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Professor Jerry Coyne has recently written a highly critical post entitled, Ken Miller, confused, finds free will in quantum mechanics, in which he attacks Professor Miller’s invocation of quantum physics to rescue free will. In a recent Youtube video, made on March 23 of this year at the New York Academy of Sciences, and featuring theologians John Haught and Nancey Murphy, Professor Miller elaborated his views:
At its finest level, matter has an inherent unpredictability, which certainly doesn’t explain free will, but certainly gives the lie to the notion that any inherent mechanical system is ultimately predictable. And I don’t think we are predictable: I think that capacity to make choices is ultimately wired into the circuity of our brain, and that’s how we become autonomous beings; that’s how we make judgments; that’s how we decide to seek the truth and how we make moral decisions. (Emphases mine – VJT.)
Quantum unpredictability: necessary but not sufficient for free will
Professor Coyne was incredulous that Miller could make such a claim:
What? Quantum mechanics to the rescue! … The obvious problem is that Miller equates unpredictability with free will. I’m willing to grant that perhaps events on the quantum level would lead to two universes, started off at the exact same physical configuration, winding up at different states in the future. What neither I nor any other competent thinker is willing to concede is that quantum unpredictability has anything to do with “free will”. A “decision” does not become free if it’s merely the result of the unpredictable movement of an electron somewhere in our brain. How can anyone believe that stuff?
I have to say that I was mystified by Professor Coyne’s failure to understand the simple point being made here by Professor Ken Miller. Professor Miller nowhere equated unpredictability with free will; indeed, he explicitly stated that unpredictability doesn’t explain free will. What he said was that unpredictability is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the existence of free will. No philosopher or scientist claims that a decision becomes free simply by virtue of being unpredictable; hence when Professor Coyne remarks that “A ‘decision’ does not become free if it’s merely the result of the unpredictable movement of an electron somewhere in our brain,” he is merely attacking a straw man.
Professor Coyne will probably want to know precisely how quantum physics makes free will possible, if the former is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the latter. In my post, How is libertarian free will possible? (July 14, 2011), I provided a detailed model which attempted to address this very question. I discuss this model below. Professor Coyne is welcome to critique my model if he so wishes.
There is one thing that Professor Coyne gets absolutely right, however: genuine free will is incompatible with determinism. He and Professor Miller agree on this point, against philosophical compatibilists (such as Professor Daniel Dennett) who argue that our actions can be completely determined and yet fully free. I critiqued Dennett’s view in my post, Battle of the two Elizabeths: are free will and physical determinism compatible? (14 August 2011).
Is emergentist materialism sufficient for genuine freedom?
In the Youtube video I linked to above, Professor Miller went on to say that our capacity to make choices is wired into our brains. Evidently he is an emergentist materialist:
We are collections of not just the molecules that make us up, but also the cells that make up our bodies. These collections have emergent properties – and what I mean by emergent properties is: the 100 trillion cells that make up a human being together are capable of doing things that no-one in their right mind would ever look at a single cell and say that cell is eventually able to do. I’ve never looked at a cell under an electron microscope and said, “You know, that’s the cell that can compose a symphony,” or “That’s the cell that can hit a baseball,” or do just about anything else. And I think out of these emerging properties comes not just the ability to make moral decisions, but the ability to basically, as an organism, made up of all these different parts, to try to ask questions like, “What is the truth, and why should we seek it?” (Emphases mine – VJT.)
On this point, I would have to respectfully disagree with Professor Miller: I would say that our non-deterministic brains allow us to make free choices, but that brains themselves are incapable of freely choosing anything. In my post, Why I think the interaction problem is real (July 13, 2011), I explained why higher-level emergent properties of the brain cannot account for freedom:
It might seem tempting to say that higher-level bodily actions can bring about lower-level bodily actions. That’s fine, so far as it goes. However, if we are to have genuine freedom, then these higher-level bodily actions must be just as ontologically fundamental as the lower-level bodily actions that they determine. For if these higher-level actions are determined by lower-level bodily actions occurring at a previous time, then we are back at square one again: we are once more the prisoners of our body chemistry, and bottom-up causation rules.
