather than being based on these, free will of the type we are interested in will have to be based on more radical phenomena.
In some sense, the much-touted shining knight of quantum physics and all the other developments turn out not to be a rescuer but rather a croaking frog; we are left with the fear that when we feel that there is moral responsibility and our actions and lives have meaning, these may be just the delusions of a conscious machine.
Determinism
The workings of the human brain were considered to be machine-like according to the old Newtonian model of nature. According to the world-view prevailing at the time, the state of any physical system at any given moment totally determines the next state of the system - given what the situation is, the entire exhaustive description of all the relevant details, things can happen in only one way. In the same way, at the largest scale, where the entire universe is the system under scrutiny, the state of the universe at any given moment totally determines the next state of the universe.
Following this logic, one can conclude that since each state of the universe is determined totally by the state of the universe at the preceding instant, a chain of cause and effect can be constructed back to the initial instant, so that the state of the universe at any time is actually totally determined by the initial state of the universe. In this sense, everything that occurs anywhere was inherent in the big bang.
This means that all right and wrong actions committed by people and perhaps all thoughts as well, are actually inherent in the big bang, that humanity cannot control its thoughts or actions - they are all written in to the big bang.
Since there is no unequivocal scientifically accepted evidence that human brains operate outside the realm of physical laws (i.e. under laws different than those governing the rest of the universe) indeed all human actions and thoughts are the result of natural law rather than human choice.
Einstein: Despite his great sensitivity to ethics, Einstein strongly believed in determinism:
"The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature."
"We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough to nevertheless sense at least the rule of fixed necessity...."
".... the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary as the past." "everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper." A. Einstein
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Determinism and the Human Brain
[To avoid this slightly technical section, skip to page....]
To understand how human brain states can be considered as determined, let us consider an analogy with a billiard table operating in a deterministic (non-quantum) universe. Imagine striking a ball, and watching it careen about striking others which then collide with yet others, forming a pattern of chain reaction collisions. The entire activity is totally described by the laws of nature - once the first ball is hit, the speed and direction imparted to it totally determine which balls will be hit, to what degree, where they will end up, what chain reaction will be caused. Different initial speeds and directions will result in different overall patterns of chain reaction.
Imagine now that the balls are electrified and glow, with a constantly increasing brightness. Photos are taken of the activity, with not quite fast enough exposure, and then the frames are laid down side by side. Each photo shows a pattern of billiard balls, each ball somewhat fuzzy because the exposure was not quite fast enough. From the photo we can tell where each ball is and from the fuzziness and the fact that the fuzziness is brighter at one end than at the other (the light in the ball was getting brighter all the time), we can tell in what direction the ball is traveling. Each photo therefore captures a particular state of the billiard balls, and the collection of photos captures the development of the states from one to another. The laws of nature totally determine which state shall follow from a given state - the balls have no choice in how to act. Each pattern of balls determines the following pattern unequivocally.
Picture these balls now as parts of the electronic components in a computer, and that each pattern of balls corresponds to a particular pattern of electric activity in the components. Each pattern of electric activity then determines the next pattern unequivocally, forming a chain of patterns. Given any pattern, the next pattern following that in the computer is totally determined. It is not the computer which decides what to do, but rather the components of the computer are forced by the laws of nature and the structure of the computer along a certain pattern. The computer is designed in such a way that the laws of nature will move it along patterns which correspond to logical activity, so that the output is for example a mathematical calculation. Given a particular program and data, and a particular structure for the computer's electronics, every input will have a specific output, and this is because every state of the electronics in the computer can have only one next-pattern, and so on down the chain, so that given the input, there is a unique first-state that leads eventually to a unique last-state, which is the unique result.
Determinism of Human Brain States
We now associate to each pattern of balls a particular thought, so that the changing pattern of the balls corresponds to a chain of thought. If the billiard balls together collectively have a mind, the thought in that mind at any given moment will be that one corresponding to the physical pattern of the balls. The mind of the billiard balls would then be thinking a chain of thoughts, without knowing that the chain of thoughts was determined by the laws of mechanics governing the interactions of billiard balls.
What about the human brain?
The thoughts in a person's mind are affected by the events in the world about them, by memories they have, by other thoughts they have had. According to materialist approaches to the human brain, all these thoughts correspond directly to patterns of electrically active neurons in the brain. The universe including the brain is like the billiard table - imagine that these balls are neurons in the brain, and that each pattern of balls corresponds to a particular pattern of electrically-active neurons. Given a pattern of events in the physical universe including the pattern of electrical activity in the brain, there is only one next-pattern for the brain, just as there is only one next-pattern for the billiard balls. Each pattern of neurons determines the next pattern unequivocally, forming a chain of patterns of neurons.
Therefore if brains operate according to the known laws of nature thoughts are something like patterns of electrically active neurons, and therefore given any thought, the next thought following that in the brain is totally determined. It is not 'the mind' which decides what to think, but rather the brain is forced by the laws of nature along a certain pattern of neurons, and the mind then thinks the corresponding thoughts. One of the thoughts it is made to think is the familiar one that goes something like "I am deciding this of my own free will".....
Every thought in the brain is determined by the prior state of the universe (including the prior state of the brain), and each state of the universe is determined by the prior state of the universe. Therefore the first state of the universe - the big bang - determines all the next states of the universe, and therefore it determines also all the eventual brain states of all the beings who arise in the universe.
Some have maintained that ours is indeed such a universe, but that nevertheless humans have a free will and moral responsibility for their actions:
insert quotes
However, we do not here mean by free will what these writers mean. The type of free will they speak of is not such that an outsider would consider it free, and is not sufficient to support moral responsibility, meaning and purpose from the outsider viewpoint.
In a universe in which brains operate according deterministic laws of nature, all the human actions ever perpetrated, good or bad, all the decisions as to how to act, were not the result of a choice by the perpetrator, but rather they are merely elements in the path of history inherent in the initial state of the universe.
People may of course have an illusion that they possess a free will, and that somehow they have acted in a manner which was not solely the result of natural law. In fact, the complexity of interactions in the brain involved in producing a thought may well preclude any possible method of even computer-aided prediction of a future thought or act, so that this illusion might never be disproven. In such a universe in which thoughts cannot be predicted, we can say that humans have a 'calculationally-free' will; further, if people feel they possesses a free will, we can say that they have a 'psychologically free' will. However in such a universe, there is no 'inherently-free' will: regardless of whether or not thoughts are predictable, or whether or not humans 'feel' free, in actuality humans have no say over what they will think or do - they only think they do.
Quantum Physics and Human Brains
Introduction: The branch of physics which deals with the most fundamental particles and fields known in the universe is quantum physics, and the basic postulates of quantum physics have ramifications to the issue at hand.
Quantum physics, introduced near the beginning of the 20th century, brought with it a drastic change in this deterministic viewpoint (that every event in the universe occurred as an inevitable and necessary result of previous events). Each event was now understood to be able to occur in a number of ways, with the actual way that it does occur left to 'chance'. Despite the fact that chance ruled each individual event, however, when numerous similar events occur, the pattern which emerges resembles the results one would expect from pre-quantum physics.
What of events in the brain, the events which underlie our thoughts and decisions? Of course a full theory of the human brain and of the processes in it is only a distant goal, and neither physics nor physiology can state categorically that free willed processes in the brain are physically possible or impossible. However (many) physicists dealing with quantum physics (have in the past often) assumed that eventually this theory will be able to describe even the human brain, leading them to assume that eventually science may be able to prove that free will does not exist. The fact that humans believe that they have free will, that they feel that they are exercising a free will in their decisions is generally not considered sufficient indication to postulate that there are processes which are not random in the quantum mechanical sense.
Probabilistic Determinism
In order to understand the basic concepts of quantum physics required here, we shall explore as an example the quantum theory of light.
It is a fact of nature that when a beam of light is shone through a slit, it spreads out on the other side of the slit, making a well-defined pattern on a screen placed behind the slit.
It is also a fact of nature that if the light is turned lower and lower (less and less light) there is not a continuous decrease of light, but a decrease in jumps - which means that the light is discrete 'pieces of light'. One can even reduce the beam so low that only one 'piece' of light comes through.
