The probability that I will stand up on my chair and yell loudly is very low
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.
