Here’s physicist George Ellis on free will, at John Horgan’s Scientific American blog:
Biologist Rupert Sheldrake, whom I interviewed in my last post, wasn’t the only fascinating scientist I hung out with recently at Howthelightgetsin, a festival hosted by the Institute of Arts & Ideas. I also befriended George F. R. Ellis, the physicist-mathematician-cosmologist, an authority on the Big Bang and other cosmic mysteries. Ellis and I hit it off initially because we share some—how shall I put it?—concerns about the direction of physics, but I soon discovered that his interests range far beyond physics. He has published papers and books not only on physics and cosmology (including the 1973 classic The Large-Scale Structure of Space-Time, co-authored with Stephen Hawking) but also on philosophy, complexity theory, neuroscience, education and even low-income housing. (See his website, and his terrific 2011 critique of multiverse theories in Scientific American.) A native of South Africa, Ellis is professor emeritus at the University of Cape Town, where he taught for decades, and has also held positions at Cambridge, the University of Texas, the Fermi Institute and other institutions around the globe.
Horgan: Krauss, Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson have been bashing philosophy as a waste of time. Do you agree?
Ellis: If they really believe this they should stop indulging in low-grade philosophy in their own writings. You cannot do physics or cosmology without an assumed philosophical basis. You can choose not to think about that basis: it will still be there as an unexamined foundation of what you do. The fact you are unwilling to examine the philosophical foundations of what you do does not mean those foundations are not there; it just means they are unexamined.
And free will?:
Horgan: Einstein, in the following quote, seemed to doubt free will: “If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the Earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord…. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.” Do you believe in free will?
Ellis: Yes. Einstein is perpetuating the belief that all causation is bottom up. This simply is not the case, as I can demonstrate with many examples from sociology, neuroscience, physiology, epigenetics, engineering, and physics. Furthermore if Einstein did not have free will in some meaningful sense, then he could not have been responsible for the theory of relativity – it would have been a product of lower level processes but not of an intelligent mind choosing between possible options.
I find it very hard to believe this to be the case – indeed it does not seem to make any sense. Physicists should pay attention to Aristotle’s four forms of causation – if they have the free will to decide what they are doing. If they don’t, then why waste time talking to them? They are then not responsible for what they say.
Lots more good stuff from Ellis in the interview, especially on the multiverse fad.
See also: Does science have answers to absolutely everything?
and
“I will” means something after all.
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nice find news!
It is of interest to point out that Ellis was part of the team that extended Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity to show that not only space but time also had a beginning in the Big Bang:
Here is a quote from Ellis on the fine tuning of the laws of physics:
I was also heartened to see George Ellis quote this from Parker Palmer,,,
Ellis quotes that quote from Palmer at the 60 minute mark of the following video:
As to philosophy, Ellis made this following, rather dramatic, statement:
And indeed Ellis need not rely on a ‘model’ to point out the centrality of the earth in the universe. He can just use this video to point out the centrality of the earth in the universe:
Of course the caveat is that in 4-Dimensional space-time every place in the universe may be considered central:
Thus from a 3-dimensional (3D) perspective, any particular 3D spot in the universe is to be considered just as ‘center of the universe’ as any other particular spot in the universe is to be considered ‘center of the universe’. This centrality found for any 3D place in the universe is because the universe is a 4D expanding hypersphere, analogous in 3D to the surface of an expanding balloon. All points on the surface are moving away from each other, and every point is central, if that’s where you live.
Thus, as Ellis pointed out, the only reason you can exclude the earth as being central in the universe is on philosophical grounds, not on empirical grounds. Yet empirically, we now have evidence that the earth is not as haphazardly placed in the universe as materialists/atheists would prefer people to believe:
Of note: The preceding article was written before the Planck data (with WMPA & COBE data), but the multipoles were actually verified by Planck.
Also of interest to the ‘geometric’ considerations of centrality in the universe is the following,,,
The preceding interactive graph points out that the smallest scale visible to the human eye (as well as a human egg) is at 10^-4 meters, which ‘just so happens’ to be directly in the exponential center of all possible sizes of our physical reality (not just ‘nearly’ in the exponential center!). i.e. 10^-4 is, exponentially, right in the middle of 10^-35 meters, which is the smallest possible unit of length, which is Planck length, and 10^27 meters, which is the largest possible unit of ‘observable’ length since space-time was created in the Big Bang, which is the diameter of the universe. This is very interesting for, as far as I can tell, the limits to human vision (as well as the size of the human egg) could have, theoretically, been at very different positions than directly in the exponential middle.
Further note:
Verse and Music:
ditto mung @1, very nice find News!
At the microcosmic level, it is clear from just a few remarks of Plank and Bohr that the boundary between matter and spirit had been all but reached by quantum physic, 80 plus years ago.
And bear in mind, that while BA77 continually tries to get it across to befuddled atheists, that the mathematical underpinning of the quantum-mechanical paradigm has also been mathematically proven to be the final, definitive, unimprovable paradigm for all time, these same naturalists are still looking elsewhere….’cos QM is crazy stuff…’n’ stuff.’
‘Whoy, ifn Oi wanted fer to get ter Whimperng Chutney, Oi wouldn’t start from ‘ere, dyer see….?’
Wow, I cannot believe Einstein would say something like that knowing full well that it is not a testable claim. One can just as easily claim that said Moon would try to depart from its boring trajectory and upon realizing that it cannot, would be thoroughly convinced that it was being directed by some unseen force and did not have any free will to choose a different path.
