Quantum Physics, Panpsychism and Free Will - Part II

Quantum indeterminacy as the activity of a universal consciousness

In the previous post, I discussed the objections against the idea that free will could find expression in quantum indeterminacy. This idea, since the times of Schrödinger, has always been seen as something inevitably leading to an interference with the laws of nature. Moreover, the objection states also that, if so, this would imply that our life would be ruled by mere chance and luck.

In my paper, I showed this conclusion to be wrong, because it rests on false premises. Stochasticity should not be understood as synonymous with a lack of purposefulness and must be seen in its entirety, also in its temporal dimension.

To show what this is about, let’s think about how we roll a die.

The probability law for a (fair!) die is that every face has a probability of 1/6 to show up. Let’s say one rolls six dice and obtains the following sequence:

6 3 5 1 2 5

This is a sequence of outcomes that doesn’t look particularly meaningful unless one agrees to posit it as having a particular significance. People would say that is just a random outcome of numbers. In fact, the probability of obtaining this sequence with the first six throws is (1/6)*(1/6)*(1/6)*(1/6)*(1/6)*(1/6)=1/6^6=1/46,656. That is, this ordered sequence has the probability to show up, on average, only one time for each 46,656*6 =279,936 throws.

Then, let us assume that, after a huge number of throws, we obtain:

…… 3 1 4 1 5 9

where the dots represent the preceding throws of the dice. This might or might not be a meaningful sequence of numbers, depending on your knowledge. Those with a little math background will recognize the first six digits of pi. For those who do not, it still looks ‘random.’ But what is the probability that this sequence shows up? There is no reason to believe it could be different: Again only one over 46,656 times throwing six times the die.

Finally, let us assume that, after another huge number of throws, we get:

…… 1 2 3 4 5 6

Of course, nobody would consider this a random sequence. Yet, the probability of getting precisely this sequence is no different than the previous ones. By rolling the die a sufficient number of times you will, sooner or later, end up with that sequence as well.

Therefore, the first thing we must become aware of is, first of all, that the notion of ‘randomness’ is in the eyes of the beholder. If a sequence doesn’t make sense to you, you will call it random. If it makes sense or represents something particular, like a known number as pi, or a sequence of letters that form a known word, then you will no longer call it ‘random.’ While someone else who doesn’t know the value of pi, or speaks another language, will see only a random occurrence of meaningless events.

Secondly, and most importantly for the present context, is that there is no need to respect a particular order of appearance of the six numbers series, to respect the probability law.

The above order was:

6 3 5 1 2 5 …… 3 1 4 1 5 9 ….. 1 2 3 4 5 6

But, if the order of appearance had been

3 1 4 1 5 9 …… 1 2 3 4 5 6 …… 6 3 5 1 2 5

or

1 2 3 4 5 6 …… 6 3 5 1 2 5 ……1 2 3 4 5 6

this would *not* indicate that the probability law (each face has a probability of 1/6 to show up) has changed.¹ The dice can, so to speak, ‘choose’ at which time which sequence has to appear, provided that, on average, each of these particular six-number series doesn’t repeat itself more than once every 46,656 throws. There is nothing in the laws of physics or statistics that prevents them from doing so.

Thus, there is a huge freedom of choice in ordering the time of actualization of a series of events without interfering with the probability law. Of course, dice aren’t conscious volitional agents, but if they were, nothing would betray their activity as long as they behave as ‘law-abiding citizens’ in a world of probabilities. No matter how sophisticated your statistical analysis might be, it will never detect such a kind of volitional act.

So, in what sense does this have to do anything with the relationship between quantum indeterminacy and free will? To illustrate this in the context of quantum physics, I used the prototypical macroscopic quantum device: Young’s double-slit experiment. The technical details are not so relevant here. It may only be said that in this experiment, light is shone through two closely spaced slits onto a screen, resulting in an interference pattern of bright and dark fringes. This pattern suggests that light—that is, the light particles termed as ‘photons’—behave as a wave, with the waves from each slit overlapping and interfering with each other on the screen. When particles like electrons are used instead of photons, they also create an interference pattern, even when fired one at a time. This reveals the dual wave-particle nature of matter, as particles appear to interfere with themselves, suggesting that each particle passes through both slits simultaneously as a ‘probability wave.’

