Free will and Observation
The term “free will” is misleading. Indeed the first question that comes to mind regarding this expression is: free from what ? Whatever your stance on this issue is, there is always a way to present it in such a way that the freedom disappears. Indeed, even with the belief that something like a soul, totally detached from the material world, exists, one would not be free … from his soul. The mystery of why your soul has led you to make this choice and not that one remains entire.
A more useful, or fruitful, way to tackle this issue is to consider the question of “free will” in relation to other phenomenons and particularly what is called an “observation”. Indeed, “free will” and “observation” are dual in the following sense: “free will” is the mechanism by which an idea (a decision) has an impact on the objective world, whereas an “observation” is how the real world has an influence on our minds. These, admittedly philosophical considerations, may give a hint at why quantum mechanics is so strange.
Quantum mechanics is at the tip of the human scientific journey. It has been confirmed through a whole set of experiments and is used in countless technological applications. Its theory is well developed, but at the same it appears very counter-intuitive to a point that even world class physicists look at it in a puzzle way. There is this famous quote of Niels Bohr:
If Quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shock you, you haven’t understood it yet
Form the double-slit experiment to the famous Schrödinger’s cat passing by entanglement and the EPR paradox or the quantum tunelling, there are so many counter-intuitive, yet experimentally verified, phenomenons that dozens of books by leading scientists, thinkers, have been published on this issue. Nonetheless, it is not clear that any progress in a better understanding of quantum mechanics have been made during the last decades. Quantum mechanics works wonderfully well. The mathematics of this theory are well established, but it remains hard to grasp why they work so efficiently. How can we have a comprehensive take on those phenomenons remains a mystery.
Equally, the mysteries around the issue of “free will” and what is consciousness remain largely unanswered. Consider the discussions around the “hard problem of consciousness” or the definition of what an artificial general intelligence would be for instance. Both from a scientific, and a philosophic, point of view, very few progress has been made and many theories are currently explored. Some goes as far as stating that consciousness is an illusion and others dispute the fact that raw materialism can explain anything meaningfully.
My thesis is that each of these mysteries is actually the flip side from the other one. Our inability to grasp with the problem of free will finds its testimony in the fact that we don’t understand quantum mechanics.
Although the successes of quantum mechanics to describe the inanimate world are undeniable, it is also true that quantum mechanics has hard times to give any insightful hints on what is life. There are attempts to study the interaction between biology and quantum mechanics but it is not my angle.
The gap between any physical theory and life is actually much wider than between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Indeed one never has seen a stone “to rebel” against laws of physics. When thrown with a given force and angle in a well specified gravity field, physics will give the precise location where the stone will land on. Every single time. Compare with what happens if you do the same with a bird. This remark is more profound than a tongue in cheek one. Life is a phenomenon of the world that physics has hard time to explain. Many are trying, in a Procustean effort, to make life fit into physics via various reductionist means, but so far life has been reluctant to emerge from inert theories.
From my point of view the crux of the issue lies in the fact that there are back-and-forth interactions between the world of ideas and the material world. Every observation is a transition from the material world to the world of ideas. The course of our thoughts is impacted in a way that we do not fully understand because it looks like there is something else, this something else could be what we intend with the expression “free will”. This ignorance is quantified in quantum mechanics : it is the famous Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. My philosophical explanation of this principle is that it is an encapsulation of our inability to understand what lies behind the expression “free will”. The idea being that an observation may change your train of thoughts which in turns may express itself in the world and ultimately makes the material world behave differently than what would be the case in absence of “free will” (like on a mineral planet where everything can be explained following equations). So every observation brings with itself a potential of unforeseeable material evolution by opening the gates between the material world and the world of ideas.
The double-slit experiment becomes less surprising under this perspective, but the mystery of what is “free will” remains in full. So a legitimate question would be: what can we do with this idea ? A first conclusion would be that it appears that looking for an explanation of “free will” from the natural sciences is a waste of energy. We should try first try to better understand “free will” from a philosophical point of view. Maybe we will find ways to express this (whatever “free will” means) in the material world, and have an experimental way to characterize it. I am very sceptical that it will work the other way around.