write a 1000 word min philosophy essay on how free will could be argued exist or not exist by using the following 5 sources.
Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 10, no. 1, 2014 BEYOND THE STALEMATE: CONSCIOUS MIND- BODY - QUANTUM MECHANICS - FREE WILL - POSSIBLE PANPSYCHISM - POSSIBLE INTERPRETATION OF QUANTUM ENIGMA Stuart Kauffman ABSTRACT: I wish to discuss a large, interwoven set of topics pointed at in the title above. Much of what I say is highly speculative, some is testable, some is, at present, surely not. It is, I hope, useful, to set these ideas forth for our consideration. What I shall say assumes quantum measurement is real, and that Bohm’s interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is not true. The Stalemate: In our contemporary neurobiology and much of the philosophy of mind post Descartes we are classical physics machines and either mindless, or mind is at best epiphenomenal and can have no consequences for the physical world. The first main point of this paper is that we are not forced to this conclusion, but must give up total reliance on classical physics. KEYWORDS: mind-body; acausal consequences, poised realm, free will theorem; quantum enigma; consciousness. INTRODUCTION I wish to discuss a large, interwoven set of topics pointed at in the title above. Much of what I say is highly speculative, some is testable, some is, at present, surely not. It is, I hope, useful, to set these ideas forth for our consideration. What I shall say assumes quantum measurement is real, and that Bohm’s interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is not true. The Stalemate: In our contemporary neurobiology and much of the philosophy of mind post Descartes we are classical physics machines and either mindless, or mind is www.cosmosandhistory.org 149 COSMOS AND HISTORY 150 at best epiphenomenal and can have no consequences for the physical world. The first main point of this paper is that we are not forced to this conclusion, but must give up total reliance on classical physics. THE CAUSAL CLOSURE OF CLASSICAL PHYSICS IS THE SOURCE OF THE STALEMATE. We all know Newton, his three laws of motion, universal gravitation, and invention of differential and integral calculus. Given seven billiard balls rolling on a billiard table, we might ask Newton what will happen to the balls. “Write down the initial conditions of position and momenta of the balls, the boundary conditions of the edges of the table, and the forces between the balls, and the balls and the edge of the table using my three laws of motion in differential equation form. Then, to find out what will happen to the balls in the future (or past, my laws are time reversible), integrate my differential equations to obtain the trajectories of the balls (for all time in the absence of friction)”. But, I note, integration is deduction of the consequences of Newton’s differential equations for the trajectories of the balls, and deduction is “entailment”. “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is a mortal.” is a syllogism whose conclusion is logically entailed by the truth, if so, of the premises. So too the trajectories are entailed by integration of Newtons differential equation. But this entailment sets up the Stalemate. If the brain is a classical physics system, then the present state of the classical physics brain is entirely sufficient to determine the next state of the brain. But then, there is NOTHING for mind to do, and NO WAY for mind to do it! It would be like asking mind to alter the trajectories of the balls on the billiard table. Thus, if mind somehow is present in a classical physics setting, it can have NO consequences at all for the classical physics world. At best, the mind can be merely epiphenomenal. (We might wonder if mind exists and is merely epiphenomenal, and if mind with brain evolved, what selective advantage could it have had?). The culprit is the causal closure of classical physics with, as Aristotle said, no Prime mover. The Stalemate arises because we want mind to act causally on brain, but it cannot because all the classical physics causes are already in the laws of the billiard ball classical physics neuronal system and attendant classical physics further variables including classical physics noise. STUART KAUFFMAN 151 QUANTUM MECHANICS PROVIDES TWO WAYS TO BREAK THE CAUSAL CLOSURE OF CLASSICAL PHYSICS AND HAVE ACAUSAL CONSEQUENCES FOR THE “CLASSICAL” BRAIN. I begin with a familiar outline of Quantum Mechanics, with the caveat that I am not a physicist. 1) We all know the two slit experiment and the resulting interference pattern of spots on the developed film emulsion beyond the two open slits. 2) We know the Schrodinger linear wave equation, often set equal typically to a classical potential V. The equation has no energy term, so what is “waving” cannot be matter or energy. No one knows what is “waving”. I will propose below that what are waving are “possibilities”, (1), or, with Heisenberg, Potentialities,(2). 3) We know the Born rule: square the amplitude of each wave, say spin up or spin down, in superposition, and that is the probability that upon measurement that outcome will be found. We know there are 16 interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, in which measurement is real in some and not others. As noted above I assume measurement is real. 4) Finally we all know the astonishing confirmation of Non-locality for entangled quantum variables. RES POTENTIA AND RES EXTENSA, LINKED, HENCE UNITED, BY MEASUREMENT. I may be proposing a 17th interpretation of quantum mechanics, rather similar in some aspects to Heisenberg’s Potenia,(2), but on different grounds. I begin with Feynman’s formulation of quantum mechanics as a sum over all possible simultaneous histories,(3). This is accepted as an equivalent formulation of quantum mechanics by most physicists. On this formulation, one must say that a SINGLE photon on its way through the two slits to the film emulsion simultaneously does and does NOT pass through the left slit. But this statement breaks Aristotle’s Law of the Excluded Middle, where “A and Not A” is a contradiction. Thus, on Feynman’s formulation, quantum coherent behavior