It is also a fact that various pieces of light aimed at the center of the slit, after passing the slit, often lands at different angles away from the center, rather than all hitting the center of the screen, and rather than all hitting at the same angle. There is no way to predict where an individual piece of light will impact. Nevertheless, when sufficient pieces are sent through, the expected pattern begins to assert itself.
Each individual event, though occurring 'at random', nevertheless contributes somehow to a pattern, in the aggregate, which can be exactly determined beforehand. This combination of random and determined behavior is termed here "probabilistically determined randomness" (PDR) or "probabilistic determinism". However, this 'random' aspect seemed at first to be contrary to the 'spirit of physics'. Much inquiry was directed to the question of whether or not the chance aspect was only apparent, because of our lack of sufficient scientific knowledge and adequate instrumentation, or if it was an actual physical requirement. It was shown that indeed the nature of the physical universe is such that intrinsically, at the most fundamental level, events are probabilistic and not deterministic.
How do the individual pieces conspire to make the pattern? According to the understanding of science, the path of an individual piece of light, or any other fundamental particle, is not describable in ordinary concepts - only the aggregate is describable. Each microscopic particle travels along a randomly chosen path, and science can predict only the pattern made by many particles, not the path of an individual particle. When there are sufficient paths involved for a statistical statement to be relevant, science can make exact predictions regarding the patterns which will develop.
In the same way that in the case discussed above the individual event is random but the overall pattern is determined, quantum physics teaches that all sub-microscopic events occur as a combination of determined and random effects (PDR) - and that any such event can occur in a number of possible ways. According to the theory of quantum physics, there is no way to determine the exact outcome of quantum events; what can be determined is only the overall pattern, the relative probabilities of the various possible outcomes.
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PROBABILISTIC DETERMINISM
Prior to the advent of quantum physics, science believed that every event in the universe occurred as an inevitable and necessary result of previous events. The state of the universe at any one instant was believed to be totally determined by the states of the universe in the past, and in turn the present state totally determined what all future states of the universe would be.
Quantum physics, introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century, brought with it a drastic change in this viewpoint. Each event was now understood to be able to occur in a number of ways, with the actual way that it does occur left to “chance.” Despite the fact that chance “ruled” each individual event, however, when numerous similar events occurred, the pattern that emerged resembled the results one would have expected using pre-quantum physics.
That is, each individual event, though occurring “at random,” nevertheless contributes somehow to a pattern, in the aggregate, which can be determined beforehand. This combination of random and determined behavior is called here probabilistic determinism or probabilistically determined randomness.
Physicists were troubled since this “random” aspect seemed to be contrary to the “spirit of physics.”
Much inquiry was directed to the question of whether the chance aspect was only apparent—i.e. due to our lack of sufficient scientific knowledge and adequate instrumentation—or if it was an actual physical requirement. With the accumulation of more experimental evidence it was shown that, indeed, the nature of the physical universe appears to be such that intrinsically, at the most fundamental level, events are probabilistic and not deterministic.
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Free Will, Quantum Physics, and Causality
Some writers have claimed that in the same way that determinism seemed to put to rest the idea of free will, quantum physics resurrects it.
Insert quotes
However, although quantum physics posits a new type of causal relationship of events, it is not sufficiently radical an innovation in causality to allow for the operation of free will of the type we are interested in.
According to quantum physics, events occur in a probabilistically determined random manner. If underlying every physical process there are random events, then the result of these events can also be judged to be inherently random.
In terms of the relevance to free will, although it is true that quantum physics reduces the determinism of the earlier physics, what it introduces is randomness instead, and not a freedom of the type suitable as a basis for free willed choice.
If all events at the most basic level of interaction are random in nature there is no room for freedom even in brain events ( AR: Duplication?: If indeed all of nature obeys this type of quantum physics at its most fundamental levels, then free will would be impossible). Therefore if free will does exist, this type of quantum physics cannot be valid as a prescriptive formalism at the most fundamental levels of natural processes.
In order for a true free will to exist, there must not only be more than one alternative available at each free-willed decision point, there must also be a choice of alternative which is made "freely". Although according to quantum physics the first condition is possible, the second condition is not - rather than being made by choice, the choice of alternative is not freely willed but rather is random at its most fundamental level. Since a random choice is not a "free" choice, quantum physics of this type is not compatible with free will. That is, if everything including thought is actually governed by quantum physics, by PDR, then true free will is impossible.
MESH
,. To encompass free will there must therefore exist some interaction which has a level of acausality yet more radical than that of quantum physics.
The very concept of free will seems to be undefineable and even self-contradictory. In order for free will to be conceptualized in a non-self-contradictory manner, in addition to modifying quantum theory to account for free will, one would possibly have to modify the concept of causality itself - the idea underlying all of science that one event causes another according to some law.
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Inherent Randomness and Free Will: Uncertainty as a Limit on Physical Theories
It may however be that quantum physics does not actually conflict with free will as it does not truly require that events are PDR. Quantum theory is perhaps more an expression of limits on what can be known rather than a description of what occurs. This theory states that overall the pattern emerging from large amounts of microscopic events will be identical to that of a random distribution, and that we cannot determine the result of individual events, but it does not describe the individual events themselves. One can claim that according to quantum physics individual microscopic events need not occur in any specific manner - for example 'randomly' - as long as they add up in the end, in the aggregate (the totality), to a random distribution.
In this interpretation, scientific theories can deal only with large numbers of events rather than with individual events. About an individual microscopic event nothing at all can be said, not even that it occurs at random. Rather, one can only say that however it is that these events occur, large amounts of events will in the aggregate form according to a probabilistic distribution.
Rather than accepting quantum theory as a statement that all events occur randomly according to a determined probability distribution, one can see it as a statement of the limits of scientific theories.
This would mean that it is not impossible that the individual events can occur in accordance with a free willed decision - there is simply no way science can tell us anything about the individual event and so the speculation or belief that the event occurs in accordance with the choice of a free will can be neither scientifically supported nor refuted.
Although quantum physics can really only make statements about ensembles, if one could extrapolate these to the individual occurrences also, then this 'strong quantum physics' would postulate that all individual events are random, rather than just the aggregate being PDR. If all of nature obeys the strong form of quantum physics at its most fundamental levels, then free will would be impossible. However this version of quantum physics is not currently believed to be valid, and so the question remains open as to the nature of individual events, especially of allegedly-free mental decisions.
We are left nevertheless with an uncomfortable feeling: even though individual events can occur even in a free willed manner quantum physics can still somehow describes statistical distributions of such free willed choices. Although individual decisions are free willed, nevertheless the statistical distribution of results - the number of positive and negative choices etc - is totally predetermined. If all choices are free, how can they possibly conspire together to fit the predetermined pattern?
Insurance Statistics and Free Will
Human activity does seem to follow statistical patterns, with crime and accident statistics being roughly constant. Insurance companies know how many people will die of each disease each year, how many people will be killed in accidents, how many fires there will be; if these events are random, it is interesting that they fall into such clear statistical patterns, but that is the same as quantum physics - random at he individual level, predictable in the aggregate. However, police also know approximately how many murders to expect in a given year. If each of these the events occur in accordance with a free willed choice, it would be rather strange that a large amount of such free choices lead in the aggregate to a determined probabilistic distribution. After all, if the choices are free, what is there to cause them always to form these determined patterns in the aggregate?
Marriages, the taking of vacations, committing murder or other crimes would all seem to be freely willed. In fact if crime is not freely willed, there can be no true responsibility for the crime. On the other hand, it has been observed that the number of murders committed in any one city remains roughly constant, or changes at a certain well defined rate. And the same for marriages, vacationers and so on. If these events are not the result of free willed choice, then nothing probably is, and free will does not exist. On the other hand if they are the result of free willed choice, how is it that in the aggregate free willed choices are so predictable?
This situation is quite mystifying to the proponent of free will, but there are possible answers, such as that the types of people and their situations are distributed in a probabilistic manner, and this is reflected in the results. However, this merely takes the question one step further.
[It may also be that not all actions that we presume are free-willed, but only some of these are: some choices are truly free, and the rest arrange themselves to complete the requisite pattern imposed by quantum statistics. Or that for some reason the statistics of quantum physics are not an accurate reflection of free willed moral decisions, are not valid for free willed events.]
