Mind, Determinism, Randomness and Quantum Mechanics

 

Mind, Determinism, Randomness and Quantum Mechanics

One of the most profound insights into language and mind, I think, was Descartes’s recognition of what we may call “the creative aspect of language use”: the ordinary use of language is typically innovative without bounds, appropriate to circumstances but not caused by them – a crucial distinction – and can engender thoughts in others that they recognize they could have expressed themselves. Given the intimate relation of language and thought, these are properties of human thought as well.(...) Concepts of determinacy and randomness fall within our intellectual grasp. But it might turn out that “free actions of men” cannot be accommodated in these terms, including the creative aspect of language and thought  

Chomsky, Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding, The Science and Faith Foundation (STOQ), The Vatican, January 2014

Descartes highlighted  creativity in the use of language and how this quality separates res cogitans (mind) from res extensa (matter); for that reason mechanical philosophy, Descartes recognized, cannot explain the mind. New advancements in physics, via Newton, proved mechanical science wrong and res extensa an incorrect theory. Res cogitans remaining a mystery.

Chomsky remarks on how free will cannot be classified neither as deterministic nor random is one of the best descriptions that I know of the subject matter (not complete maybe but in the good track), in some pages I will talk about another related definition.

In a parallel way, modern natural philosophers discovered that Nature does not behaves in a deterministic way, but her patterns cannot be described as random neither. Quantum mechanics is indeterministic but not random, and this discovery shed light not only in natural science but also in pure mathematics:

So, what is quantum mechanics? Even though it was discovered by physicists, it’s not a physical theory in the same sense as electromagnetism or general relativity. In the usual “hierarchy of sciences” – with biology at the top, then chemistry, then physics, then math –quantum mechanics sits at a level between math and physics that I don’t know a good name for.(...) if you want a universe with certain very generic properties, you seem forced to one of three choices: (1) determinism, (2) classical probabilities, or (3)quantum mechanics.(...) ...cancellation between positive and negative amplitudes can be seen as the source of all “quantum weirdness” – the one thing that makes quantum mechanics different from classical probability theory.  

Scott Aaronson, Quantum computing since Democritus, pp.110-11

Expanding on this,  Bell´s Theorem could be seen as the fact that each new measurement creates a new physical phenomena that cannot be explained by any mechanism:

With the action of the agent upon the system, the no-go theorems of Bell and Kochen–Specker assert that something new comes into the world that wasn’t there previously: It is the “outcome,” the unpredictable consequence for the very agent who took the action. John Archibald Wheeler said it this way, and we follow suit, “Each elementary quantum phenomenon is an elementary act of ‘fact creation’.” 

Fuchs, Blake ,Stacey, QBism: Quantum Theory as a Hero’s Handbook, 2017 p.9

Quantum theory is not only a great tool to predict experiments, it says important things about the nature of Nature :

-Agents matter 

-There's no mechanism for how any particular experience arises 

-Any part of the world has intrinsic autonomy. When I act on a part of the world, quantum mechanics puts no constraints on what particular experience will result  

Rüdiger Schack, talk at the Royal Holloway University of London, 2016

This wonderfully expresses the “Weltanschauung, cosmovision, worldview” that emerged in the first decades of the xx century. We must not fall in the trap of thinking that the lack of mechanism behind quantum phenomena is due to ignorance: We postulate that this lack of mechanism and indeterminism are “objective” aspects of the of the world.
 As far as we can see, no hidden mechanism is possible, and in natural philosophy (science) we don't speculate about things that we cannot in principle know.  The lack of mechanism is an empirical result, in the same way that the Born Rule is the result of empirical data analysis that shows that to predict Nature probability theory must be modified.

The kind of ideas exposed in this article are not new, but the teachings of 20 century best physicists (besides Einstein, who was the last great classical thinker, he clearly understood the big change that QM impose on our worldview but refused to accept it). For example look at the words of the late John Archibald Wheeler, who as a young student met Einstein and worked with Bohr:

"Law without law": It is difficult to see what else that can be the "plan" for physics It is preposterous to think of the laws of physics as installed by a Swiss watchmaker to harden from everlasting to everlasting when we know that the universe began with a big bang. The laws must have come into being. Therefore they could not have been always a hundred percent accurate. That means that they are derivative, not primary Also derivative, also not primary is the statistical law of distribution of the molecules of a dilute gas between two intersecting portions of a total volume. This law is always violated and yet always upheld. The individual molecules laugh at it;yet as they laugh they find themselves obeying it. . . . Are the laws of physics of a similar statistical character? And if so, statistics of what? Of billions and billions of acts of observer-participation which individually defy all law? . . . [Might] the entirety of existence, rather than [be] built on particles or fields or multidimensional geometry, [be] built on billions upon billions of elementary quantum phenomena, those elementary acts of observer-participancy?”

