Will, Force, and Agency: From Physics to Biology

My little concessions to panpsychism

The inanimate material world is generally not considered to be dominated by will, agency, desire, and volition. Physics describes the universe from the elementary particle to galactic clusters, in terms of a play of matter and forces, or fields, in space and time. There is no consciousness or a mind that thinks and acts with a purpose, a direction or an aim. All is a blind mechanistic sequence of causes and effects. There is only space, time (or spacetime), and causality. It may be unpredictable, non-computable, or intrinsically uncertain, but this doesn’t imply any soul, mind, let alone a ‘God’ (whatever this word means) that determines and orders the events that lead to the emergence of life. Short after the Big Bang, it must have initially appeared as a quite do-nothing universe: Nothing and nobody was willing to do anything. Yet, something pretty much active and driven by will, purpose, and desire emerged: Life.

Those, like biologists (or, at least, those biologists interested in the more philosophical aspects of life), who try to explain the emergence of will and purposeful action in Nature–that is, in organisms that are conscious agents, like us humans–start from a bottom-up approach. Willful action is explained as the ‘adaptation of the organism to the environment,’ the ‘feedback of a non-linear complex system,’ the ‘necessity to maintain homeostasis,’ or the drive for gene transfer, etc. All these mechanistic processes that, at the fundamental level, are nothing other than biochemical reactions or organic functions and cycles, lead to a behavior that we call the ‘will to live’–that is, the famous ‘instinct of survival’–but which ultimately explains nothing: It only restates the same thing with different terms and does not shed any light on why these processes or functions should lead to that subjective feeling of desire, urge to act, will to do or avoid something.

According to this point of view, there is nothing like will, let alone purpose. Will is only the result of complicated interactions of particles, organs, modules, and biological functions or complex cycles, that, finally, at the macroscopic level, emerge into that previously alien psychological property that is will. We are told that the emergence of will in Nature is like the wetness of water, which emerges from the interaction of H₂O molecules.

However, there are two fundamental problems with this point of view, one of which we have already discussed in a preceding essay. Wetness is not an emergent physical property, but rather a subjective perception of a conscious agent in the first place. The analogy not only doesn’t hold, but should even give us a reason more to doubt the mechanistic narrative. Secondly, the notion of ‘will’ and ‘agency’ in biology is somewhat different from what we really imply by those terms. In our everyday parlance, we associate will, desire, agency, or intention also to a feeling, a sensation, or an inner psychological urge that is felt, again, by a conscious and sentient agent. Reducing will to a complex or unpredictable self-regulatory, self-referential, self-organizing, ‘self-whatever’ system, explains, eventually, how the bodily aspects of a living organism work, but not why they should give rise to anything resembling a willful subjective feeling. The nature and emergence of will and agency in Nature remain an utterly unexplained phenomenon. No more and no less than consciousness, the universe, or life itself.

Nonetheless, there is one thing that this psychological aspect of ourselves we call ‘will’ has in common with the most fundamental aspects of physics–namely the ability or potentiality to act, perform a work by expressing some force and cause some change. Will is always about the ability to do, act, build, and change something.

Poetically, or at least metaphorically, we could say that physical forces–that is, the electromagnetic, gravitational, and atomic forces–act like the expression of a ‘blind will.’ By ‘blind’ we mean that there is nothing and nobody, knowing and planning anything by expressing that ‘will’ and that the action and resulting dynamics from these forces can be captured by abstract differential equations that don’t presuppose anything living, volitional or desiring, in the sense we conscious organisms think of.

But what is a force in physics? In physics, a force is defined as the ability to cause a change of motion in time. For example, whatever can impart a change of velocity to a material object, is a force. It could be of electric, magnetic, gravitational, or nuclear type, but it is always a force. This is true in classical Newtonian mechanics, relativity, and quantum mechanics. One might also add the interesting fact that in quantum field theories, the so-called ‘electroweak interaction’ is responsible for all nuclear decays, which always implies a change of one type of particle into another. So, it is always something about setting matter in motion and about transformation in time.

And, what is matter? As well-known from Einstein’s matter-energy equivalence, matter is a form of energy (that’s what his famous formula E=mc² states.) What then is energy? It is the ability to perform work, such as lifting a heavy body, etc. And what is work? It is what you have when a force acts upon an object throughout a time interval. Thus, matter is a form of energy, and energy, through work, expresses itself as a force in action in space and time. So, by trying to understand what force is, we can’t avoid referring to force itself. The logic of physics is, in this sense, a wheel of self-referencing entities inside a circular logic. It works, nevertheless, if you don’t bother about the existential questions we are dealing with here. But it shows how, when it comes to deeper questions, the so-called ‘exact sciences’ don’t tell us much about what the world ultimately is and… why it does something. Ultimately, everything boils down to forces, space, and time. More than that, physics won’t be able to tell you.

At this point, instead of always asking how all this subjectivity could arise from mechanistic unconscious forces in a spatial and temporal universe, could we, perhaps, for one time, allow ourselves to think the other way around and conjecture that physical forces may not be entirely unconscious? Could the universal causality that all these forces express be, perhaps, not just metaphorically or poetically, but literally the expression of a blind will? How would the same problem appear if, instead of positing an unconscious force as the fundamental primitive, we posit consciousness and will as the basis of all there is? After all, there is in every particle, atomic nucleus, atom, and molecule something prone to act or react, bind or dissociate, to produce or resist a change and a work, that determines or effectuates something, no more and no less than someone driven by will does. Only a fortuitous analogy and play of words?

The most fascinating definition of will that I found is that of the 20^th-century  Indian mystic and poet Sri Aurobindo who defined will as “consciousness applying itself to a work and result.” He also called it the “force of being in conscious action”

In what sense does this differ from the forces that physics describes? The only difference is that science extracts being and consciousness a priori from the world, and then wonders how it could emerge in the very same world. It is not willing to conceive that a particle could make a ‘choice,’ and then is puzzled by a quantum indeterminism that seems to empower particles with precisely that. It is not willing to admit that, perhaps, also cells, let alone particles, may be driven by more or less primitive motives, desires, or craves, and could make choices–that is, consciously will and wish something. We are then puzzled how that psychological property could come into being by piling up unconscious and unwilling entities, apparently out of nothing. Modern thinkers resort to neural networks, self-organizing complexity, holistic theoretical frameworks, self-regulating autopoietic systems, etc., but are always left with the same question: Why should all this give rise to a subjective experience that wills, desires, and purposefully acts? Meanwhile, they discover that their models make no sense if they don’t posit some sort of meaning, codes, information, cognition, and semantics as already preceding the organism and inherent in its functions and processes. The organism supposedly instantiates a will, but the very same organism, to come into existence, needs codes and semantics that are produced by a will. The proverbial chicken-and-egg problem.

While, if we don’t create that wall of separation in our conceptual constructs between the intentional action and causation by a mental agent and a physical force, things might make more sense. If we postulate consciousness, mind, and life as the fundamental primitives of the universe, then the emergence of intentionality, purposefulness, volition, choice, decision-making, and self-determination at higher levels of organization no longer appear mysterious but, to the contrary, become a natural and self-evident outcome.