In any event, if one can accept that statistics tell us about the aggregate of criminal decisions and yet these individual criminals are responsible for their individual decisions, ie these were freely taken, then the existence of an overall determinism is not felt by us to be a refutation of the freedom at the individual level - if so, then quantum physics provides an exact analogy to this, describing the overall pattern without dealing with the nature of the individual event.
However strange this combination of freedom and determinism is, we can see that quantum uncertainty and PDR mirror exactly the expected results of free willed behavior as observed in the actual world. Nevertheless as a theory only of the limits of what we can know, and of the overall patterns in the aggregate, quantum physics in this interpretation tells us nothing about individual events and therefore nothing about free will itself other than its overall aggregate behavior.
Quantum physics does not deny the possibility of free will however it in no way provides a theory of how individual decisions are made in a free-willed manner.
The Interaction Underlying Free-Willed Phenomena
What is the mechanism whereby individual free decisions are in fact made? Since quantum theory cannot answer this in this respect it is insufficient as a complete description of nature.
Even if there is true free will even of a statistically limited type so that somehow quantum statistics are not violated, so that quantum physics correctly describes the limit of possible scientific knowledge about the free-willed system, quantum physics is not describing at all the operation of free will, the means whereby free willed choices are made: the very existence of some truly free willed choices requires the existence of interactions far more subtle and basic than those postulated and dealt with by quantum physics.
If this is the case, then ordinary quantum physics could be considered as having validity limited to non-mental events, or to events in arenas of lesser complexity than the human brain, or as being an approximation to a more fundamental theory just as classical physics is an approximation of quantum physics, or as a theory which tells of the limits beyond which physics cannot enter - limits beyond which lie mental phenomena.
In the early-mid 20th century Bohr proposed that the mental events involved in producing a thought are quantum-level events and so it would be impossible to physically trace mental events with any instrument without interfering with the mental events being traced. If such were the case physics could not hope to describe mental events, and this quantum nature of interactions in the brain would preclude any possible method of prediction of a future thought or act. Consequently an illusion of free will might never be disproved and thus physics could not rule out the existence of free will.
Indeed, it has been proposed that somehow the existence of the illusion may be due to the very phenomenon which ensures that the events in the brain are unpredictable.
However, many disagree because they feel that the processes underlying a thought are too complex to depend on single quantum events and a thought itself is too ordered to depend on a single quantum event, and therefore these processes would be sufficiently macroscopic to resist the disturbance created by a minimally-disturbing measurement. Thus they conclude that physics could eventually describe human thought processes. Indeed scientists are now perhaps succeeding in tracing individual brain events.
However the interaction underlying free-willed choice may be so subtle that perhaps it is not scientifically describable. Indeed, a scientifically describable free will would probably mean a scientifically predictable free will, which would likely mean that it is not free at all. True free will may by definition be beyond scientific analysis, or 'non-modelable'.
It would therefore seem that if true free will exists, it is necessarily based on interactions fundamentally other than those underlying anything else known to science today, including quantum physics.
Quantum Determinism and the 'Universal History Video Library'
Introduction
According to present scientific understanding, based on the ideas of quantum physics, the state of the universe at any given time determines not the actual state of the universe at the next instant, but rather determines what the possible next states might be, and also determines the relative probability of each such possible outcome. The actual next-state of the universe is 'chosen' randomly by nature from among the possible next-states. Therefore, the first state of the universe - namely the conditions obtaining at the initial singularity or the big bang - determines the entire range of quantumly possible future states of the universe.
Would it be possible to predict the future? If all the laws of nature were known, then it might be possible to predict the future development of any physical system to some degree. For example, given the conditions at the big bang, all the possible future states of the universe could be known. However, due to the randomness inherent in physical processess, as described by quantum physics, the actual future state is chosen at random from the possible future ones, and it cannot be known in advance which one will be chosen.
One could therefore say that if a sufficiently powerful computer is given the design for the big bang, all the minute details of all its possible future histories can be known - however the one actual history which would result from among all the possible ones would be unknown.
[There is the possibility however that the computations would prove to be so complex that for a computer to be powerful enough to perform the calculations it would have to be larger than the whole universe. In such a case, one could say that prediction is quantitatively impossible, and such a quantitative limitation could also be interpreted as a qualitative limitation. If instead of prediction before the fact one demands only knowability, so that a computation which takes longer than the real time development qualifies, .....So it may be that only an outsider computation can be qualified even to retrodict. However there is no way of knowing if the concept of an outsider is meaningful at all.]
Actualization of A Particular Universe-History
Let us assume that for a particular big bang there are for example 100100100 possible future histories differing significantly from each other, and that all the details of all these histories are recorded in the computer and labeled from one to 100100100.
If such a big bang were to be created, its future history would be identical to one of the recorded and labeled histories, however it would not be known which one of these it will act out. Since the big bang would develop according to the laws of quantum randomness, the choice of which history would appear would be decided randomly, as though by the toss of a die. Indeed, one toss of a die with 100100100 sides, or choosing one number from 1 to 100100100, is the same as the combination of random choices produced by the quantum randomness of the developing universe. The development of the universe from a big bang to its final conclusion is essentially the same as if the big bang had tossed a die and chosen its entire future history.
The import of this is different when it is realized that there are ramifications to the question of whether humans are the playthings of fate, or are masters of their own fate. If brains operate under laws no different than those governing the rest of the universe, then every decision in any brain, every thought, is simply a pattern of electrically-active neurons - or more fundamentally, a particular combination of elementary particles. According to quantum physics, each thought - each pattern of electrically active neurons - has various possible next-states rather than only one, however these states are those decided by the laws of nature rather than by the mind of the person whose brain is being considered, and the decision as to which of these states is activated is left to chance. Thus, for each thought or sensory input in the brain, there are various possible next-thoughts, and one of these is actualized, 'chosen at random by nature'. In other words, every time that a person decides to carry out a certain action, the decision to do so is simply one of the possible such decisions that nature chose at random from among all the possible decisions. The mind has control neither over the range of possible decisions, nor over the choice as to which decision is chosen
We could then say that whichever future is realized from among the quantumly-possible ones inherent in the initial universe state, all the human actions, thoughts and decisions contained in that history are the result of natural law rather than human choice, elements in the path of history that nature chose at random from among all the possible history paths that were inherent in the initial state of the universe.
The illusion of possessing a free will which transcends natural law and quantum randomness in some measure might never be disproved, especially since only probabilities can be predicted.
In a universe governed by the laws of physics as we know them, as soon as the big bang exists, all future quantumly-possible histories are written therein - any conscious being in such a universe is but a puppet acting out the particular history randomly chosen by nature from among all the possibilities. All events which occur in such a universe, all actions seemingly initiated by the conscious beings, are in actuality attributable to the initial state of the universe, the laws of nature, and randomness.
If humanity exists in a universe without free will, then even if humans are convinced that they bear moral responsibility for their actions, they are puppets who falsely believes they pull their own strings - people can no more decide whether to be 'good' or 'evil' than they can decide whether or not to be born. All their actions are written into the fabric of the universe and its laws, and they are not responsible for their actions or thoughts.
Of course people could always define themselves as 'free' if they feel free. Whether this is only a subjective perspective, or can be considered objective is discussed in the next chapter.
Chaos, Unpedictability and Freedom
Many writers have intimated that the results of chaos theory are relevant to the question of free will, just as others before them had claimed that quantum physics is significant in that respect.
Insert quotes
In this chapter we will analyze those aspects of chaos theory of relevance to this question, and show that it is actually of no relevance to free will as defined by us.
Chaos and Instability
In some situations, a large effect can result from a small cause - for example if a train is balanced on the edge of a precipice, a relatively small push might tumble it down. In this way, due to an inherent instability in the situation, the effect of the small cause can be 'multiplied' far beyond what it would achieve otherwise.
Weather conditions are very sensitive to small causes. A sneeze creates a tiny breeze which can divert a section of air which then causes.....etc etc until a thousand miles away the resulting chain of events is sufficient to nudge a wind pattern into a cyclone formation, which then destroys a town.