does NOT obey the law of the excluded middle. After quantum measurement, the result does obey the law of the excluded middle. For example, the electron, upon measurement, is found to be either spin up, or spin down, not both simultaneously. So measurement, if real, does take Quantum Mechanics from something that does not obey the law of the excluded middle to something that does obey the law of the excluded middle. Philosopher C. S. Pierce noted that Actuals and Probables DO obey the law of the Excluded Middle, but Possibles do not. Thus, “The photon possibly did and possibly did not simultaneously go through the left slit” is NOT a contradiction. I now wish to propose a new dualism, but not a substance dualism: Res potentia - ontologically real Possibles that do not obey the Law of the Excluded Middle, and Res extensa - ontologically real Actuals that do obey the Law of the Excluded Middle, COSMOS AND HISTORY 152 linked by measurement, (1). Because Possibles are not a substance, consistent with the fact that the Schrodinger equation has no energy term, this dualism is not a substance dualism. “Possibles” are not far from Heisenberg’s “Potentia”,(2), indeed may be identical. If so, what is waving in the Schrodinger equation are possibilities. I note next that if we accept Res potentia and Res extensa united by measurement, there can be no deductive mechanism for measurement. The “X is possible” of Res potentia does not deductively entail the “X is actual” of Res extensa. Physicists like equations. Here the logic is very simple, but correct. This is an hypothesis easily disproved were we to discover a deductive mechanism for measurement, not found since 1927, but a valid test of the Res potentia hypothesis only assuming measurement is real. RES POTENTIA AND NON-LOCALITY We have a hard time thinking about non-locality. I like the following: Possibilities are not located in space and time. This provides one way to think about non-locality in which measurement, located in space and time, of one of two entangled electrons as spin up, instantaneously implies the second is located in space and time, and is spin down. If Res potentia is not in space and time, entanglement can “spread” instantaneously, but “spread” is wrongly thought of as located in space and time. Here measurements create Actuals that do obey the law of the excluded middle, so, I want to hope, must be located in space and time, or spacetime, the latter only if quantum mechanics can ever be formulated with respect to General Relativity. THE “POISED REALM” HOVERING REVERSIBLY BETWEEN QUANTUM AND “CLASSICAL” WORLDS. Gabor Vattay, Samuli Niiranen and I have recently proposed, or perhaps discovered, a new “Poised Realm”, (4,5), in which the total system can hover reversibly between quantum coherent and “classical” worlds, with the known debates about what the classical world may be. The Poised Realm is captured by an X Y coordinate system. At the origin on the Y axis, the system is quantum coherent. As the system moves up the Y axis, the system undergoes increasing decoherence as an open quantum system losing phase information to the environment and approaches “classicality” infinitely closely for all practical purposes, FAPP, (6). (I note that the decoherence program no longer seems to think it can account for quantum measurement, again if measurement is real, ( 7). What is new on the Y axis, is that REcoherence can occur and move the system back down the Y axis from “Classical” FAPP to quantum coherent. The possibility of recoherence is assured by a theorem by Peter Shor, (7), now in use for quantum error correction in decohering qubits with the input of “information”. More STUART KAUFFMAN 153 recently, quantum biology at body temperature is firmly established in the long lived quantum coherence of light harvesting molecules. Even more recently, experimental evidence supports recoherence induced by phonons in the light harvesting complex that induce recohrence in the electron involved, (8). The Y axis seems real in theory and practice. The X axis is: Order, Criticality and Chaos, going out from the origin. In classical physics, this arises as a set of Hamiltonians are tuned from a conservative oscillation like a pendulum, where neighboring orbits are parallel and the Lyapunov exponent is thus 0, to a critical point out the X axis where the Lyapunov exponent undergoes a second order phase transition to become slightly positive at Criticality, then more positive in the Chaotic parts of the X axis. In the quantum coherent world, criticality corresponds to the metal - insulator transition between extended and localized wave functions. The X axis is also real. Vattay and colleagues, (9),have now measured the absorption spectra of hundreds of different organic molecules. From each molecule one constructs a histogram of the number of small energy intervals between absorption bands, and larger and larger energy intervals. The ordered regime corresponds to a well known exponential decay, from may short intervals to a few long intervals. The Chaotic regime is a unimodal distribution. The critical regime is a unimodal distribution whose single peak is shifted toward shorter wavelengths than the chaotic regime, (5). Almost half the molecules examined are ordered, and, astonishingly, almost half are critical, a single point on the X axis. A few are chaotic. So the X axis is real. Why half are critical is a new mystery. Thus, the X axis is real. Since both the X and Y axis are real, the Poised Realm is real. New physics arises in the Poised Realm, in part because decoherence is dissipative, so the Schrodinger equation does not propagate time reversibly and unitarily, but temporal behavior can be followed using Density Matrix methods. Experimental evidence for new physics includes the fact that in coherent systems, jumps between quantum states are Poisson distributed in time, yielding the familiar exponential half life. In the presence of decoherence, the jumps are no longer Poisson in time, confirmed experimentally, and sometimes called the AntiZeno Effect,(10). The full portent of the Poised Realm may be very large. I will propose below that it plays a major role in the Mind - Body problem. TWO