The picture below shows the interference fringes and the profile of the probability distribution representing it (the meaning of the arrows will become clear soon… be patient…) That is, the fringes are the most likely areas where a particle will be found on the detection screen (typically a CCD detector or a good old photographic plate.) The maximum likelihood of measuring the presence of the photon or electron corresponds to the maxima of the probability distribution (the peaks of the ‘wobbling curve.’) There is a much higher probability that the particle will hit the screen in the center fringe (that with the two up/down arrows,) and with some lesser probability the two secondary left and right fringes (the ones with the left/right arrows,) but there is almost zero probability to hit an area of the screen that is in between these two (no light there, it’s dark.)

The relevant point is that the double-slit experiment underscores the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. While the probability law (the number of fringes, their intensity, how they are displaced on the screen, etc.) is determined uniquely by the physical properties of the whole apparatus and that of the particles—that is, by the laws of Nature—the particle’s order of arrival in time on the screen is unpredictable. Which particle will hit at what time and which fringe remains an entirely random process. Every single particle hits ‘randomly’ one or the other fringe. This is, so to speak, a ‘caprice of Nature’ that nothing and nobody can change.

Let’s say that the time series of particles ‘fired’ through the double-slit reach the screen with the following sequence: the first particle hits the center fringe right, the second particle the center fringe left, the third particle the second fringe right, and the fourth particle the second fringe left. This corresponds to the following sequence of arrows:

They represent the detection of the particles on a specific place on the screen with a specific temporal order, from the left to the right.

Let’s call it the ‘arrow-up,’ ‘arrow-down,’ ‘arrow-right,’ and ‘arrow-left’ vectors, respectively, and that are associated with the particles displaced on the central and two lateral interference fringes on the detector screen.

However, exactly as we have seen with the time series of dice outcomes, if Nature had ‘chosen’ another time ordering—that is, would have ‘permuted’ the order of arrival of the particles on the screen in time, this would not change the profile of the fringes—that is, the quantum probability law remains invariably the same. It could equally well have come up with

or also

and so on.

Or, to put it in other words, Nature is constrained by the probability law: The particles must obediently distribute themselves along the fringes profile (according to a likelihood represented by the dotted graph of the mathematical probability function). Nevertheless, they still have full freedom to choose when and how to permute the series of their arrival in time—that is, with what order of appearance the whole process of many particles hitting the screen is realized. Nature is still allowed to ‘shuffle the whole deck of cards’ whenever and however it likes. And nobody could notice, not even in principle!

Now, the question is, if and how this freedom to change the order of appearance of the events could be used to do something meaningful and creative? The answer is: Not a human agent, or whatever individual conscious being. It is called ‘quantum uncertainty’ precisely because it is a law of Nature imposed on us and there is nothing we can do about it. However, if we take the agent-causation perspective, with Nature itself being the agent, then there is nothing in the known laws of physics that prevents it from having the freedom of choice, acting on the order of appearances. It turns out that it is precisely this kind of freedom that allows for a gargantuan number of options to choose from. Let me illustrate this with a ‘toy model’ thought experiment.

Suppose we connect the double-slit device to a PC, and every time the detector measures an ‘arrow up’ particle it will move an object, say a black dot on the computer monitor, a step upwards. Similarly, each time an arrow-down, arrow-right, or arrow-left particle is measured, the system will move the dot on the computer monitor a step downward, rightward, and leftward, respectively.

This process can be generated with a computer simulation. It is not too difficult to write a program that creates a sequence of probabilistic events using a random number generator with the probability distribution of the double-slit experiment.

The result is the following. To illustrate the (virtual) dynamics of the sequence of events here is the zoomed-in figure of what is going on.