The situation is chaotic in the sense that every instant new small causes join the fray, multiplying up and constantly changing the pattern. On the other hand, when a small nudge gives the final twist to a strong wind changing it into a cyclone, the small cause has given rise to a very ordered effect - changing an unordered wind into a circular pattern with a life of its own.
Prediction and Free Will
As long as it is impossible to predict who will sneeze when, and all other such small causes, it is impossible to completely predict the weather. The weather is 'unstable' in the sense that it is very sensitive to small causes. Similarly, many physical systems are sensitive to small causes, and due to the 'multiplication' of small causes in these systems, and the many possible small causes which can affect them, it is almost impossible to predict what will happen to these systems. Chaos theory studies systems in which there is a multiplication of small causes, and also the emergence of ordered patterns from unordered ones via small causes.
In some systems, even if it is known exactly which small causes are present, and how they affect the system, it is still practically impossible to predict the result since the calculations are so difficult - it would require a supercomputer to compute, and even then, the computation would likely take so long that the result would arrive after the event occured, giving a 'prediction' only after the fact.
In some instances, it may be that even if in order to study a certain event the rest of the universe were utilized to construct a universal computer, the 'prediction' could not be made faster than the occurrence of the event being studied. In such a case the event is quantitatively unpredictable. Perhaps one could even consider it to be unpredictable in principle, a more qualitative statement.
Would we say that such a system exhibits 'free will' because it is unpredictable? Certainly in the sense that we will define free will, this will not qualify, since the fact that the 'prediction' can be made at all means that the system developed according to well-defined patterns and laws rather than being free. The fact that no prediction could be made, even if this is so in principle, does not affect this judgment.
Quantum Chaos
We now add in quantum physics to the picture. As we saw, according to quantum physics microscopic events occur at random in inherently unpredictable ways. In unstable systems, these random microscopic events are multiplied up into large scale events, so that there is an added element of unpredictability in such situations - on the one hand it is in principle impossible to predict the small causes if they are quantum random, and on the other hand - due to chaotic instability - it may be in principle impossible to predict the multiplied effect of these small causes.
Are such events 'free-willed'?
In our definition they are not, since they are fundamentally no different than other random quantum events - except that these random microscopic effects are multiplied into large scale random events. They are not free, they are merely unpredictable - their unpredictability derives from a combination of randomness and calculational complexity rather than from an inherent 'freedom'.
If producing a thought involves (quantum) chaos, so that no prediction of a thought or act will be possible, the illusion of a transcendent free will might never be disproved; we could say that humans have a 'calculationally-free' and a 'psychologically free' will without this implying the existence of an 'inherently-free' will.
Thus chaos whether of the deterministic or quantum variety does not give rise to freedom, only to unpredictability and the illusion of free will, which is irrelevant to moral responsibility will, and therefore it has no fundamental relevance to our discussion in this book.
Incomputability
In mathematical theory, there is a concept called 'incomputability' which has some relevance to the issue of free will. It has been found that.......
INSERT DESCRIPTION OF INCOMPUTABILITY
There have been speculations that incomputability may not be merely a mathematical curiosity, but that incomputable physical processes might exist as well. (See Komar, Pour-El etc.) Recently, Roger Penrose has written books with the speculation that quantum gravity may turn out to be such an incomputable physical process, and he has further speculated that this will provide a basis for free will. However, we can see that for the type of free will which is of interest to us here, incomputability in not sufficient.
Incomputability by itself is not sufficiently radical to support an inherent free will. Instead, one can see that free will must of course be based on an incomputable process, however incomputability alone guarantees only non-predictability, but is not sufficient to provide the freedom of a true inherently-free will. It is interesting nevertheless to see how novel ideas in mathematics stretch out conceptions of what is possible in the physical universe, and even if they are not sufficient to found on them a theory of free will, they do pave some of the stones along the path.
Inherently Free Will, Morality, Purpose and Meaning
If all brain processes are PDR human actions would be determined/random at the same level as the irruption of a volcano or the sting of a bee, and as the rising and setting of the sun. Because volcanoes do not have a choice as to how to act, we do not consider the volcano to have moral responsibility to prevent danger from its lave flows, nor do we describe it as evil if it causes death and destruction. We do not feel that the sun is good or bad, rather that its effects on us are sometimes beneficial and sometimes harmful.
If human brain processes are PDR, humans have no choice in the decision as to which actions their brains will have the illusion that it is 'choosing' to do, and so neither the worst and most murderous dictators nor the best and most generous and religious saints are responsible for their actions, and therefore they cannot truly be described as 'evil' or 'holy'. In such circumstances, most people would feel that the concept 'moral responsibility' would lose most of its meaning. If humans are puppets of PDR, most people would agree that there is no true meaning to their lives, and if all follows from the big bang and the laws of nature, and from randomness, most would feel that there is no deep purpose to the existence of the universe.
However, even for a PDR universe a being can argue that if it feels it is morally responsible for its actions then it is so by definition. Whether this can be considered an objective definition or not is discussed in the next chapter. In any case, the type of moral responsibility, meaning and purpose which can be defined in a PDR universe is not the type which most people intuitively mean in our universe.
All this changes if there is true free will. Free will is radically other than all other interactions, and if humans possess free will, then a radical difference exists between the actions of man and that of the rest of the universe. If humans possess an 'inherently free' will they can decide on their activity and thoughts in a partially autonomous manner; using free will a human can free themselves from the deterministic/random universe and initiate activity (partially) independently of the prior state of the universe.
Even if all else operates in accordance with the ordinary laws of physics, free-willed decisions by definition do not. The brain processes involved in making decisions between moral alternatives of right and wrong are in this view unique and significant in that they are autonomous, and are perhaps the only non random/deterministic processes in the universe. In a universe with free will, human actions can be attributed to the perpetrator of the action, and not to the universe, nor to a creator. Therefore, in such a universe, it is not meaningless to claim that man may have a moral responsibility to choose the good over the evil. In a universe with free will, there is the potential for meaning and purpose.
The Creation and Eden Account
It is the creation of this type of universe and with this type of free will which is presented in Genesis.
To understand the creation and Eden accounts, one must understand the perspective from which they are presented - that of the creator of the universe. Thus, we must understand what relevance human free will would have to the issues of moral responsibility, meaning and purpose as considered from the perspective of the creator of a universe. We shall consider this idea in the next chapter.
Conclusion
If as postulated by science all physical systems including the brain operate according to the known laws of nature - quantum chaos, entropy increase and so on - then we are indeed conscious robots, with no control over our actions and thoughts, only the illusion of control. We may be satisfied with this illusion, and with the sense of moral responsibility, and of meaning and purpose, afforded us by this illusion, some may find it satisfying even if they realize that it is an illusion, and define free will as existing as long as they feel they are free.
There is after all no contradiction to natural law involved in a creature finding satisfaction in a known illusion - indeed if most people are in this category then one can see in this mass satisfaction with illusion the operation of a law of human psychology.
In the next chapter we shall investigate what subjective or objective criteria can be put forward in various scenarios for judging whether beings can have moral responsibility, whether their life can have meaning, whether a universe can have a purpose - and what type of free will would be necessary for such definitions to be valid.
Appendix 1: Quantum Field Theory and the Human Brain
Ten subjects answered an ad of a pschologist - the typical student-lure of "earn $20 by participating in a one hour experiment". They are milling about in the room while the psychologist peers at them through a one-way mirror. The experiment is meant to analyze 20 emotion-categories of interest. If each person will display only one emotion during that hour, then only 10 emotions maximum will be observed. In fat, it may be that some of the participants will have the same emotion and so only 8 or fewer of the 20 emotions will be on display. Scratch that experiment.
Clearly to study an ensemble (an aggregate) one needs at the very least as many participants as there are states. And since some may be duplicates, likely are, one needs perhaps twice the amount of participants as there are states. And if one wishes to study several examples of the same state in order to find patterns, then one need have many times the amount of participants as there are states.
Similarly in physics. Quantum physics can make statements only about aggregates of particles rather than individual particles, and the same for complicated systems of interacting particles; quantum physics can deal only with aggregates of systems of interacting particles rather than an individual system of interacting particles. Since quantum field theories can only consider large amounts of similar systems rather than individual systems, for there to be a quantum field theory of a specific type of system, there must exist large amount of such systems (an 'ensemble' of such systems).
