Determinism versus Choice

This post was originally published on http://www.silentyak.com in response to the previous post on this blog.

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Talk to someone about quantum mechanics for a while, and sooner or later, the question of deterministic behavior versus free will pops up. It is like one of those arguments between religion and science; it cannot be resolved because, for one thing, no one knows the answer. Oh sure, you may say you know the answer, because it is so obvious, but you should realize the other side is just as convinced that they have seen the light.

This may seem paradoxical, but there is a good reason for it. Imagine that you are talking to someone who strongly believes in free will. If you ask him to explain exactly why he thinks this is so, he may say, "Look, when I feel thirsty, I might actually get up and drink some water - or I may not. No one could possibly claim to predict what I will do the next time I feel thirsty. Therefore, I have free will." The non-believer would say that his action was the result of a complex set of interactions between molecules that ultimately resulted in his decision. To this, our subject would respond that it was he, in fact, who brought about the interaction between molecules that resulted in his decision. Quantum mechanics ensures that this claim cannot be lightly brushed aside. No matter how closely we look into this situation, we will never be able to eliminate the existence of his choice as long as he exists. Without the doer of action possessing free will, all of this would be reduced to the interplay between molecules in a very large box called the Universe. It still may not be deterministic if the Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is to be believed, but in this probabilistic universe, there would be no one throwing the dice.

So in essence we are trying to decide whether true intelligent agents exist or not. We could invoke God, and claim that God controls all individuals and therefore, God is the only intelligent agent. This doesn't really affect our argument, because if we decided that a single God did not exist, we could delegate that job to individuals themselves. We would then be trying to decide whether billions of Gods exist. Instead we will assume that if one human being exhibits free will, then so does everyone else. We will be content with arguing about the existence of at least one intelligent agent rather than worrying about the details.

Having said all that, I hope you see that this is not a solvable problem. It is impossible to prove the existence of an intelligent agent because there could always be hidden deterministic variables that guide the 'free will' of the agent. You would have to be God (with absolute knowledge) to conclusively state that there are no deterministic causes for your actions.

At the same time, it is impossible to disprove the existence of an intelligent agent, simply because one can always present an intelligent agent as the seen or unseen cause of any event. As before, you would need to be God (with absolute knowledge) before you could claim that there is no intelligent agent.

I submit that there cannot be a God with absolute knowledge simply because there is no way of knowing that one's knowledge is absolute. As God, how can you be sure that there is no God above you?

Now, why did we translate a nicely stated problem of free will into another that cannot even be solved? Primarily because if you cannot solve this problem, it follows that you cannot solve the original one. The conclusion is that people who tend to disagree on the subject of freedom of choice, will, unfortunately, continue to disagree.

At this juncture, there will be some who will claim that this could be a problem that has a solution, even though we are not in a position to find it. This statement looks suspiciously like the one made by new-comers to quantum theory when they are told that Schröndinger's cat is neither alive nor dead until the box is opened. Maybe a quantum theory of God will emerge that could give us the probability of the existence of God at any point of time. Stay tuned until then.