If you’re going to argue that higher-level emergent processes occurring in the brain can explain human freedom, then you’ll have to argue that these processes were not determined from below at a previous date. But can brain processes be free?
Arguments against mechanistic materialism
In my post, I then provided links to some short, highly readable philosophical posts (see here, here, here, here and here) demonstrating that a purely bodily action could not possibly qualify as a free choice. (See here for a more serious paper by the late Professor James Ross.) However, I realize that Professor Coyne is distrustful of philosophical reasoning, as he considers it to be based on unverifiable armchair argumentation, so today I’ll try a different tack. Instead, I’d like to suggest that Professor Coyne have a look at a non-technical mathematical paper by the Oxford mathematician J. R. Lucas, which was read to the Turing Conference at Brighton on April 6th, 1990. It’s an argument based on Godel’s theorem, which aims to show that mechanism is false. Lucas originally developed the argument in an article entitled, Minds, Machines and Godel (Philosophy, 36, 1961, pp.112-127). In his subsequent 1990 paper, Lucas elaborated his argument and defended it against some common criticisms.
I can move the neurons in my brain
There are some philosophical dualists (e.g. Professor Edward Feser) who have argued (see here) that the “interaction problem” is a pseudo-problem. In my post, Why I think the interaction problem is real, I argued that interaction between persons and their brains really occurs. I went on to defend the view that persons (not brains) make choices, and that it is simply “a basic fact of human nature that whenever I perform the non-bodily action of deciding to move my right arm, region ‘X’ of the motor homunculus in my brain (i.e. the area in my brain which governs right arm movements) is activated, and whenever I decide to move my right leg instead, region ‘Y’ of the motor homunculus in my brain (which governs right leg movements) is activated.” This was a deliberate oversimplification: I further acknowledged that “the mechanics of voluntary movement [described above] is grossly oversimplified, as it overlooks such things as feedback, forward modeling, fine motor-tuning and proprioception.” In the same post, I also criticized the view (commonly known as Cartesian dualism) that “that mind and body are two things, and that the former interacts with the latter in a purely mechanical fashion – as if the mind were like a ‘spiritual billiard ball’ that could somehow set ‘physical billiard balls’ (i.e. neurons in the brain) in motion.”
How is quantum physics related to free will?
I wrote about the relation of quantum physics to free will in my post, How is libertarian free will possible? (July 14, 2011), in which I provided a detailed model of how a non-bodily act of top-down causation transforms a non-deterministic brain into the executor of a free choice made by a person. Here is the relevant excerpt from my post:
Reasoning is an immaterial activity. This means that reasoning doesn’t happen anywhere – certainly not in some spooky Cartesian soul hovering 10 centimeters above my head. It has no location. Ditto for choice. However, choices have to be somehow realized on a physical level, otherwise they would have no impact on the world. The soul doesn’t push neurons, as Eccles appears to think; instead, it selects from one of a large number of quantum possibilities thrown up at some micro level of the brain (Doyle’s micro mind). This doesn’t violate quantum randomness, because a selection can be non-random at the macro level, but random at the micro level. The following two rows of digits will serve to illustrate my point.
1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1
0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1The above two rows of digits were created by a random number generator. Now suppose I impose the macro requirement: keep the columns whose sum equals 1, and discard the rest. I now have:
1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1
0 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0Each row is still random, but I have imposed a non-random macro-level constraint. That’s how my will works when I make a choice.
For Aristotelian-Thomists, a human being is not two things – a soul and a body – but one being, capable of two radically different kinds of acts – material acts (which other animals are also capable of) and formal, immaterial actions, such as acts of choice and deliberation. In practical situations, immaterial acts of choice are realized as a selection from one of a large number of randomly generated possible pathways.