What does 'large amounts' mean in this context? Imagine a system with ten million possible different states. Having two systems or one hundred such systems is not sufficient. For the ensemble to give an adequate representation, and be useful for the purposes of quantum field theory, there must be many more than ten million such systems. There must be enough systems in the ensemble so that one can assume that each possible state is represented a few times. That is, there must be many more systems in the aggregate of systems than there are states in each individual system.
A bunch of non-interacting entities, no matter how many, can be considered individually, and the theory of the bunch of them can be obtained as a simple result of the theory of an individual one. For example, a theory of a gas of particles can often deal with the component particles as non-interacting, and the result is that the system is very simply described, even if it has trillions upon trillions of component particles.
The brain is highly complex, however this is not because it has many neurons, but rather due to the fact that - as distinct from the case of an aggregate composed of non-interacting parts as in the case of the gas described above - the brain has very many interconnections between its component neurons.
It may be that a thought involves billions of interconnecting neurons, and that to form a scientific theory of thought, one has to study systems of billions of interconnected neurons. These interconnections can form in many different ways, giving rise to different brain states, each brain state corresponding to one particular configuration of interaction between the billions of interconnected neurons.
Some of the brain states will be essentially similar, but many of them will be significantly different from each other. There are possibly many trillions of different possible brain states or thoughts - or at least thoughts differing from each other in significant ways. Thus, one needs to study systems (of billions of interconnected neurons) which can have many trillions of different states. However, to study a system which has trillions of different states, one needs an ensemble of many trillions of systems.
According to physicist D. Christodoulou, since there are more brain states in one brain than there are brains in the world, no ensemble of brains can be used to construct a field theory of brain interactions. As a result, standard physical theory may prove inadequate to the task of ever formulating a scientific theory of brains and therefore of thoughts. Therefore, standard physical theories will never be proven to apply to the brain, and there will remain the logical possibility that there may exist phenomenon in the brain - such as free willed interactions - which exist nowhere else.
deleted from previous ch bec of ref to outsider. Should these be reimserted somewhere?
We do so by constructing different cosmic scenarios - universes with or without free will, with or without a creator - and seeing if our intuition can point up which types of universes would or would not have meaning and purpose to an 'insider' and to an 'outsider'.
there can be meaning to human life from an outsider's perspective, for example the perspective of the creator of the universe, especially one who has brought about the existence of the universe for some purpose.
We shall first analyze scenarios where humans play the part of 'outsider', and then adapt the discussions to the case where the humans are the subjects and the perspective is that of an 'outsider' to the physical universe, in particular the perspective of the creator of the universe.
What however would be the perspective of the creator on this charade? Would a PDR universe seem purposive to its creator, would human activity have meaning, would the creator consider humans to be morally responsible for their actions and thoughts?
What if humans in fact possess a free will in an otherwise PDR universe, how would this change matters?
Chapter 5:
Designer Universes, and Purposeful Existence
Albert Einstein:
"[T]he idea of the existence of an omnipotent, just, and omnibeneficient personal God....[has] decisive weaknesses...
[I]f this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishments and rewards he would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him"
Introduction
We have seen that without free will, there can be no intuitively unambiguous moral responsibility, meaning and purpose. We then saw that science seems to negate the possibility of the existence of a truly independent free will. Instead there is raised the possibility that we only feel that we have free will. Indeed, as a result of science's seeming 'nay', some - including perhaps Einstein - have defined free will in this way.
In spite of this, we will try to define a free will which is in consonance with our intuitive understanding of what a free will is.
It turns out that the particular type of free will, moral responsibility, meaning and purpose which we intend here is most easily illustrated by appeal to a particular model: assuming the existence of an entity 'outside' our universe and then finding what conditions have to be filled in order that humans have moral responsibility, and the universe have a purpose, from the perspective of this 'outsider'.
We will then claim that whether or not such an outsider exists, only the existence of these conditions give true meaning to these concepts, the meaning we intuit for them.
A second motivation for considering an outsider perspective is that we are concerned with the creation and Eden accounts, and of course the Bible in its traditional understanding presents itself as having been transmitted from a being "outside" the physical universe, and refers to the transmitting entity as the creator of the universe itself. Therefore when analyzing the issues of moral responsibility, the meaning of existence and the purpose of the universe as seen from the Biblical perspective, we must consider this "outsider's" perspective.
The Outsider's Perspective
What would an 'outsider' mean in our scenario? What would it mean in the Biblical context?
If by definition the word 'universe' includes all that physically exists, it is meaningless to speak of the existence of more than one universe, and therefore one could not meaningfully refer to a being inhabiting 'another' universe. Similarly, if 'universe' includes all, it would be meaningless to posit the existence of a being who inhabits a realm physically 'outside' of the universe. In addition even if 'universe' only includes our physical existence and there is a being who is 'outside' this universe, if it is truly an 'outsider' it could not interact with the universe and therefore could not perceive events within it, so that the term 'outsider's perspective' is self-contradictory.
One could of course speak intuitively of such an 'outsider perspective', but because of the inherent self-contradiction, there is no guarantee that the conclusions reached are not nonsense. Attempts can be made to define the 'outside' in mental or spiritual terms, however any being existing in a non-physical realm would perhaps be unable to interact with the beings in a physical realm.
The Biblical Perspective
From the Biblical perspective the creator does not exist in physical space, inside or 'outside' the universe, and so is an outsider with respect to the physical space-time of the universe, but is at the same time aware of all that occurs within the universe (and indeed intervenes in the occurrence of events within it).
Whatever the problems with defining 'an outsider's perspective', the Bible represents itself as being presented from such a perspective, and therefore to understand it as it was meant, it is best considered from within such a perspective. Whether or not such a perspective can be rigorously defined is not important in this context - what is relevant is to consider what might be the intent of the Biblical accounts. In our interpretation, the Bible is saying in effect "use your intuition to imagine the perspective of an outsider, and then look at the Bible as presented from such a perspective."
Designer Big Bangs
Perhaps we can develop some intuition regarding what would be the outsider perspective of a creator of our universe, by analyzing the outsider perspective of humans in a similar relational situation - that of a creator of a universe.
Some of the recent articles in professional physics journals have titles like 'can a universe be created in the lab?': future technologies are already being discussed which will produce sufficient energy concentrations to cause space-time to develop bumps which could break off to form other universe.
Humanity might yet one day find itself in the role of creator, designing big bangs, and might then find itself as the 'outsider' relative to this new universe. We can attempt to develop some intuition regarding the outsider perspective of the creator of our universe by speculating as to what would be the outsider perspective of humans relative to a universe they had created.
A Quantum-Determined Universe: The Human Outsider Perspective
To illustrate our conception of the concepts of free will meaning and purpose we will assume here a scenario in which humans with a super computer can arrange for the production of conditions such that a big bang emerges.
Given the design for the laboratory-induced big bang, all its possible future histories can be computed on the super-computer; however, choosing the history to appear would need to be decided randomly.
Essentially then, from the perspective of the humans forming the big bang once the design of the big bang is known all the possible future histories can be computed. The only unknown is which one of the possibilities will emerge. Instead of actually creating the big bang and allowing it to develop for billions of years, the same informational effect can be obtained by simply throwing a suitable die, saving all the bother of actually creating the big bang, and waiting about to see how it would develop to the end. Indeed one can consider the entire unfolding of the universe's history from a big bang to its final conclusion as completely equivalent to one individual throw of a die - as if 'Nature' had tossed a die and chosen its entire future history.
Effectively, once it is decided on what should be the design of the big bang, all is known except the outcome of the one die-toss. If humanity ever gets to this stage, where not only can universes be created, but all their potential outcomes be completely specified, then creating universes and watching their development would be no more interesting than rolling dice. It would be far more reasonable to roll dice for this purpose than to create a big bang and wait about for its inevitable though random development.
Free Will, Meaning and Purpose: A Creator's Perspective
One can imagine that quantumly determined universe can be designed to eventually produce conscious beings, all according to the natural law operating in that universe.
