Does Free Will Exist?
Anyone committed to science has difficulty with free will. In The Selfish Gene (2nd edition, pp.270-71), Dawkins asks, ‘What on earth do you think you are, if not a robot, albeit a very complicated one?’ From personal introspection, I do not believe that my conscious self exercises free will. Certainly I ponder difficult decisions at length, but the decision itself invariably comes into consciousness from a different, unconscious realm. Brain research confirms that what we think are spontaneous decisions, acts of free will, are prepared in the unconscious mind before we become aware of them.
However, the many-instants interpretation puts an intriguingly different slant on causality, suggesting that it operates in nothing like the way we normally believe it to. In both classical physics and Everett’s original scheme, what happens now is the consequence of the past. But with many instants, each Now ‘competes’ with all other Nows in a timeless beauty contest to win the highest probability. The ability of each Now to ‘resonate’ with the other Nows is what counts. Its chance to exist is determined by what it is in itself. The structure of things is the determining power in a timeless world.
The same applies to us, for our conscious instants are embedded in the Nows. The probability of us experiencing ourselves doing something is just the sum of the probabilities for all the different Nows in which that experience is embedded. Everything we experience is brought into existence by being what it is. Our very nature determines whether we shall or shall not be. I find that consoling. We are because of what we are. Our existence is determined by the way we relate to (or resonate with) everything else that can be. Although Darwinism is a marvellous theory, and I greatly admire and respect Richard Dawkins’s writings, one day the theory of evolution will be subsumed in a greater scheme, just as Newtonian mechanics was subsumed in relativity without in any way ceasing to be great and valid science. For this reason, and for the remarks just made, I do not think that we are robots or that anything happens by chance. That view arises because we do not have a large enough perspective on things. We are the answers to the question of what can be maximally sensitive to the totality of what is possible. That is quite Darwinian. Species, ultimately genes, exist only if they fit in an environment. Platonia is the ultimate environment.
In Box 3, I said that Platonia is a ‘heavenly vault’ in which the music of the spheres is played. This formulation grew out of numerous discussions with the Celtic composer, musicologist and poet John Purser (brother of the mathematician and cryptographer Michael, who made the comment about my parents with which I ended the Preface, and brought to my attention the Shakespeare quotation). With the inimitable assurance of which only he is capable, John is adamant that the only theory of the universe that ever made sense was (is) the music of the spheres. My guts tell me that he and the artists quite generally are right. But harmony rests on mathematics, of course. Rather appropriately, given my extensive use of meteorological metaphor, John and his wife Bar live in the misty Isle of Skye, where at least one of the said discussions took place while the better part of a bottle of whisky was consumed, mostly by John.
You will naturally ask why we do not hear this music of the spheres. Keats provides a first answer: ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter’. But Leibniz may have given the true answer. In his monadology, he teaches that the quintessential you, everything you experience in consciousness and the unconscious, is precisely this music. You are the music of the spheres heard from the particular vantage point that is you. This is taking a little liberty with the letter but certainly not the spirit of his great philosophical scheme. On the subject of liberties, I have taken fewer with Leibniz than Michael did with Shakespeare. Hal does not actually ask Falstaff (‘fat-witted with drinking of old sack’) why he should be so superfluous ‘to inquire the nature of time’ but to ‘demand the time of day’. But, were it not for the blessed Sun and its diurnal rotation (our fortunate circumstances), the one question would be as profound as the other.
Now for something like the original Gretchenfrage.
Is There a Role for a Creator in Quantum Cosmology?
Perhaps, but it is a somewhat strange one. It seems to me that science can never do more than guess – theorize about – the structure of things and then test to see whether its conjectures are confirmed. This is an open-ended venture (with tremendous successes behind it) and always presupposes that there is some structure already out there waiting to be found. In the scheme I have advanced, much is presupposed: Platonia, its detailed structure (immensely important) and a wave function that ‘samples’ possibilities. It is the nature of theory to presuppose something, so that always leaves a potential role for a Creator. But does invoking something to explain what we cannot explain get us any further?
What does intrigue me is the power of structures in a timeless scheme. They determine where the wave function collects. If one wanted to see ψ as spirit pondering what shall be brought into existence, it has no power in the matter. Leibniz always said that not even God could escape the dictates of reason. He must always act rationally. Perhaps that is more reassuring than a capricious deity is. However, a rational universe is quite alarming too. If you are about to perish in a concentration camp, is it any consolation to know that what must be will be?
In The Life of the Cosmos, my friend Lee Smolin espouses a self-creating universe, likening its growth to the often largely unplanned development of cities. I find his epilogue especially eloquent. In fact, timeless quantum cosmology does give almost god-like power to structures, ourselves included, to bring themselves into being. We shall be if that fits the great scheme of things. The ideas of both Lee and myself tend to pantheism. The whole universe – Platonia and the wave function – is the closest we can get to a God.
Where Is Heaven?
I have long thought that, if only we had the wit to see it, we are already in heaven. It is Platonia. I say this with some trepidation, though I believe it is true. If so, Platonia must be hell and purgatory as well. What I mean by this is really quite simple: some places in Platonia are very admirable, pleasant and beautiful, many are boring in the extreme, and others are horrendously nasty. The same contrasts exist within the individual Nows. What we do not know is where the wave function collects.
I certainly find it difficult to believe that there is a material world in which we currently find ourselves, and some other, quite different, immaterial world we enter after death. Apart from anything else, modern physics suggests very strongly that so-called gross matter – the clay from which we are made – is anything but that. It is almost positively immaterial. Platonic forms have exact mathematical properties, and those are all that physicists need to model the world and to attribute to matter.
I also feel strongly that this created world is something to be marvelled at and cherished, not dismissed as some second-best version of what is yet to come. Disrespect for this world is disrespect for whatever creates it. I shall not attempt to argue about these things in detail here, but the total elimination of time, if accepted and supported by mathematics and observation, must force theologians to reconsider their notions. If there is a happier and more perfect world, in which the lion lies down with the lamb and the sword is made into a ploughshare, I think it will simply be somewhere else in Platonia. I am sure that there are locations where experience is much deeper and richer than here. Such experience may be perfectly timeless – consciousness just sees what is. Perhaps we are somehow included in that awareness. Perhaps too the world is redeemed, and its inner conflicts resolved and understood somewhere in Platonia’s distant reaches, farther from Alpha than we are.