In all aspects of my approach to life and reality I try to do away with dualism and strive to find unifications everywhere my mind wanders. I find that the universe is always in balance and that the two ends of the pendulum are actually one. As in a famous Taoist symbol, the big white entity and the big black entity actually hold a little bit of each other. They’re really one and the same, two ends of one balancing gradient spread across reality. So when I consider the question of what is commonly referred to as ‘free will’ which is a loaded term I will not mention again, I try to accommodate two of it’s major aspects. The first is that physical laws tend to make strong predictions about what we observe in the universe (except in quantum physics, which will shortly come into play). The other aspect is that our day to day subjective experience is nothing like those laws, but rather like we can make decisions spontaneously and without any sort of determinism.
The conclusion I have come to (and it is not really a conclusion but a stepping stone to something greater down the road) is that the faculty that conscious beings have for making decisions works much like a quantum wave function. In the quantum realm, a particle goes along as a wave until it must interact in such a way that it’s position or momentum must be definite. When this happens there is a certain probability involved which places the particle in a certain state. This probability is not perfectly deterministic, but some states have staggeringly small probabilities and others have very high probabilities. When the quantum wave function collapses the particle’s position, let’s say, will become definite according to these probabilities. I will not discuss what happens to the rest of the wave function. Personally, I entertain the idea of many worlds, and I admit it may be necessary for my interpretation of conscious choice to work.
In the time line of the particle, from the ‘now’ just preceding collapse we cannot say with certainty the particle’s position, or what the position will be in just a moment. In the ‘now’ directly following the wave function’s collapse the we can be certain about the particle’s position and, more importantly, in our time line it seems that it could only have come out this way and no other way. If there had been any other outcome, a position with a different probability, our time line would be different. This is a kind of anthropic principle, by which if we are observing the particle in it’s current position, it must have had to ended up in this way because otherwise we would not be observing it. I will readily admit that this could be a hole in my hypothesis.
However, making that assumption, we have a model of the wave function that is not deterministic at the moment of collapse, but from a perspective after collapse we can see that only one outcome could have occurred. It is retrospectively deterministic. Applying this to a human choice, let’s say I will either raise my left hand or my right had—a simple choice. There is a probability that I will do one or the other (this is simplifying it greatly, since in reality there is a myriad of choices at every single moment). Before the choice occurs I cannot make a prediction beyond a probability that I will raise my right hand or my left hand. The choice appears free, within a certain limitation (the probability) but after the choice had been made, when examining the historical record of the choice, that is my memory in this case, I can see that the choice I made is the only possible one in my time line. The other choice could not have been made by the very fact that I didn’t make it.
Now let’s expand the amount of possible choices to a more realistic level, that is, I can take a very large number of various actions at any given moment, each with a slight variation (now we have something like a configuration space). Each action has a probability that is determined by genetics, environment, stimuli, etc. The probability that I will stand up on my chair and yell loudly is very low, but given the right stimuli the probability can become very high. After I perform my action, collapsing the “consciousness wave function,” subsequent inspection, due to the historical records in the universe (reactions of other people or physical reactions in my environment), determines that my action must have taken place and no other action could have taken place in it’s place (perhaps the other probable actions entered separate time lines).
This proposal is far from scientific (maybe that’s an understatement) but I think it’s an interesting thought. It helps us understand how physical laws can give us the appearance of determinism in conscious decisions while affording room for the more commonly observed freedom and spontaneity. It also shows that the universe has a fundamental structure in place that can work on a quantum level but can also be applied to larger scale complex systems. This is what I meant by “unifications” in the beginning of this line of thinking.
I went to a used bookstore in Takadanobaba on Sunday called The Blue Parrot. It’s apparently a pretty well known used English bookstore in Tokyo. A friend of my mine at work mentioned it to me and I finally got around to checking it out. I was lucky to find they were having a half-off sale last weekend. The place is a pretty tiny, cramped space with three aisles of various books. It has a typical small, alternative bookstore, hipster vibe to it. There was a flip-flop wearing clerk with an earring and a middle-aged story-telling bald writer loitering and telling stories for a better part of an hour while the clerk ooh-ed and aah-ed.
I browsed the stacks, which had all the usual book sections: sci-fi, fantasy, classics, general lit, self help, non-fiction, travel, as well as Japanese text books and the like. There’s a 100 yen bargain bin with nothing in it that I wanted. Most books seem to be about 500 yen so I got two for that since there was a sale. There’s some good stuff, but the things that jumped out at me out of the multitude of books were one’s I’ve read already. I ended up getting this old copy of Brave New World from 1936. I like old books much more than new ones because they have a nice lived-in feel. This one has some notes in French. I also got a nice yellow-paged copy of Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. It’s an abstract and magical account of his days as an aviator in the French postal service—or so far it is, I’ve only just started.
I used to love a brand new hardcovers with crisp pages and a sexy binding, but as time went on and I got poorer I decided to stop wasting money on new books when a used one reads just the same. Then I found that the used ones read better since the pages are darker and easier on the eyes. I gave up the hardcovers for mass paperbacks since they fit in my pocket and are easily concealed. And nowadays I search for the oldest edition, particularly for sci-fi, as they usually have fantastical covers originally painted by hand (my copy of Solaris has a beautifully surreal depiction of the colloid planet). I also love when an old book has someone’s notes in it, or better yet a dedication. A copy of Siddhartha I own has a note inside the cover. It reads: To Grant, To feel. Love, Barb —dated 1/1/77.
A new book is just a book. But an old book has a life of it’s own to me. It’s not just another copy.
“ Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time? The river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future.
— Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
We sleep in the sing song
windy window rattle of
Tuesday afternoons,
late for class and life
amid used books scattered
half-read and dogeared,
cold pizza and debt.
—as the suns sets in Damascus,
some woman bleeds in Persia,
the colossus sinks into the sea,
we write dissertations
on bud brewed chai:
honey sweetened
jasmine spiced
earthly melange
—we ponder the beginning,
in Africa-ca-ca-ca....
the first dustings of
monkey perception
rising from the valley.