If such a universe were to be created, then from the creator's perspective there would be no greater meaning to the actions of conscious beings in that universe than to the motion of a stone or an atom, since all of these would simply be results of the same natural law.
We will consider here a scenario which is fundamentally different than that of the outsider scenario considered previously. Here we consider a creator who is not merely an outsider, and is not only the fashioner of the universe from preexistent laws of nature, but rather is the very source of the natural law and the initial conditions of the universe. In this scenario creation is a result of the creator's free willed decision to create, and the laws and initial conditions are chosen.
In such a case all actions of the created conscious beings and all other events in the universe follow from these created laws of nature and initial conditions, and are directly attributable to the creator rather than to the created entities. If there is a being which bears moral responsibility for the events in the universe, for the actions perpetrated by one being on another, it would be the creator, and not the beings themselves.
If the beings which inhabit a universe do not possess an 'inherently free' will, then all acts and thoughts in that universe derive solely from the creator's own initial act of creation of the universe and its laws of nature, and from the randomness of quantum events. Their unfolding may be predictable, or just random, and therefore of little interest to the creator.
That is, in a universe without free will, the actions of conscious beings are no more meaningful to the creator of the universe than the motions of a mote of dust and there is no inherent moral activity. For an omniscient creator who can predict all possible paths of universe development, watching the actual history unfold is informationally equivalent to rolling dice.
Free Will, Meaning and Purpose in a Quantumly Determined Universe:
The "Insider's Perspective"
Scenario: A being feels that its life is meaningful, but from the outsider perspective it is not in control of its destiny, and events proceed as they do according to the dictates of natural law and randomness, rather than as a result of free willed decisions. Despite living in a PDR universe as a conscious robot created by a deity the being has the illusion that it possesses a free will, and feels that its actions are meaningful, that it is morally responsible for its actions.
Ironically, although the deity has no particular purpose in creating this universe and for the existence and actions of this being, nevertheless the being believes deeply that its actions are contributing to the achievement of some purpose related to the moral choices of humanity or to a course of history affected by human freely willed choices. Is it true by definition that its life is in fact meaningful since it feels it to be so - or is it necessary that there be something else besides the feeling of meaning?
We might regard with pathos the feeling this being has of moral responsibility and meaningful existence, of a great purpose behind the pattern of event; from our outsider perspective in considering such a universe, we might feel that it was somehow deluded.
We would agree that although the events in that universe were automatic, they can seem meaningful to the beings within the universe, the "insiders". However since to hypothetical 'outside observers' their universe is not meaningful, perhaps the meaning of their universe is in some sense subjective rather than objective.
A Created Universe With Free Will : The Outsider's Perspective
Since a morally-relevant free will operates neither according to randomness nor according to deterministic law, it is not the same as the operation of a machine, nor equivalent to the toss of a die. Thus moral activity resulting from free willed choices cannot be predicted, and cannot be simulated, and therefore it has the potential to be inherently interesting.
That is, a universe which evolves beings possessing brains of a complexity such that they can support a phenomenon as unique as free-willed consciousness can have a history which is of interest even to the designer of the big bang from which the universe evolved, since the moral activity is autonomous, deriving from the moral beings themselves, rather than from the design of the big bang.
Only while the universe is a 'moral universe' with freedom of development - as opposed to a random/determined universe - is it likely to be of interest to a purposive creator. Therefore the development of the big bang from its initial state until the emergence of moral beings would be no more interesting than that of the big bangs which would not produce moral beings. The interesting action of a universe would begin with the first free-willed intelligent choice in it, and true history would begin then. Indeed, in a universe designed to produce moral beings, the prior events involving determined and random interactions of physical and biological systems would be irrelevant.
Moral Beings and Purposive Activity
Moral activity could begin only upon the emergence of the first true 'moral being' - a being possessing sufficient intelligence and foresight to understand the consequences of its actions, equipped with a moral sense to know the difference between good and evil actions, and endowed with the free will to choose between the two. Clearly also there can be no moral choice in a being lacking consciousness and self-consciousness.
With regards to our universe, inasmuch as is known to us, life exists here on earth, where as the eminent evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky writes, self awareness is quite possibly unique to human beings:
"Self-awareness is, then, one of the fundamental, possibly the most fundamental characteristic of the human species. This characteristic is an evolutionary novelty: the biological species from which humanity has descended had only rudiments of self-awareness, or perhaps lacked it altogether."
Self-awareness has seemingly arisen only in humans, and although not everyone might agree on definitions of intelligence, consciousness, morality, and so on, and on how much these may be present in a rudimentary form in 'the species from which humanity has descended', certainly no-one would consider any animal - even the highest ape - as morally responsible for its actions . No species other than man seems to posses the requisite combination of free will, intelligence, and analytic ability which can allow us to consider their actions as freely chosen, and thus the feeling that moral consciousness seems to have arisen only in the human species.
According to Darwin - in agreement with earlier writers:
"of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense of conscience is by far the most important."
The emergence of moral consciousness was a turning point in the evolutionary process itself and biologically speaking, due to it humans can be classified as a completely new phenomenon qualitatively different than any evolutionary forebears.
Free Will, Moral Responsibility, Meaning and Purpose
From our discussions it emerges that the type of free will, moral responsibility, meaning and purpose which is intuited by most people is of the type which would exist in a created universe with true free will. In this type of universe, these concepts have meaning not only from the insider perspective but from the outsider perspective as well. When we will refer throughout this book to free will, we will mean it to be of this type - irrespective of whether there does or does not actually exist any 'outsiders' to our universe.
The Creation and Eden Accounts
The type of moral responsibility meaning and purpose which is closest to the author's intuition - and perhaps closest to that intuited by most people - is exactly that which would exist if there was a creator, with these concepts defined according to this creator's outsider perspective. Thus the metaphysical scenario which is implied by what are for many of us the most basic human intuitive concepts actually conforms to the scenario presented in the Bible - namely the existence of a creator who designed the universe to fulfill some purpose.
We are therefore interested in the Biblical perspective on these concepts, and on how the form and content of the accounts reflect this perspective.
The Bible presents itself as having been communicated by a being 'outside' - in this case that of the creator of our universe - and for the creation and Eden accounts to be comprehended as they are presented in the context of the rest of the Bible, it is necessary to view them from this perspective.
We have seen that until the emergence of humans there was no moral activity on earth, no free willed choice. Therefore from the Biblical perspective of the creator of a purposive universe, until the emergence of free-willed conscious beings capable of moral choice there was no true purpose to the existence of the universe. Creation of a universe would not take place if moral beings would not be part of it, indeed creation is designed so as to produce moral beings. Therefore, from the Biblical perspective, the creation of the universe is directly related to the emergence within it of a moral being
This relationship between creation and the emergence of moral beings is reflected in the literary structure of the opening accounts in Genesis. The creation account describes the creation of the universe and the Eden account relates of the emergence of moral humanity: while from most perspectives these are two very different and not directly-related subjects, from the Biblical perspective as understood here these two accounts in the Bible are intimately related, and this interdependence can explain why the two accounts are juxtaposed.
In the Biblical perspective, the universe was designed specifically to produce moral beings, and this explains the preoccupation of Genesis with the moral activity of humans after the Eden account - for example with the stories of Noah, Abraham, Joseph and so on. The universe was created for a purpose, and events within it can have objective meaning because a non-random, non-deterministic element involving intelligent activity - free will - was injected into the universe.
The universal history of interest to the creator commences with the emergence of the first moral beings - the events referred to in the Eden account - and thus the beginning of Genesis serves as an introduction to the history of humanity, rather than as a history of the formation of the sun, or of the dinosaurs, or even of pre- moral humanity.
As to the creation account, the formation of galaxies or of atoms or mountains and of other beings, whether dinosaurs or apes or Neanderthalers, are not of relevance to the moral perspective. Only moral beings are relevant and therefore only they are of direct interest to the Biblical perspective, and therefore only they are of necessary inclusion in the Biblical creation and Eden accounts. These accounts describe in general the overall aspects of creation, the emergence of various species of fish, land animals, birds, the formation of the sun, moon and stars, as background to the most important event from the perspective of the creation account, the emergence of moral beings.
