Some time ago I introduced the hypothesis that the soul has an “efferent system” and that one part of this efferent system was responsible for the “soul-to-brain” (or “immaterial-to-material”) interaction. I suggested that this was the quintessential mystery surrounding the concept of a soul. Specifically, how does the soul, which (presumably) is immaterial, have an effect on a living thing, which is material/physical? I said I had a theory about how that happens, and now it is time to dive into that theory. In today’s entry, I am just going to lay the groundwork of where in the universe we should look for the actual immaterial-to-material action. With respect to the mechanism itself, we will discuss that in more depth in the future.
I
mentioned in the entry where I introduced the efferent system of the soul that
the problem of how an immaterial thing like the soul could have any influence
on something material like the brain, is a long-discussed problem. If you’d like to get some background on that
from a really excellent series of videos, I strongly recommend the series of
videos that Jeffrey Kaplan (U North Carolina) has put together. Specifically, the video about Princess
Elizabeth of Bohemia critique of Rene Descartes’ dualism would give you a great
basic background, which you can find <here>.
Today,
though, I’d like to start at a more philosophical level. I’m going to try to address the following three
questions:
1.
What are the conditions under which an immaterial “willed” thing might
influence a physical thing?
2.
Why haven’t we already discovered that influence?
3.
Wouldn’t willed actions break the laws of physics?
I’m going to use an illustration that I have partially introduced in the past <here>. Once we’ve worked through it, then I will go back and show how it provides insight into answers for the three questions I’ve posed. I think the illustration also answers a common criticism of many opponents of free will, so we will finish up by addressing that issue at the end.
The
illustration I’m going to describe is a theoretical experiment involving some
measurements with a penny. The
experiment involves a robot gripper that holds a penny vertically – i.e. the
faces of the penny are perpendicular to the surface they are dropped onto. The gripper is 1 meter above a very solid and
flat base. The apparatus includes an
extremely accurate means of recording when the gripper opens (and the penny
starts to drop), and when the edge of the penny first hits the table. Thus, the “time of flight” can be calculated
very accurately. Further the entire
apparatus is carefully set up so that when the penny hits the base, it will
bounce around and eventually land half of the time with the heads up and half
of the time with tails up (and never stays on edge!).
For the
purposes of this illustration, there are some features that might be hard to
duplicate in an actual experiment, but for which we can easily imagine an
apparatus that was designed as described.
The experiment will be performed in a total vacuum so that there is no influence
of air molecules on the time-of-flight of the coin. The base of the apparatus will be perfectly
flat and hard, such that repeated experimentation does not wear out the base
(and, we’ll assume the penny doesn’t wear out either…or that we have an infinite
supply of perfectly matched pennies).
Also, the base does not move relative to the center of the earth. There is no earthquake during our experiment. I suppose we’ll have to imagine eliminating
the gravitational pull of the moon and similar extraneous forces.
The point
of these features is this: when we
calculate the gravitational constant of the penny falling from its 1 meter
height, we calculate the constant to be 9.80665 m/s2 every single
time. The error in our
time-of-flight measurement is less than 5 decimal places, so we never see that
error in our reported value.
In
addition to measuring the time-of-flight for each penny drop, we also record
whether the penny lands heads or tails.
As mentioned, the apparatus is designed so that the distribution of
heads to tails is 50:50.
OK,
great. Now we are going to run our
experiment in 100 sets of 100 trials, for a total of 10,000 data points. Remember, it’s a thought experiment, so we
can choose anything, and 10,000 data points seemed to me like a sufficiently
large sample size to convince ourselves of some “certainties” in the analysis
of our data.
Now, we
will average the values for each set of 100 trials for both the gravitational
constant calculation and the heads:tails calculation. The resulting outcome is pretty easy to
imagine. It’s going to look something
like this:
Trial # Average
Gravitational Constant (m/s2) Number
of Heads
1 9.80665 51
2 9.80665 48
3 9.80665 51
4 9.80665 54
5 9.80665 50
6 9.80665 52
7 9.80665 46
8 9.80665 47
…
100 9.80665 49
We could
plot them. The gravitational constant
would be a single point. The number of
heads would have a distribution centered around 50 (approximately) and spread
out on either side of 50. If we did
enough trials, eventually we’d have one where there were 100 heads and one
where there were 0 heads. But that would
take a lot of trials!