Ellis is a fellow countryman of mine. And just like professor David Block they make me very proud..
The day will come soon when Albert Einstein is no longer regarded as the god of physics. The man was so wrong about so many things (time dimension, determinism, block universe, spooky action at a distance, continuity, etc.) that the only reason that he’s still considered one of the greatest scientists in history is humanity’s propensity for hero worship. His strictly deterministic worldview is what caused him to dismiss free will. The man was a crackpot, in my opinion. Sorry if I offend anyone else’s worldview.
I find it very interesting that the materialistic belief of the universe being stable, and infinite in duration, was so deeply rooted in scientific thought that Albert Einstein, (1879-1955), when he was shown that his general relativity equation indicated a universe that was unstable and would ‘draw together’ under its own gravity, added a cosmological constant to his equation to reflect a stable universe rather than entertain the thought that the universe might have had a beginning..
In January 1933, the Belgian mathematician and Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre traveled with Albert Einstein to California for a series of seminars. After the Belgian detailed his Big Bang theory, Einstein stood up applauded, and said,
Einstein ended up calling the cosmological constant, he had added to his equation, the ‘biggest blunder’ of his life.
Most people who take a passing interest in science are aware of Einstein’s ‘biggest blunder’, but fewer people are aware that Einstein was also proven wrong in challenging the ‘spooky action at a distance’ predictions of quantum mechanics.
Of related interest to Einstein being proven wrong in Quantum Mechanics, Einstein was once asked (by a philosopher):
Einstein’s answer was categorical, he said:
Quote was taken from the last few minutes of this following video:
The preceding statement was an interesting statement for Einstein to make since ‘the now of the mind’ has, from many recent experiments in quantum mechanics, undermined the space-time of Einstein’s General Relativity as to being the absolute frame of reference for reality. Perhaps the most dramatic example of the ‘now of the mind’ within quantum physics is Leggett’s Inequality:
But it interesting to note where the ‘now of the mind’ of quantum mechanics finds partial congruence with relativity,,,
Of note from Near Death Experiences (NDEs),,
As to free will and Einstein’s denial of it, quantum mechanics has shown that not only is consciousness integral but and observers free will is also integral to the experiments in quantum mechanics. Perhaps the clearest example of free will’s integral role in quantum mechanics is the following experiment;
In other words, if my conscious choices really are just merely the result of whatever state the material particles in my brain happen to be in in the past (deterministic) how in blue blazes are my choices instantaneously effecting the state of material particles into the past?,,, These experiments from quantum mechanics are simply impossible on a reductive materialism (determinism) view of reality!
It is also interesting to note where Einstein’s theories of relativity and free will find partial congruence. Having free will basically boils down to having two options and choosing one of them. In Theism the two choices boil down to heaven and hell,,
And two very different ‘eternities’ are revealed by Einstein’s two theories of Relativity:
Verse and Music:
Did they choose life?
Great interview, thanks News. BTW, whatever happened to Nightlight? It looks to me like Ellis addresses the theory that he wrote about so much here.
I found a transcript of Jaki’s “The Mind and Its Now”
The Mind and Its Now – Stanley L. Jaki, July 2008 – transcript
Excerpt: There can be no active mind without its sensing its existence in the moment called now.,,,
Three quarters of a century ago Charles Sherrington, the greatest modern student of the brain, spoke memorably on the mind’s baffling independence of the brain. The mind lives in a self-continued now or rather in the now continued in the self. This life involves the entire brain, some parts of which overlap, others do not.
,,,There is no physical parallel to the mind’s ability to extend from its position in the momentary present to its past moments, or in its ability to imagine its future. The mind remains identical with itself while it lives through its momentary nows.
,,, the now is immensely richer an experience than any marvelous set of numbers, even if science could give an account of the set of numbers, in terms of energy levels. The now is not a number. It is rather a word, the most decisive of all words. It is through experiencing that word that the mind comes alive and registers all existence around and well beyond.
,,, All our moments, all our nows, flow into a personal continuum, of which the supreme form is the NOW which is uncreated, because it simply IS.
http://www.saintcd.com/science.....imitstart=
Great post News!
Hey guys I found some papers and essays that George Ellis wrote on his bio site.
——————————————
http://www.mth.uct.ac.za/~elli.....omness.pdf
Good find, Jaceli123. Readers might also like to have a look at this:
http://www.parssky.com/tools/f.....veries.pdf (warning: it’s a big file)
Scroll down to Ellis’s article, “Why Are the Laws of Nature as They Are? What Underlies Their Existence?” on page 387.
See also this article by biologist Dennis Noble, a friend of Ellis’s:
http://www.musicoflife.co.uk/pdfs/Answers-new1.pdf
Got to run. Bye for now.
Don’t forget Prof David Block!
http://www.davidblock.co.za
I love this quote from Professor Block….. one of my favourites….
“As a scientist, I always think logically and I reason things out. That was how my whole search for God began. I looked through my telescope at Saturn and said to myself, “Isn’t there a great God out there?” And when I studied relativity, relativistic astrophysics, cosmology and all those beautiful areas of mathematics, they pointed me to the fact that this whole universe is masterfully made, finely-tuned and controlled by the Great Designer. The logical next step was to want to meet this Designer face to face.”