On a neural level, what probably happens when an agent decides to raise his/her arm is this: the arm goes through a large number of micro-level muscular movements (tiny twitches) which are randomly generated at the quantum level. The agent tries these out over a very short interval of time (a fraction of a second) before selecting the one which feels right – namely, the one which matches the agent’s desire to raise his/her arm. This selection continues during the time interval over which the agent raises his/her arm. The wrong (randomly generated quantum-level) micro-movements are continually filtered out by the agent.
Facts are stubborn things. If the facts suggest that materialism is wrong, then it is time to look for a better model. In this post, I have attempted to describe a top-down, “person-body” dualist model which addresses the nuts and bolts questions relating to free will, and which explains how quantum indeterminacy makes it realizable within an organism with a human body.
Though not as clear as your explanation Dr. Torley, this video is in the same direction as you:
Here’s the way I look at the free-will/consciousness arising from matter question.
Presumably, on the assumption that consciousness arose sometime after the Universe began, all arrangements of matter blindly and obediently followed physical law (quantum mechanical or otherwise) before it appeared. Presumably, according to materialist metaphysics, all arrangements of matter continued to blindly and obediently follow physical law after consciousness arose.
Given that consciousness in and of itself thereby made no difference to the behavior of arrangements of matter, it is impossible to see why it should bother to “emerge” at all. It makes no difference to anything, cannnot cause anything that wasn’t perfectly able to take place without it, and therefore is not even implied by considering the physical state of things alone. No explanation that says in effect: “This unconscious thing interacted with that unconscious thing and that’s why consciousness ’emerged’.” can even be coherent. A physical explanation of consciousness is thereby a logical impossibility. Unless consciousness can act as a separate cause of things its “emergence” can only be a non-sequitur.
I found another ‘logical impossibility’, from empirical evidence, as to consciousness being ’emergent’ from a material basis:
(i.e. This experiment clearly shows that the detector is secondary in the experiment and that a conscious observer, being able to know the information of which path a photon takes with local certainty, is primary to the wave collapsing to a particle in the experiment. The act of a detector detecting a photon at an earlier time in the experiment does not determine if the wave will be collapsed at the end of the experiment. Only the availability of the information to the observer is what matters for the wave to collapse. That is what he meant by ‘we the observer are shocked to learn’)
It is also very interesting to note that some materialists seem to have a very hard time grasping the simple point of these extended double slit experiments, but to try to put it more clearly; To explain an event which defies time and space, as the quantum erasure experiment clearly does, you cannot appeal to any material entity in the experiment like the detector, or any other 3D physical part of the experiment, which is itself constrained by the limits of time and space. To give an adequate explanation for defying time and space, such as also had to be done when the hidden variable argument was refuted by Alain Aspect, one is forced to appeal to a transcendent entity which is itself not confined by time or space. But then again I guess I can see why forcing someone, who claims to be a atheistic materialist, to appeal to a non-material transcendent entity, to give an adequate explanation for such a ‘spooky’ event, would invoke such utter confusion on their part. Yet to try to put it in even more ‘shocking’ terms for the atheists, the ‘shocking’ conclusion of the experiment is that a transcendent Mind, with a capital M, must precede the collapse of quantum waves to 3-Dimensional particles. Moreover, it is impossible for a human mind to ever ’emerge’ from any 3-D material basis which is dependent on a preceding conscious cause for its own collapse to a 3D state in the first place. This is more than a slight problem for the atheistic-evolutionary materialist who insists that our minds ’emerged’, or evolved, from 3D matter. In the following article Professor Henry puts it more clearly than I can:
Astrophysicist John Gribbin commented on the Renninger experiment here:
i.e. The material detector is completely removed from any possibility as to being the cause of quantum wave collapse in the experiment.