OK – so
what? I hope this is all very pedestrian
to you. Obviously, this is what is going
to happen. If you don’t believe me, try
it yourself.
Now for
the fun and interesting part. I’m
going to introduce a soul into this experiment who will exercise free will. How, you might ask? Well, I just happen to have a very willing
soul that has free will and is readily available to assist with this
experiment: namely, me!
So, here
is what I am going to do. Sometimes, as
the penny falls, I’m going to grab it and then set it down on the table. On some trials I will hold the penny for a
bit and then set it down. Sometimes I
will actually grab it quickly and slam it down on the table faster than it
would normally fall. Sometimes I’m going
to see if I can grab it but still have it hit the table at exactly the time it
normally would have in a free fall. And
sometimes I’m just going to let the penny fall without interfering. I’m not going to tell you how many trials I
will interfere with – it could be every trial, or none of the trials, or
somewhere in between. Also, each time I
grab the penny I will decide if I’m going to place it on the table with the
heads up or the tails up (i.e. I will use my free will – it will not land
randomly).
Finally,
I’m going to place an opaque and soundproof barrier between you and the
apparatus, so all you can see is the readout:
the calculated gravitational constant and whether the penny landed heads
up or tails up.
Now, your
job is to identify the trials where there a soul intervened with free will, and
the trials where the laws of physics were allowed to do their natural,
physicalist thing. For starters, here’s
the data from the first ten trials that we did:
Trial # Calculated
Gravitational Constant (m/s2) Heads
or Tails
1 9.80665 H
2 11.05052 T
3 15.67812 T
4 9.80665 H
5 9.80665 T
6 7.78888 T
7 8.675309 T
8 9.81789 T
9 9.80665 T
10 28.05052 T
Let’s start with the
gravitational data. Can you identify in
which trials free will was inserted? Of
course you can. It is totally obvious,
even though all you can see are the numbers.
Trials 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, and 10 are obviously “free will trials.” I hope you are impressed, though, with trial
#8 when I tried hard to match the natural fall of the penny and I got within 10
milliseconds! That was pretty cool. Also, you might also be able to identify
which trial occurred while I was listening to Tommy Tutone. The point is this: it’s obvious which trials have free will in
them. If pennies had free will and could
act like this in a purely physical system, there would be no mystery about free
will. Actually, if pennies (or any other
inanimate object) had free will, we’d never know that there was a gravitational
constant. We’d just know that the entire
universe was unpredictable. But that is
not what happens in a purely physical world:
it is totally predictable and exactly the same. It is repeatable. That’s what allows us to perform meaningful
experiments. If inanimate objects had
free will, scientific inquiry couldn’t exist.
OK, fine,
now let’s move over to the heads or tails column. If you did not have the gravitational data –
just the heads/tails data – could you identify which trials are “free will
trials” and which are not? Think about
it before you answer.
You cannot
tell which trials were the ones I intervened in and which trials I let normal
physics play out. In fact, if I hadn’t
told you that I was going to mess with how the pennies landed, you’d never even
imagine that there might be free will buried in your column of data. This is true no matter what “pattern” of coin
flips I might decide to use. In the ten
trials shown above, every time I intervened, I placed the coin down on the
table with tails up. But even knowing that
information, you still can’t tell which trials are which. Sure, at some point, if I intervened in every
trial and placed the coin tails up 100 times in a row, you might get
suspicious. But regardless of what I
did, you could never prove that free will was involved because a random
distribution such as this includes the possibility that the coin will
land tails up 100 times in a row.
Let’s
say, however, that I don’t want you to know that I’m intervening with
the coins on some of the trials. I can
easily do that with a few simple rules.
Let’s say that I only intervene with a few of the 100 trials in each
set. Let’s say two – two out of
100. And, further, let’s say what I do
is decide which side I want up – heads or tails – in the first of my two trials
in which I intervene. Then, just for
fun, in my second trial I always place the coin on the opposite side. So, if I decided this set of 100 trials was
going to be my “heads” set, I’d place a heads trial first and then some random
number of trials later, I’d intervene and place tails. You would have no chance of guessing which
trials I intervened in. We could repeat
this 100 times…10,000 times…a google times…and you still would have no chance
of accurately guessing the trials I intervened on.