We are not chauvinists, and do not insist that we are the most significant entities in the cosmos (see discussion later in the book re alien civilizations, and Rambam's views on the significance of other intelligences), however from the perspective of the creation account directed towards humanity it is humanity which takes central stage. We are dust, star dust, but our potential for conscious moral activity makes us more significant - even from the outsider perspective - than all the stars in the universe.
Appendix I: Quantum Cosmology and The "Outsider's Perspective".
We are interested in the question of how a physical being who is in some sense 'outside' the physical universe we inhabit might consider the question of the purpose of our existence and of the universe as a whole. We will explore the limits of science and logic in this respect to obtain a feeling for what might be the perspective of a partial outsider, and when these reach their limits we will use intuition to develop this idea further to obtain an intuitive picture of a 'full outsider's' perspective.
To obtain the closest thing to an 'outsider's' perspective in science we turn to modern cosmology. This area of physics explores - among other topics - scenarios of non-interacting universes and superspaces of many universes, constructs which arise from some of the implications of quantum physics as applied to the laws of general relativity. It is not clear what it means that there is another universe outside our own. However, if indeed there is meaning to statements about 'other universes', then there may be meaning to statements regarding the meaning or purpose of our universe as seen from the perspective of a being 'outside' our universe.
We will here explore the concepts of meaning and purpose as seen by beings inside and outside some universe, and apply these insights to a consideration of the creation and Eden accounts as related from such an outsider perspective.
General Relativity and Space-Time Curvature
The theory of special relativity teaches that space and time are intermingled, as are matter and energy. Furthermore, the general theory of relativity shows that matter-energy causes space-time to 'bend'. Indeed, all that we observe as the operation of 'the law of gravity' is actually a manifestation of the curvature of space-time in the presence of matter-energy. For example, when we let go of an object it falls to the ground, and we say that this is due to the force of gravity. In actuality though, the motion is due to the curvature of space-time caused by the presence of the Earth, by its matter-energy.
Indeed, in considering the physical universe as a whole, all its matter-energy and all its space-time, there is a relationship between the overall curvature of space-time and the total universal content of matter-energy. If there is more than a certain density of matter-energy, the entire space-time of the universe can be so affected that it curves in on itself so tightly that it forms a ball - closing in on itself. In such a case, travelling in any direction eventually leads back to the starting point, and the universe becomes a finite entity even though it has no boundaries or ends.
This is vastly different than the similar-sounding statement that travelling on the earth in any direction brings one eventually back to one's starting point - the earth is curved, and it is evident to anyone who sees the horizon and understands its implication, or who is watching from space, that this is what would happen. However, there is no vantage point from which space-time could be seen to be a ball - we are all part of the universe, and could never go 'outside' of it to see that it is curved.
Cosmology
If one considers the entire matter-energy-space-time of the universe as a unit, the equations of general relativity show that the space-time is dynamic - that is, the size and curvature of space as a whole changes. From observation - together with extrapolations based on certain assumptions - it seems that the universe is expanding, and indeed the theory of general relativity predicts that this should be the case. If so, then long ago it was far smaller than it is now, and at some point the entire univere was the size of an electron, and even smaller.
Cosmology is the study of the entire universe as a system, and of how this system developped over time, and perhaps of its origin as well.
Quantum Cosmology
According to the laws of quantum physics, at the smallest scale of existence - for example that of the electrons and protons of which all atoms are composed - the ordinary concept of defining a location or a state of motion is meaningless. It is simply incorrect to say that a particular electron has a particular location and particular state of motion - or state of rest - at a particular time. Predictions based on calculations which assume that they do, will always turn out to be incorrect when compared to experimental results. Instead one must apply the quantum theory, which then provides exactly correct predictions.
An interesting application of quantum physics results when one considers the initial state of the universe, at the time of the big bang, when the universe was very small. At such a scale, the ordinary concepts of location and state of motion are inapplicable as quantum physics teaches, but also due to the fact that the system contains so much matter-energy - indeed it is the system containing all existent matter-energy - the considerations of general relativity theory are indispensable as well. Theories which apply quantum physics to the universe as a whole are called quantum cosmologies.
Although there is as yet no successful theory of quantum cosmology, many very interesting partial results have been obtained. For example, it is clear that the very concept of space-time must be revised when dealing with the universe in its initial stages, and space-time could have developed all sorts of strange bumps an holes in those stages. One of the possible implications of this is that the initially existent space-time split into various pieces - creating 'baby universes' - and perhaps these did the same. Thus, there may be some sense in which there are different separate universes, which are inaccessible to each other now, but which derive from a common source.
Possibly, these universes can be accessible to each other at some level beyond that of ordinary space-time, for example via the mental realm of thought or intuition, the level on which reside such mental concepts as meaning and purpose.
Appendix II: An Outsider's Perspective
It is not clear whether universes which separated from each other can ever interact, whether a being existent in one such universe can communicate with another in a different universe, or can even obtain information about the existence of any othr universe. If not, then the concept of 'other universe' is meaningless. However if physics implies that these are existent, then by definition there is information about these other universes, and the possibility arises that perhaps more information can also be available.
Perhaps there is a realm beyond that of space-time in which there can be communication, or knowledge of one another. In such a case one can speak of beings 'outside' a particular universe, and of their knowledge of 'other' universes. Indeed, cosmology today speaks of the possibility that there are other universes, and that some of these may have laws of physics which are different than those of our own universe.
For example, it may therefore be that although in our universe free willed phenomena are possible, they not be possible in other universes, and vice versa.
Objective and Subjective Perspectives
In considering such a universe, even though we are aware that from the perspective of the inhabitants of this universe there is indeed meaning and purpose to their existence, we might nevertheless feel that it would be rather empty of meaning and purpose.
On the other hand, the subjective can be objective in a sense: If one defines 'universe' as 'all that exists', then there can be no perspective from 'outside' the universe, since there is nothing other than the universe. As a result, it may be that the feeling of meaning and purpose of a being in a universe is actually an objective statement in the sense that no other perspective exists.
Nevertheless, there is some possibility of defining space-times which although they do interact, are so different that they are justifiably termed different universes. In such an instance it may be that one can define 'the perspective from outside the universe'. Furthermore, possibly statements from this 'outsider' perspective about the other universe can perhaps legitimately be considered as 'objective' when compared to statements made about a universe made from 'within' that universe.
This is especially the case when referring to the mental realm of thought and concept - the realm in which meaning and purpose arise - for this realm is beyond that of space-time-matter-energy, and therefore possibly provides for interconnections between universes which are distinct at the purely physical level.
In any case, as we stated previously, whether or not such a perspective can be rigorously defined is not important in this context. What is relevant is to consider what is our intuitive understanding of free will, moral responsibility, meaning and purpose in this context, to compare this to the outsider's perspective, and to investigate what might be the intent of the Biblical accounts in this context.
Part II: Context: 3pages
Chapter 6: The Creation and Eden Accounts: the Context of Biblical Text
Teleology, Metaphysics, and Moral History
The book you are now reading was written by God.
A startling claim like that made above will not be taken at face value by most readers. The mere fact that a book makes the claim to be a record of God's word to man is certainly not sufficient reason to accept it as such. Claims made by a book about itself - its contents, origin, authorship, history and so on - will not, if unsubstantiated, convince most readers.
Of course, a text itself may contain what is to some people convincing evidence of the truth of its claims it makes. For example, upon reading a particular book which claims divine origin some people may feel convinced by its insight that it is indeed of divine origin. Generally though instead of simply accepting or rejecting the claim of a book regarding its authorship, we might ask others if they know where the text originated, when it was written, by whom. We look for the cultural context of the book.
Modern approaches of deconstruction and the post-modernist attitude to interpretation of history and of texts provide important insights. However in this work we are more concerned with free will of the type implied by the traditional understanding of the Bible; it is that which has informed our cultural conception of free will and moral responsibility. We are not concerned here with historical, critical or deconstructionist readings of the Biblical text.
For our purposes here the relevant cultural context of the Bible is provided by the Tradition claiming to stretch back to the time the Bible was written. Consequently in our discussions we consider the written text of the Bible to be simply an element of the oral tradition (see appendix below for more discussion of this point), and our interpretation of the creation and Eden accounts will follow the interpretations provided by this tradition.
