Einstein, Purposive Creation and Morality: Quantum Physics and Free Will

 

Einstein, Moral Responsibility, and Genesis: As Einstein stated, created beings cannot be held meaningfully responsible for their actions by the creator of the universe and the laws of nature if their actions follow fully from the operation of these laws. In his conception, human, animal, vegetable and mineral follow identical physical law, and human mental activity is no exception -  just as a stone rolling down-hill does not choose to do so, neither can a person choose their thoughts and decisions – we can only 'feel' that we so choose. Einstein wrote:

 

            …the idea of the existence of an omnipotent, just, and omnibeneficient personal God....[has] decisive weaknesses...  …if 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?

 

            According to the view, a person’s actions are the result of ‘nature and nurture’, or ‘genes and environment’. Since the genes are from nature, if God created nature then they are from God. Similarly, nurture is the environment created by other people, but the actions of these other people are the result of their own nature and nurture, and so on backwards to the first people. In this sense ‘nurture’ is also indirectly ‘nature’. The fact that people are not simple mechanisms does not mean that they are not mechanisms, just that they are very complex mechanisms. Einstein felt that although much is not yet known about their brains, nevertheless if there is a God, their actions are the inevitable result of God’s laws of nature^[1][1], just as is the case for much simpler mechanisms. He wrote:

            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 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.

^[2][2].... the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary as the past.

 ^[3][3][For t]he man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation......a God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable......for the simple reason that a man’s actions are determined by necessity, external or internal, so that in God’s eyes he cannot be responsible any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it undergoes.

 

What type of free will is inherent in the Bible? Einstein did not believe in the existence of free will, and felt that if there is a God, this God could not be so capricious as to hold people responsible for actions that they could not prevent, and therefore he could not believe in the Biblical God (and the Biblical stories). Clearly Einstein felt that it was obvious that the creation and Eden accounts present the type of free will and moral responsibility which would be meaningful to a transcendent being.

Believers in the Bible can agree with Einstein that in the Biblical conception, the type of choices possible to humans could not be the results of determined or random processes if the created beings are to be held meaningfully responsible for their actions by the creator of the universe and the laws of nature. Whether or not one accepts the truth of the Biblical accounts, clearly the implication that human actions are of interest to God, and humans bear responsibility for their actions in God's eyes make sense only from within the perspective that humans posses a 'true free will'. ^[4][4]

 

'True Free Will' is Unique, and Controversial:  In order that a true free will exist:

1) more than one option exists at a decision point, as in quantum physics as opposed to determinism;

2) an option can be selected "freely", ie

a) not randomly, as in quantum physics;

b) not deterministically as implied by the rationality of a truly free choice.

 

The conundrum is: On the one hand, requirement #1 has been shown possible by quan­tum physics, while on the other hand #2 is contradicted by quantum physics which states that options are ‘selected’ at random. Furthermore, choice must be rational to be free, and rational implies deterministic (The idea of a truly free non-random choice implies a choice made after careful deliberation rather than by caprice. To be rational, a choice must be based on reasoning, which is a chain of logic, or at least a determi­nistic chain of thought. This deterministic chain leads eventually to one's genetic complement and environment and so forth.) Therefore free choice is self-contradictory.

 

Physics, Free Will and Intuition: True free will is necessarily built upon an interaction "transcending" both the determinism of classical physics and the probabilistically-determined randomness (PDR) of quantum physics. Unless there would be some experimental proof that true free will exists, physics would rightly exclude it^[5][5]. Our deepest intuitions however point to its existence. And of course most religious beliefs assume it does exist, and base the concept of moral responsibility on the assumption that our free will is real. Nevertheless our intuitions about what is logical make true free will counterintuitive. Thus our intuition is in favor of the idea of true free will, but our conception of logic makes the same true free will counterintuitive.

 

The Acausality of Free Will: a Rationale and Ramifications: Beyond our intuition there are other justifications for assuming the possibility of non-causal, or 'acausal' pro­cesses, and these perhaps point the way to the physical origin of the type of radically-acausal phenomenon such as free will.

a) The greatest mystery of all is the origin of the universe. A universe which exists is in itself an indication of acausality for it exists without real cause: cause implies temporal order, yet time originated with the uni­verse and thus no cause could "precede" the existence of the universe. Thus in some sense,  at its most fundamental level, even the scientific conception of existence implies acausality.