An individual agent is not completely constrained by his environment nor is he completely free, agency creatively adapts at each new step of actuality, not randomly nor determiniscally but quantum mechanically.

Interestingly, if we follow the opposite view of superdeterminism, in which for example we can see the world as a giant cellular automaton (Stephen Wolfram or Gerard t´ Hooft), we arrive at another description of free will related to the previous one. In this case of “illusory” free will:

Ever since antiquity it has been a great mystery how the universe can follow definite laws while we as humans still often manage to make decisions about how to act in ways that seem quite free of obvious laws. But from the discoveries in this book it finally now seems possible to give an explanation for this. And the key, I believe, is the phenomenon of computational irreducibility. For what this phenomenon implies is that even though a system may follow definite underlying laws its overall behavior can still have aspects that fundamentally cannot be described by reasonable laws. For if the evolution of a system corresponds to an irreducible computation then this means that the only way to work out how the system will behave is essentially to perform this computation—with the result that there can fundamentally be no laws that allow one to work out the behavior more directly. And it is this, I believe, that is the ultimate origin of the apparent freedom of human will. For even though all the components of our brains presumably follow definite laws, I strongly suspect that their overall behavior corresponds to an irreducible computation whose outcome can never in effect be found by reasonable laws. 
S. Wolfram, A New Kind of Science, p.750 

In this description free will is not random, but emerges from deterministic rules. The caveat is that even in principle, we cannot predict the complex behavior associated with it. More interestingly, Wolfram describes complexity as this interesting phenomena that lives between repetitive boredness and chaotic randomness:

According to Wolfram (2002, p. 741), if the behavior of a system is obviously simple--and is say either repetitive or nested--then it will always be computationally reducible. But it follows from the principle of computational equivalence that in practically all other cases it will be computationally irreducible."

 Rowland, Todd. "Computational Irreducibility." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource, created by Eric W. Weisstein. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ComputationalIrreducibility.htm

 

This description of complexity is not private to Wolfram but a common understanding in complexity science. We can also observe that irreducible, unpredictable but not random complex phenomena can be described by a superdeterministic theory or by a nondeterministic one (like QM).
 If we have two contradictory theories the best way to choose the correct one is via empirical experiment and idealistic models like the ones proposed by Wolfram have very little empirical support, support that abounds in quantum physics as in no other scientific theory past or present.

 Leaving behind the thousands of experiments related to QM, fee will is the most direct and omnipresent empirical data that we know. Its a self evident truth and the burden of proof falls on anyone who wants to deny it. In doing so, he negates his experience for the sake of a theory that he likes, forgetting that the very reason for science is to understand experience!

If we can't trust a self evident truth like free will, we cannot trust neither the certainty of mathematics or any empirical data, we must give up the pretension of understanding the world. Remember the words of Democritus:

Wretched mind, from us you are taking the evidence by which you would overthrow us? Your victory is your own fall.

We take agency as fundamental, it is everywhere, like experience. But that doesn't means that human and electrons can act or experience in the same way. The simplest object has 2 dimensions, it represents the potentiality of "one bit of experience", a human, represented by an astronomical amount of qubits, can experience infinitely more. Newtonian physics bounded mechanical philosophy but that wasn't well understood in the last three centuries, only the best philosophers insisted in the deep meaning of it (Newton himself, Hume,etc), shockingly, most modern scientists  forget about it. Quantum mechanics is a radical new attack, the only “mechanics” are those of the algorithms used to calculate probabilities, the rest is a statement about the world, a transcendence of res cogitans and res extensa that forces us to think in new ways.

This is another Copernican jump, or shift, in our view of the world, we are not in the center of the universe, we are the product of evolution like everything else, and we are as free as anything. What quantum theory give us is insight into our environment and tools to act upon it, e.g ways to optimize energy, compute as powerfully as possible and expand our experience in ways that we haven't dream off.

Juan Manuel Jones Volonté, 

abril 2018

0.1, junio
0.2 16-6