The black starred symbol is the starting position at coordinate (0,0). The cross symbol indicates a target: The aim, the goal, the ‘food source’ that the little dot—our tiny virtually artificial-life entity—aims and wills purposefully toward. Once the data stream is read out from the double-slit device, the dot moves according to the arrows measured. If we let this simulation run for some time—here I used 20,000 steps—what one obtains is a random walk throughout an area of about 400x400 pixels, and the dot ends at the black square.

As you can see, there seems to be no direction, the ‘walk’ is messy. As it should be. Because this is what quantum randomness is all about. And it is hard to get to the cross symbol if you are the slave of random events constrained by strict probability laws. You must be extremely lucky in getting the right sequence from the double-slit, steering you randomly, just by chance, toward the target. Alternatively, you might have to wait a very long time (and eventually apply a lot of energy to produce all the photons) until Nature generates for us (the event-causation perspective) the right sequence that leads you there. That’s why I repeat all the time that ‘harnessing stochasticity’ doesn’t help the cause of free will. While, if you would have some causal power over the production of quantum events, generating a different sequence allowing you to travel less randomly, eventually following a straight line right from the star to the cross symbol, you would produce a sequence of events that no longer obey the probability distribution and, thereby, will violate the laws of quantum physics.

However, if we let Nature choose in and through us (the agent-causation perspective) and conceive of the series of quantum events as an intentional and volitional act, then things look differently. Of course, Nature also must obey its own laws, it isn’t allowed to produce whatever kind of phenomena. It also must generate a series of quantum events that obey the probability distribution and, after a large number of particles hit the screen, must build up the interference pattern. The point, however, is that there is virtually an infinite number of possible ways to permute the time of appearance of the very same events to produce always the exact same interference pattern. If the overall number of up, down, right, or left arrows remains the same, their order of appearance in time can be chosen at will. The laws of Nature prescribe the relative frequency of the events, not their order of appearance. Permuting the order does not affect the probability distribution (provided that, again, once Nature has ‘picked out’ a specific ordered series, it doesn’t repeat it, on average, more often than the probability law allows.)

Thus, it is another causal power that turns out to be useful: Changing the order of appearance of the events obeying a probability distribution is sufficient to do the trick. In fact, the above random walk is only one possible path corresponding to a specific time ordering of the series of ‘arrows.’ One could take the whole times series (the arrows)—that is, in the context of the computer simulation, the time series already generated by the random number generator—and carefully permute its order of appearance in time in such a manner that it hits the target.² There is no need to change the cards, one only reshuffles the deck. The probability law remains the same, this does not change the interference fringes. BUT it changes the path of the random walk. As shown in the following figure.

This particular ordering of events leads to the desired result. The random path is statistically still ‘random,’ insofar as it still represents a series of events that, on the double-slit detection screen, corresponds to a probability distribution of the very same interference fringes. If one observes only the final distribution of the photons or electrons on the screen abstracting from their arrival times, one couldn’t notice any difference between this and the previous random walk.

All this might sound a bit complicated way to express a simple fact: There is a lot of free room left for free will, even if the quantum probability laws of Nature constrain it, and we accept that it isn’t our little ego that makes choices.

To sum up, the random objection does not stand scrutiny. On the contrary, positing quantum randomness as the very root of free will is an entirely legitimate conjecture that doesn’t contradict anything science tells us. The libertarian claim remains fully consistent, especially when embedded in the panpsychist framework.

Finally, let me get back to the central theme. What does quantum physics have to do with consciousness, free will, let alone metaphysical speculations about a universal consciousness or divine causation? Most physicists would answer that there is no connection, that’s all pseudo-scientific woo. According to the orthodox naturalistic interpretation, those strange quantum ‘fluctuations,’ and that weird quantum indeterminacy we like to imagine as bubbling spacetime foam, have no such metaphysical connotations. In the view of the ‘shut up and calculate’ theoretical physics it is just what it is, and we shouldn’t question the nature of things further beyond our ability to formalize it in a mathematical language (that’s the standard Copenhagen interpretation that Niels Bohr favored). The naturalist perceives these metaphysical speculations as absurd and magical. But the price modern science pays for this kind of attitude, avoiding any further thoughts about the nature and ontology of things, is that it replaces what it perceives as an ‘absurdity’ with another no less absurd belief system. The idea that particles pop in and out of existence, that quantum mechanics is a ‘theory without hidden variables’ meaning that quantum fluctuations are ‘acausal,’ or that everything is inherently random without an underlying cause, and that we should not try to investigate further this state of affairs, reflects a worldview that is no less questionable and, I might add, no less metaphysical or magical.