That the mind of a individual observer would play such an integral, yet not complete ‘closed loop’ role, in instantaneous quantum wave collapse to uncertain 3-D particles, gives us clear evidence that our mind is a unique entity. A unique entity with a superior quality of existence when compared to the uncertain 3D particles of the material universe. This is clear evidence for the existence of the ‘higher dimensional mind’ of man that supersedes any material basis that the mind has been purported to emerge from by materialists. I would also like to point out that the ‘effect’, of universal quantum wave collapse to each ‘central 3D observer’ in the universe (Wheeler; Delayed Choice, Wigner; Quantum Symmetries), gives us clear evidence of the extremely special importance that the ’cause’ of the ‘Infinite Mind of God’ places on each of our own individual souls/minds.
Music:
THis all goes back to the other recent post about the quantum cat problem. As we pointed out in that thread the observer is a fundamental local point of ALL quantum physical events. Therefore, i nthe beginning when our brains and their activity is forming in an unpredictible physcial expansion, those events lead us into a world of choices that WE then have to make. Given how we develop in our DNA/biology and the nuturing of it effects our eventual choices, and our choices overtime mount and directly effect our life-line. So not only does our observation directly effect the world around us, and not only is there an inherently unpredictable nature to the physical struture of the reality we are comprised of and surrounded by but OUR CHOICES directly effect what will happen to us next.
This is why things like homosexuality cannot scientifcally be dertermined. It is because in human beings there are many things than can influence our decisions and development, but when it comes to decisons and choices, given ALL the vairables, and the nature of Qm physical reality, they elude a purely physical mechanical explanation.
And if you doubt me think of this. Qm says anything we observe changes in the make up of its physical manifestation just due to our observation alone. Thus, even if you thought we DID have a sufficent explanation of ANY finely tuned choice realted event- THAT EXPLANATION ITSELF is then automatically called into question by our own inherent uncertainty in the matter that we use to understand and form that theory/explanation.
This is what heisenberg and Bohn understood. That is why they said there is NO quantum reality- but only a quantum physical explanation of a physcial reality that we CANNOT truly know.
Heisenberg said “the world is not only stranger than we think, it is stranger than we CAN think.” Ad that is because we are not the masters of this universe but merely players in it relying on our best understandings and faith to guide us though the darkness.
The ONLY THINGs that are safe from the uncertainty of QM variation are those things that be believe in FAITH, because faith is where you reach out to the unknown and accept it as truth. And the decison of what you CHOOSE to believe in, WILL directly effect the outcome of other subsequent events in your life. In that sense what we put our faith in BECOMES our reality.
That is why proper education is so important.
And prayer as well.
Excellent food for thought, as usual.
A little off-topic, but:
I have been arguing at Elizabeth Liddle’s blog for several days now about the simple, necessary assumption that humans can deliberately discern true statements. If, under the materialst/determinist paradigm, deliberacy (free will, choice) is nothing but a description of a sensation that accompanies an action, then it cannot be used as the causative agency for the action.
I “chose to” or “deliberately did” become incompatible as the causative explanation for the action under materialism/determinism. It would be like saying “I felt nauseous, so my fist hit his face” or “I imagined a unicorn, so the hammer head hit the nail.” Associated images or sensations do not provide causal explanations for an action.
They argue that humans cannot deliberately discern true statements (because “truth” is unavailable to us as subjective entities, or because no “free will” actually exists). I ask them if they are presenting that as a deliberately discerned true statement about what humans can and cannot do, and if they are expecting me to be able to deliberately discern that their claim is true via the argument they present.
It seems odd that so obvious a repudiation of materialism/determinism can simply be denied. One cannot live or argue as if they do not have true free will; even arguments against it necessarily implicate that we have it and that it is a sufficient causative agency in and of itself, or else we could not be expected to deliberately discern the truth of any argument.
I think it is a very dangerous subject to move into. The danger is exactly the one ID opposes: falling into the trap of a mechanistic/naturalistic view. We should leave room for mystery. How can immaterial entities be explained or forced into any reasoning scheme? E.g. how can my attitide to ones I love be reduced to chemical reactions in my body? For one, Schroedinger ended up driving towards pantheism in his deliberations on free will.