It is perhaps not so out-of-character for a universe whose very existence implies acausal­ity to exhibit free ­will-type acausality. [We will elsewhere argue that if such processes exist,  a likely place for them to manifest is where consciousness is involved.]

 

b) Another question arises as to the origin of consciousness: if humans evolved, then we must suppose that conscious­ness evolved. However, how could one type of phenomenon, matter ruled by pro­babilistic determined randomness (PDR), give rise via a physical mechanism such as evolution to a qualitatively different pheno­menon^[6][6]?  One answer would be that consciousness was inherent in the universe at its origin and this enabled the human brain to attain consciousness at some point in its evolution (for example, perhaps when the brain achieved a certain complexity it connected to the consciousness inherent in the universe). Another answer would suppose that consciouness was not present always, but rather it somehow 'emerged', somehow arose without precedent, basically in a non-causal manner, just as the universe itself exists acausally. It is perhaps not so out-of-character for a universe in which consciousness is present from the beginning to exhibit mind-like properties such as free will, and even more-so for a universe in which consciousness 'emerges' acausally.

 

The Relationship of Free Will and Consciousness: Free will is possible only as a property of a consciousness - an "I" that wills. (This can be seen upon some reflection.) On the other hand, consciousness is possible without an accompanying free will. However, consciousness alone would be powerless to affect events in the absence of free will – it would be a prisoner of its ‘host body’- and everything occurs as it would without the existence of consciousness.

Thus if by human consciousness we mean a phenomenon which can interact with the universe and affect it, then we must consider consciousness to be free-willed, and so we can for this purpose consider free will and human consciousness as inseparable.

A question arises as to the origin of free-will[ed consciousness]: if humans evolved, then we must suppose that free-will evolved. However, how could one type of phenomenon, matter ruled by pro­babilistic determined randomness (PDR), give rise via evolution to a qualitatively different pheno­menon, free will processes?

One answer would be that free will was inherent in the universe and at a certain point in the evolution of the human brain, free will existed where it had "previously" not existed. When the brain achieved a

certain complexity it connected to the free will inherent in the universe. Or, as an acausal phenomenon, free will needed no direct preceding "cause" and could thus arise even as the product of PDR processes.

 

Free will is the only phenomenon which involves processes not bound to the pro­babilistic constraints of quantum physics. Free will can even be considered as the gen­eral phenomenon, and quantum probabilism merely a special limited case of it – ie the case where many options exist for how an event will occur but it occurs in a probabilistic way rather than freely.

Thus it can almost be expected that free will "transcend" quantum processes in some way. Since consciousness is our only means of knowing of all physical events - they exist (to us) only inasmuch as they are reported by our consciousness - it can almost be expected that consciousness might play an important physical role in the actualization of events.

 

The Measurement Problem of Quantum Physics (the Collapse of the Wave Function)

Every event is "recorded" automatically as it occurs by virtue of its effect on the universe-however, this type of recording is not sufficient to "collapse the wave function". All measuring devices including the human brain are natural products of the nat­ural universe. If their actions result from random/determined processes, then these actions are likewise random/deter­mined, and thus their actions are natural events qualitatively no different than any other natural event in the physical uni­verse. How then can it be that mea­surement can “collapse the wave function”? One could postulate that it is only human measurement which can cause this 'collapse', however why would human measurement be qualitatively different from the automatic recording of an event by machine or by other events?

 

Free Will and QuantumPhysics: The difference has be attributed by some to human consciousness, however from the perspective developed here this is useless because if con­sciousness is governed at its most funda­mental level by quantum processes then the argument is circular. Instead we propose that the operative element is free will, and as a result we can understand why the measurement of a free-willed consciousness is qualitatively different. And different in precisely the required way. Free will can cause events which would not have occurred in a purely determined or quantum universe. It transcends quantum physics. It is in its essence a choice­-making phenomenon, choosing which reality it wishes to create. Thus a free­-willed consciousness is a unique pheno­menon and perhaps is uniquely qualified to "collapse the quantum wave function".

 

In addition, based on the idea postulated by Wheeler, perhaps only a free-willed consciousness can bring reality-retroactively-to the universe, (See Wheeler.) ^[7][7]

 

Quantum Physics, Free Will, Moral Responsibility and the Origin of the Universe

The belief that humans are purely physical beings and that consciousness is as physical a pheno­menon as any other is incompatible with our most deeply held beliefs about moral responsibility. Indeed, if one had to choose between deterministic/materialistic science and moral responsibility, most thinking people would, as a result of intuition and feeling (rather than logic) choose the latter. This belief in human moral responsibility implies not rejection of quantum physics but of its universality (it rejects the assumption that mental activity in the human mind are restricted to PDR processes), and assumes that mental events can over-ride the seemingly logical demands of causality. However, here is no scientific evidence that true free will exists.