Others embrace ‘quantum Bayesianism,’ also known as QBism, which starts from the assumption that I agree with, namely that the quantum state isn't an objective property of reality "out there." Instead, it reflects our subjective understanding and interactions with the quantum world. For example, what about the weird superposition of possibilities in a quantum state? When we measure the state and get a single result (like finding an electron in a specific spin state), we are simply “updating our beliefs” based on the new information. In a sense, I like this approach because QBism emphasizes the knowledge of the observer in the measurement process, and it challenges the idea of an objective reality existing independently of our observations, something I outlined here. However, it stops there and doesn’t tell you anything about the ontology of the world, other than what we already know, almost falling into a subtle form of solipsism. It simply tells you that you should only think in terms of ‘degrees of beliefs’ about the outcomes of measurements, but doesn’t explain what is been measured, let alone why those outcomes ‘fluctuate’ like mad. In the end, QBism is yet another ‘shut up and calculate’ approach in disguise.

While, the fact is that several serious physicists, some of them also Nobel laureates, for some reason, seem to be attracted by the idea that there might be a connection between the ontology of quantum physics with that of the mind. Already during the last century, some of the founding fathers of quantum physics, like Arthur Eddington, Arthur Compton, and Pascual Jordan speculated that microscopic quantum stochastic phenomena might be amplified up to a macroscopic scale, determining brain processes. Roger Penrose worked out a bit different model but, again for some reason, feels that consciousness, will, and our brain activity might have something to do with quantum mechanics.

Why do some feel compelled to invoke quantum physics when it comes to the question of the nature and the origin of consciousness and mental processes?

Even though they don’t advocate for metaphysical interpretations and keep the intellectual discourse inside a naturalistic worldview, I believe they intuitively perceive how the inherent indeterminacy of the quantum world offers an answer of the kind I discussed here. However, it is dangerous to speak about these topics in an academic environment that self-compels itself to a strictly naturalistic and mechanistic worldview, and even punishes or ridicules those who dare to step beyond these boundaries.

Werner von Heisenberg (yes, the guy who became so famous for his principle of quantum uncertainty,) speculated that this inherent quantum indeterminism, which is the characteristic stochastic aspect of quantum mechanics and that conditions all the phenomena throughout the universe, could be seen as the dynamic possibilities of Nature, a form of Aristotelian 'potentia' that brings a potentiality, or an ‘idea,’ into actuality. If so, because of its universality this ‘Idea’ could be no other than that of the Universal Mind. Indeterminism does not ‘generate’ free will, it is itself the expression of a free and creative universal spirit in things.

Perhaps Nature is trying to tell us something. It invites us to look upon reality with a complementary macroscopic and microscopic, universal and particular, global and local standpoint at once. Sometimes, we don’t need new data, information, or groundbreaking discoveries. Shifting the perspective may change our worldview. No presently known scientific, logical, or philosophical reason stands in our way of taking this viewpoint.

1. You might object that it is very unlikely that a random number generator spits out the first six numbers “123456” already at the time it is turned on. You might suspect that it isn’t random at all. But this coincidence is no more and no less probable than obtaining immediately the sequence “6 3 5 1 2 5.” Wait, and see. If it doesn’t repeat on average more than 1/6^6 times, then you can safely say that it is a real coincidence.

2. More accurately, the starting and ending point of the random walk remains always the star and the square. In the second simulation, only the path from the star to the crossed symbol is displayed (target hit!), the rest of the path has been omitted for clarity.