BTW, if we want to defend a theistic stand in the origins controversy, we must also be aware of this danger: God is independent of any reasoning and cannot be forced by necessity. So I think it is impossible to prove or disprove that God exists.
My own view is closer to Miller’s than to Coyne’s on this issue. I do agree that Coyne has misinterpreted Miller when he says “Miller equates unpredictability with free will.”
The real problem with “free will” debates, is that there is little agreement on what we even mean by “free will.”
as to this comment of Miller’s:
Actually at ‘its finest level’, matter with an inherent unpredictability is merely an illusion that we have apriori forced onto the evidence, for at the ‘finest level’ of reality we find that there is in fact information not matter!!!
Further note:
i.e. Whenever Miller, or anyone else, mentions ‘matter’, to support a reductive materialistic position, they are merely referring to a imaginary mental construct that is not truly the basis in reality, for reality at its basis is shown to be information, i.e. Logos, The Word of John 1:1.
further note:
How can functional quantum information/entanglement possibly ‘emerge’ from any material basis of atoms when atoms are now shown to reduce to a transcendent basis of quantum information in the first place? i.e. It is IMPOSSIBLE for the ’cause’ of transcendent functional quantum information to ’emerge’ from, or reside within, material particles!
Moreover neo-Darwinists have yet to deal honestly with the fact that purely ‘material’ processes have NEVER been seen producing ANY functional information!
footnotes:
Reading your response, I couldn’t help but smile and think: “If the mind is pre-determined, then how is it possible to be arguing (i.e., have two separate positions) about what free will consists of.” You have to chuckle a bit here.
Well thought out, and well stated. Bravo!
I think a simple rebuttal to Coyne’s position is the reality of “out of body” experiences.
These are now very well-documented.
In one instance, a person born blind, had an out of body experience and later described what they “saw”!!
Thus, as you argue, vjt, the mind is obviously “immaterial”, and hence, associated with our bodies through ‘agency’, but not bound by the demands of this ‘agency’.
Dr. Torley:
Quantum unpredictability: necessary but not sufficient for free will
The false premise in there is that “unpredictability” is true. More precisely, unpredictable is not the same as unknown. Something is inherently unpredictable only if it is inherently unknowable and can never be sufficiently measured or observed. We often use the word “random” as a euphemism for unpredictable, when in fact what seems random is often insufficiently measured.
Brownian motion of molecules is not a “random walk”, rather its lack of predictibility is directly related to the lack of measurement of the kinetic energy and direction of each impinging molecule. A hugely complex system to measure precisely with existing technology, but measurements are theoretically possible and hence what seems random is theoretically predictable.
At quantum levels, as recent experiments *prove*, what was presumed unpredictable was merely unknown; it was observed (measured) in the past when the observations need to be, albeit surprisingly, in the future of what is to be predicted. I.e., past quantum unpredictibility becomes quantum certainty by observing the quantum future.
The point is that what is presumed to be inherently unpredictable, likely is merely misunderstood and inadequately measured.
Further, I can choose at will with complete and unrestricted freedom to either mimic, complement, or ignore (make no choice) the output of a quantum random number generator, thus demonstrating that my free will is independent of whatever quantum “randomness” impinges upon the generator. i.e., my choices are neither determined by any other agent nor by macro, micro, or even quantum environmental factors.
Coyne and Miller are both wrong. Quantum unpredictibility is neither fact nor relevant.
… it [the soul] selects from one of a large number of quantum possibilities thrown up at some micro level of the brain (Doyle’s micro mind).
Whatever the soul/mind is, I highly doubt it operates at quantum resolution, i.e., it seems implausible the soul sits at quantum control board simultaneously selecting from a near infinitude of quantum possibilities and then has the “granularity” to select just one (or a group of many) for some kind of feedback. However the immaterial “person” (soul/mind) interacts with the physical brain, the “macro” level of thought in our conscientiousness would seem to argue against a level of control finer than the motor/sensory homunculus. Our conscientious thoughts give us no hint of thinking (even autonomic feedback) at quantum levels. Even immature, developing minds (young children) with no concept of quantum levels are as adept at voluntary motor skills as most adults. While we learn to throw a ball accurately, we learn at macro feedback levels, not fine-tuning quantum possibilities.