The Creation and Eden Accounts
The first chapters of Genesis present two separate stories relating to the central mysteries of human existence. The first - that of the six days of creation - relates to the fundamental questions of why the universe exists at all, how it came to exist, how life came into being, and the origin of the human race. In the second account - that of the Garden of Eden - the central event is the onset of free-willed consciousness and of moral choice, represented in the Bible by the incident of the Tree of Knowledge.
To understand the creation accounts, one must also understand the literary background of the people to whom the Bible was initially given. Analyzing the creation accounts that were current at the time provides us with insight into the meaning of the creation account for those who first received it. Indeed, comparisons with the creation accounts of the Babylonians and other ancient nations show up distinctive and significant differences between them, which allows us to see what special meaning the creation and Eden accounts had for those who first heard them, and were perhaps familiar with the current Babylonian and other creation stories.
The central message conveyed by the contrast between the creation account in Genesis and the other creation accounts is that from the Biblical perspective the universe is Purposive, having been created by an Omnipotent God rather than having been eternally existent and governed by various competing gods. God consciously chose to create, freely deciding on each step of the design of the universe, proceeding only when and because the prior stage met divine approval. There is a moral order in the universe, God is not capricious, and man was created 'in the image of God' - a conscious being endowed with free will and the moral responsibility to choose the good.
Creation is itself an act of will, and the creation account is accordingly about an act of divine will. Indeed, the method of creation in Genesis exhibits choice and thought rather than caprice or predestination, and the culmination of the process is both an expression of will and its attendant creation of will - according to some traditional Biblical commentators, [God is the quintessential Will and therefore] the creation of a being who is made 'in the image of the creator' means the creation of a free willed being.
While the creation account leads up to the creation of humanity, this in turn leads up to the eating of the tree of knowledge in the Eden account. Thus, there is a progression from the initial creation of existence to the emergence of free-will and of moral choice - with the being which was created in the free-willed image of its creator acting in defiance of the will of its creator.
This second account, that of the Garden of Eden, relates to the fundamentals of the human condition; human mortality, existential loneliness, and the burden of moral choice. It also involves the central philosophical paradoxes of human existence such as the emergence of free-will, the mind-body problem (discussed in later chapters), and the soul/body and God/man dichotomy.
The significance of the creation and Eden accounts derive from their interpretations on various thematic levels, and in this work we explore these accounts from the perspective of the metaphysical, philosophical, religious and scientific centrality of free willed consciousness. We will explore the connection between the two accounts , as well as the connection between the themes of existence, purposive creation, free-willed consciousness, and moral choice.
The knowledge gained from scientific origin theories makes the creation and Eden accounts particularly enigmatic when interpreted as a cosmogony. However, the understanding of these accounts as being an ordinary cosmogony is actually somewhat limiting, and possibly inappropriate to its intent, as we shall discuss later. At various junctures throughout the book (eg in the appendix to this chapter), we will discuss the relationship of these accounts to the teachings of modern cosmology.
As we stated in the preface, understanding the connections between the two accounts will aid us in appreciating their meaning and their juxtaposition, and can also help motivate the implications in Genesis of a 'recent' creation.
The Creation and Eden Accounts, and their Connection to the Rest of the Bible
The underlying theme reappearing at various junctures in the present book is that of free-willed moral consciousness, and this theme also underlies most of the Bible.
The Bible is concerned with moral instruction and regulation, with rights and duties, and its stories are concerned always with the moral actions of humanity. All the Biblical commandments and prohibitions, all the praise and censure, all talk of reward and punishment, are predicated on the fact that humans are moral beings - that they have a free will, the intelligence to understand the consequences of their actions, and an understanding of the distinction between right and wrong. The Bible is about the actions of moral beings, and is addressed to moral beings.
The other half of the equation is that of the source of all the above - of the moral beings themselves, and of the book- the Bible - that is addressed to them. According to the tradition which presents the Bible, the universe as a whole is the product of design, the moral beings are part of this design, and the book derives from the author of the design. The universe is the product of free-willed conscious design, and it contains within it a free-willed conscious being, a being which when sufficiently developed can even employ its moral consciousness to challenge that of its creator, as the book tells us Abraham did.
Thus the Bible is prefaced with the two central ideas underlying its entire content. First, a description of a deliberate, willed, planned creation; creation of a universe via the design of a free-willed consciousness, concluding with the creation of free-willed humanity. Then an account of the emergence within this universe of an independent free-willed moral consciousness, derived of a mixture of dust and divine spirit.
The rest of the Bible is then a dialogue between the creating free-willed consciousness and this creature of dust and divine spirit, whose autonomy extends to the use of its free-will to defy the will of its creator who has granted it this very autonomy.
As advertised, we will find that an understanding of the Bible as based on the concept of free-willed conscious moral activity will allow us to better understand some of the perplexing issues relating to the creation and Garden of Eden accounts. Furthermore, with insights provided by modern physics and cosmology especially as relating to the idea of free-willed consciousness, we will find a better appreciation of the relationship between the ideas presented in Genesis and those of science and cosmology itself.
Genesis as Teleology rather than Chronology
The creation account should not be expected to contain a chronological description of the development of the universe, but rather it is a reference to the underlying purpose for which the universe was created. And, as in the Biblical perspective this purpose involves the fulfillment of the Bible's moral ethical and religious commands, and it is man's free-willed consciousness which qualifies him for this challenge, the creation and Eden account are less concerned with the development of the physical universe and the animal kingdom, and more with the emergence of man and of free-willed consciousness.
The Bible is not primarily a history book, and the text itself makes no overt claim to be one. Nor does it claim to be a science text. Tradition does view the text in this way to some degree however this is not necessarily its essential fous. Rather, it is to be seen as a record of divine revelation regarding moral history, and moral ethical and legal imperatives, with the creation and Eden accounts as introductory chapters.
Rather than stressing the physics of planetary formation, Genesis stresses that the universe was carefully designed to produce life; rather than dealing with biology, it speaks of a purposive universe in which a creature formed from the dust of the earth is infused with the divine spirit and charged with the challenge and obligation of moral action.
The entire course of Biblical narrative points to the fact that from the Biblical perspective the universe is a stage for the drama of moral activity, that its purpose is the fulfillment of the imperatives outlined in the Bible, that the meaning of life and of existence of the universe itself is tied to the action of free-willed conscious choice.
In the Biblical perspective, it is not the actions of non-sentient animals which are of interest, it is not the evolution of stellar systems which are relevant, but rather only the moral activity of free-willed beings are significant. In this world-view, history - as a record of events of significance - begins not with the big bang or with the dinosaurs or even with early hominids, but rather with the emergence of the first free-willed conscious being, the drama of the first moral choices.
This understanding of the meaning of history for the Bible, and of its preoccupation with events of moral significance, allows an appreciation of the historical-chronological structure of the first few chapters of Genesis.
Traditional Genesis presents a description of the careful and purposeful creation of the universe culminating in the formation of the first humans, followed by an account of the emergence of free-willed consciousness and of moral activity.
It declares that contrary to those who may claim that the universe is the product of random chance, or exists in of itself from eternity, the universe is actually the creation of a Mind, and is the product of careful design. In contrast to those who may insist on the cosmic insignificance of humanity in comparison to the vast physical universe and the myriad species of life on earth, the creation account stresses the crucial role of humanity in the universe as derived from the potential for moral choice which distinguishes humanity from the inanimate no matter how vast, and from the non-sentient, no matter how numerous.
When understood in this context, and with this understanding of their role, the opening chapters of Genesis resonate not only with the rest of the Bible, but also with many of the speculative ideas which have arisen in the wake of modern physics and cosmology; in turn these ideas shed light on the structure and content of the opening sections of Genesis.
Part III: The Ineffability of Free Will: Why it may be that a scientific theory of true free will is impossible. The appropriateness of the Eden account's style and format given the nature of free will.
Chapter 7:The Ineffability of Free Will 7.5 pages
Overview: maybe for book jacket: 2 pages
Appendix: Morality and free will 1/2 page
Contents of FILE "FREE WILL AND PURPOSE" which was erased 1/2 page
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