Free will revisited in the face of quantum physics
Lately I have been reading this book: The Hidden Pattern: A Patternist Philosophy of Mind. The book deals, quite obviously, with philosophy of mind and all the matters that touch this subject, including free will. The author is Ben Goertzel who happens to be a very interesting person. He holds a PhD in mathematics, but has dealt with cognitive science, and economics and currently focuses on AI research. He has written many more books, although this is the first one that I read.
Ben Goertzel
What seperates Ben Goertzel’s writing from that of others is his ability to combine philosophy and eastern religion into a unified perspective, like a new-ager, but unlike a new-ager, he creates logical and mathematical proofs for his problems. Don’t get me wrongs, but those people into new age philosophies have a tendency to mesh-up everything around, creating arguments that seem plausible (at least to those with no formal scientific background), but they are truly meaningless. Ben Goertzel truly embraces the problems from a scientific perspective.
The reason I am writing this article is that I found a very interesting piece of theory in this book. Well, actually, the book is full of interesting theories (and facts) and even though I’m just in the middle of it, it has got me into a lot of thinking. However, what really caught my attention was a theory inspired by quantum mechanics that really simplified the problem of free will.
First, we must explain a few fundamental things about quantum physics.
In quantum mechanics a certain property of a particle can be in superposition of its states, that means, it holds many values all at once. The most famous example is Schroedinger’s Cat. In wikipedia there’s a very good explanation of this experiment
Schrödinger’s Cat: A cat, along with a flask containing a poison, is placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If a Geiger counter detects radiation then the flask is shattered, releasing the poison which kills the cat. Quantum mechanics suggests that after a while the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, not a mixture of alive and dead.
So, we can say that the cat is both alive and dead and when an observer arrives at the spot, the superposition of the states collapses to a single one. The wave function collapse is why our world looks like classical physics, even though the underlying princinples are quantum in nature.
What Ben Goertzel proposes for the solution of the problem of free will is this. In each event, there is a part of the brain in which the incentive for an action occurs and another part of the brain that observes this action happening (but NOT the procedure). The observer part of the brain lives in a world of superimposed multiverses of a virtual reality. This virtual reality is actually all the possible outcomes of the future. Think of it like a tree with various branches. Once something in the external world happens, the superimposition of the states of the virtual world collapses down to a single one. This procedure happens instantaneously. The modelling part of the brain can affect the actions of the part of the brain that produces the action. However, this procedure takes a lot longer. So, it can be registered in the brain (unlike the instantaneous collapse of the multiverse states) and the brain ministerprets the events as if the modelling part of the brain actually caused the event.
Well, the fact about the brain making decisions before we realize is well documented. We can offer the studies of Libet and Haynes (Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them). There is also an older article on Encefalus dealing with this very topic: Free Will – plain and simple
Most people freak out when they learn about the results of these experiments, but for scientists the problem is how to deal with the problem that while our brain produces actions, we believe that it is us that produce the actions. Many people believe that quantum mechanics can provide explanations for problems that science based on classical physics hasn’t answered thus far. We will not delve deeper into the subjects of quantum consciousness or add more theories. But I promise I will do so some other time. There are very good resources on the web concerning these topics, but the problem is that these topics are so theoritical and academic in perspective that the average person cannot even begin to grasp what we are talking about. For that, we need another article unto itself.
Quantum mechanics requires some serious study…
Now, concerning Ben Goertzel’s view, it is certainly an interesting one. However, whether this solves the problem of free will is a completely different subject. Of course, there isn’t an experimental procedure to test this theory, so it remains just that: a theory. Nevertheless, the applications of quantum mechanics to the problems of the theory of mind seem to be a good solution to what seems a dead-end. So let’s just keep this theory in our minds 
just for now.