The point
is this: we know that free will, if it
acts at all, acts in a way that we cannot detect with our physical
instruments. We’ve been searching for free
will since at least the “swerve” of Epicurus, and we haven’t found it. So, how could free will have escaped our
measurement all this time? By
“hiding” in randomness! I know that
many of you don’t believe that there is such a thing as free will, but I think
you would agree that if free will exists, it acts within random events,
not determined events. Otherwise, we’d
have observed it in action already.
Now I’d
like to circle back to my original three questions and show how this helps us
answer those questions:
1. What are the conditions under which an
immaterial “willed” thing might influence a physical thing?
Answer: free will has to have its influence through
some existing random process. In fact,
if it can be proven that there are no random processes in the entire
universe, then I think you will have proven that free will does not exist. Randomness is a necessary substrate for the
existence of free will (although it is not a sufficient substrate).
2. Why haven’t we already discovered that
influence?
Answer: the action of free will within a random
distribution cannot be distinguished from the other random samples by any outside
observer. And, at least when it comes to
any actions by anyone else, we are always outside observers.
Is
it weird to suggest that free will “hides”?
Almost as if it had…I don’t know…a free will? Yes, I think it is kind of weird to suggest
such a thing, but, the point is, given that human beings have been searching
for free will for millennia…and they haven’t found it…that would seem to
indicate that it is hidden. Also,
if free will could be predicted, then it wouldn’t be free will anymore. So, yes, I think free will is hidden – hidden
from scientific discovery. However, on
the other hand, free will is the most obvious thing to every human being who
exercises it. If you don’t like
something that could hide from science, then I guess you will reject free will
along with other very valuable things like love and creativity.
3. Wouldn’t willed actions break the laws of
physics?
Answer: if randomness truly exists, and free will
acts within the bounds of that randomness, then no laws of physics are
broken. No new energy is introduced into
the physical system.
There is
one more thing I’d like to mention, which is an argument that opponents of free
will often bring up when anyone starts talking about free will living within
randomness. Most often, the free will
proponent will say something like “quantum indeterminacy shows that free will
could exist.” The opponent will say
“indeterminacy has no will – it doesn’t get you any closer to free will.” I agree with those opponents. If the claim being made is that “free will =
randomness”, then such a claim is meaningless.
Willed events are not random events. But the point I’m trying to make here is that
free will requires randomness to exist in order for free will to exist, but
free will is not the same as randomness.
Fish require water to exist – but that doesn’t make fish the same as
water.
After all
this, you might claim that it is suspiciously convenient that this theory of
free will makes free will something that can’t be observed, leaves no trace,
does not alter the laws of physics, and therefore can never be proven to exist
and can never be measured or even caught in the act. Free will would be just like the Flying Spaghetti
Monster. If free will does not “want” to
be found, then the outside observer not only cannot find free will in their
observation of the data, but they can’t even have a suspicion that free will is
hiding in their data. If I didn’t tell
you that I had altered some coins, you’d never think of it. Free will can make the outcome be totally
random within every possible measurement of randomness, thus erasing every
trace of its existence.
I would
argue that this description sells free will very short. Yes, it is true that if free will lives
within randomness, you can never find it by outside observation. But none of us are outside observers in
this experiment. We’re the subject of
the experiment. As the subject of
the experiment, you can know that free will exists because you
experience it. Although you would not be
able to identify which trials above were “free will” trials and which were not; I, as the subject, had no problem identifying them. I know which coins I placed and which I let
fall randomly – it is not at all hidden to me.
As the subject, I know that I intended to do something, I decided to go
ahead and do it, and I did it. I know I
had a choice. You, as an outside
observer, have no way of proving that I made a decision, but I do,
because I made the decision.
So…is the
observer right, or is the subject right?
You’ll have to decide that on your own – you can play each role
(assuming you are a human being with free will) and see which side you consider
the most reliable. I can’t prove either
side. But what I want to stress is the
following: if you’re looking for free
will, you need to look for a site of randomness where it can live and flourish. In our next entry, we’ll explore whether it
is possible to find the randomness we need within the nervous system.