The mechanistic assumption that humans are purely physical is not only unproven but is also logically incompati­ble with those beliefs we are most sure of. These assumptions are not science but rather are part of a philosophy, and the Biblical creation and Eden accounts present a diametrically opposite view: a created universe in which humans possess a true free will, so free that they can be held responsible for their actions even by the creator of the laws of nature, the Designer of the universe; so free that they give meaning to the universe even from the creator's perspective. Neither perspective can be 'scientifically proven': on the one hand the mechanistic perspective does not assume the existence of processes beyond what science can prove, on the other hand it is counter to some of our deepest intuitions; the religious perspective on free will assumes the existence of processes for which there is no physical experimental evidence, and is counter to logic, but is in tune with some of our deepest intuitions.

 

We present three scenarios^[8][8]:

 

Option A (mechanism): The universe arose by itself, via chance. Life emerged from non-life and humans evolved from ‘lower’ life forms. Qualitatively human, animal, vegetable and mineral follow identical physical law, and human mental activity is no exception.

All events including mental events occur in a PDR way, and thus free will is physically impossible. In addition, cau­sality is valid, and so free will is logically impossible. Therefore, man has no control over his actions and thought and cannot logically be held responsible for them. Of course many people are neurologically wired to feel that they are responsible for their actions, and have invented the words "moral responsibility" to describe this emotion.

Our feeling that we have free will is real - it is a real feeling - but free will itself does not exist. Free will is a chimera, and our belief in moral responsibility our wiring rather than a transcendent truth.

 

Option B: "Deistic (PDR) mechanism": God created the universe and instituted a system of "natural law" to run it. All events occur in accordance with this natu­ral law, except when God intervenes in nature. Quantum physics describes the universe, and its states at any time fol­low in a probabilistically determined random way from the initial created state of the universe. Therefore, everything that occurs does so as a direct result of some combination of God's choice of initial state, God's choice of system of natural laws, and randomness. Clearly, God cannot expect humans to act differently than they do since all follows determinedly from God’s initial creation, and so humanity cannot be held responsible by God for its actions. Those who do not realize that they really do not have free will and believe that they can be logically held responsible by God are wrong. [However, it would be God who caused this feeling, due to the neurological wiring which evolved according to God's design].

 

Option C: Biblical Free Will: God created the universe in such a way that except for consciousness it follows the PDR laws of quantum physics. Humans are conscious and have free will. [Quantum physics (PDR) does not hold in the realm of human mental processes, and a causality-defying process allows one to freely choose actions in a rational way without this choice being determined due to its rationale] As a result humans are responsible for their actions, even from the perspective of the creator.

 

The Acausality of Free Will: a Prescription for Further Research: Quantum physics implies the existence of a new type of logical structure: quantum logic. However even the causality of quantum logic could not encompass true free will. Nevertheless, if we take seriously our intuition regarding the existence of true free will then one must find a new approach to the logic of causality and the causality of logic.

Perhaps one could also benefit by trying to extend quantum physics in such a way that we can incorporate the requirement of free will that choices be not random but deliberate. Although this seems counterintuitive and counter-logical, perhaps using quantum­ transcendent free will one can construct a new "free logic". Of course this seems intuitively impos­sible and/or absurd to us now, but so would the probabilistic determinism of quantum physics have appeared to the pre­-quantum physics community.

All this would have important ramifications for the issue of contrafactual definiteness, Bell's inequal­ity and so forth. (See d'Espagnat.)

 

Partial Bibliography

·       Burtt, E.A. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (revised edition). N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954, See especially pp. 64-67, 75, 94,

·       d'Espagnat, Bernard. "Quantum Theory and Reality," Scientific American, Nov, 1979, pp. 128-140.

·  Wheeler, J.A. "Beyond the Black Hole," Some Strangeness In the Proportion. N.Y.: Addison­-Wesley, 1980.

Back to Science & Religion homepage
Back to Home Page: Physics, Philosophy, International Politics, Economics, Biblical Studies, Religion & Science,

---