The mind/soul need interact (whatever that mechanism) with the brain at a level no finer than the brain’s voluntary functions, the mapping of which we don’t yet understand very well, but it plainly seems several levels above quantum. Just because that interaction has an immaterial component does not justify a corequisite of quantum randomness.
</my2cents>
Materialists undermine their own philosophy each time they try to persuade us that free will doesn’t exist.
If, as they insist, matter is the sole determinant of our beliefs and actions, then their arguments do not have the capacity to take us on a path other than the one which nature has determined?
If, on the other hand, they think that they can, through the power of words, persuade us to take a path other than the one nature has determined, then materialism has obviously left the building.
I, too, have reservations about trying to explain the unfathomable mystery of the relationship between the immaterial human soul (which includes the faculties of mind and will) and the material brain (an organ, albeit the noblest of organs) through quantum indeterminancy). The fact of the relationsip is evident, but the how is, in my judgment, a mystery that will always remain unexplained.
Charles a very well put two cents; And what you have stated is what bugs me about Hameroff’s quantum microtubules (see post #1). For though he undermines the materialistic understanding of neurons with his quantum microtubule model (which he now has empirical support for), his model does not, by itself, provide empirical support for ‘top down’ cause of, nor causality from, the mind. Yet there is a line of evidence, that I have seen Hameroff mention in his writings, that does provide empirical support for at least a ‘beyond space and time’ cause for the mind:
Top down cause of mind is supported here;
As well, the extreme plasticity of the brain also argues very forcefully for a ‘top down’ cause for the mind:
If that wasn’t enough, at the molecular level, the cells of the brain are found to be extremely ‘plastic’ to changes in ‘activity in the brain’;
Whereas, though I haven’t seen Hameroff mention it, Top down causality ‘from’ the mind is supported here:
Particular quote of note from preceding video;
I once asked a evolutionist, after showing him the preceding experiment, “Since you ultimately believe that the ‘god of random chance’ produced everything we see around us, what in the world is my mind doing pushing your non-existent god around?”
Although empirical support for a transcendent cause of, and from, the mind is very important to establish, perhaps the most important empirical finding, of recent science, is that ‘non-local’ (beyond space and time) quantum information is found in molecular biology on a massive scale, for this provides solid support for the ‘mechanism’, for the theistic belief, of a transcendent soul of man that lives beyond the death of his body:
It is very sobering to realize just how ‘spooky’, to use Einstein’s infamous word, it is to find quantum information/entanglement on a massive scale in molecular biology:
And this ‘beyond space and time’ quantum information/entanglement, found on a massive scale in molecular biology, does indeed provide a very plausible mechanism for the transition to a ‘eternal dimension’ upon death, as is commonly held by Theists:
Moreover, reality itself offers evidence for a ‘eternal dimension’ to be transitioned to!
Please compare the similarity of the optical effect, noted at the 3:22 minute mark of the following video, which was put together by two Australian University Physics Professors, who used a supercomputer to make the video, when the 3-Dimensional world ‘folds and collapses’ into a tunnel shape around the direction of travel as an observer moves towards the ‘higher dimension’ of the speed of light, with the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ reported in very many Near Death Experiences:
Here is the interactive website (with link to the math at the bottom of the page) related to the preceding video;
And here are some ‘typical’ Near Death Experience testimonies from Judeo-Christian cultures:
Moreover time itself, becomes eternal at the speed of light:
And this ‘eternality’ found for physical reality, is confirmed in Judeo-Christian Near Death Testimonies as well:
verse and music:
I am often puzzled by people who claim that science refutes free will. Science itself depends of making choices so as to thoroughly test possible alternative explanations. And if we don’t have free will, I wonder how scientists make those choices.