Modern Physics and Ancient Faith

Stephen M. Barr

Ch 19 The Issue

p167What sets man apart from matter - nice paragraph. Reason, but also morality.

p168 The religious view. Only man is "in the image of God" rationality and freedom.

p168 St Irenaeus of Lyons "Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts."

p168 Catechism of the Catholic Church "By virtue of his soul and spiritual powers of intellect and will, man is endowed with freedom, an 'outstanding manifestation of the divine image'."

p168 "[In] his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, ...[man] discerns signs of his spiritual soul. The soul, 'seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material,' can have its origin only in God"

p169 The material view. Man no more than matter - totally understandable if we knew the motions of all the particles in him. Scientific history leading inevitably toward material view, characterized by five developments

p169 #1 Biology has been shown to be reducible to chemistry and physics

p170 #2 Man appears physically to be an animal like other animals

p170 #3 There is a correspondence between physical events in the brain and mental processes.

p171 #4 Computers have shown that machines can perform "mental" tasks.

p171 #5 What happens in the physical world is rigidly determined by physics.

p171 "even if our minds were able to make free choices, these choices could have no effect on the actions of our bodies, because our bodies are made of matter and would have to behave in the way determined by the prior state of the material world."

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Modern Physics and Ancient Faith

Stephen M. Barr

Ch 20 Determinism and Free Will

p175 The Overthrow of Determinism

p176 "This issue of determinism and free will is one of the few where scientific theories have the potential of being in clear contradiction to religious doctrine; and such a contradiction really seemed to exist at the end of the nineteenth century."

p176 The discovery of quantum physics and the overthrow of determinism. Even Einstein, Schrodinger and deBroglie had problems with it. Einstein "God does not play dice."

p178 Points to quantum indeterminancy but discourages it as an explanation for free will. Takes the next step to say that it might create an "opening" for free will to operate, and presents three arguments against it.

p178 #1 "quantum theory asserts that all events, to the extent that they are not determined, are governed only by chance. And if they are governed only by chance, then obviously they cannot be governed by something else, like a rational will." David Chalmers in "The Conscious Mind" "[T]he theory [that quantum indeterminancy allows free will] contradicts the quantum-mechanical postulate that these microscopic 'decisions' are entirely random.."

p180-181 Argues along the lines that, forbidding other influences, the probabilities might be exactly equal, but that some non-physical cause that influenced the probability would not violate the quantum theory since the observed outcome would be an allowed one. Since A and B are allowed in the quantum theory, the selection of either of them could not be considered to be a violation of the quantum theory.

p182 Heraclitus "one cannot step into the same stream twice"

p182 #2 "If the 'will' could somehow influence Nature's choice of alternative that occurs [in quantum processes], then why is an experimenter not able, by the action of 'will power' to influence the result of a quantum experiment? If this were possible, then violations of the quantum probabilities would surely be rife!" Roger Penrose, "Shadows of the Mind".

p182 Responds along the lines that control applies only to certain quantum processes going on in the brain . "I can believe, for example, that it is within my power to control some part of my brain so that it will lift my arm and wave it about, without believing that I can also by willpower affect the movements of the Sun, Moon and stars."

p183 #3 "structures in the brain, specifically neurons, that are involved in mental activity are simply too large for quantum indeterminancy to play a role in them." Prevailing view of brain researchers. But challenged by Penrose, and by Sir John Eccles.

p183 consiciousness not really understood, so shouldn't be so confident as to assume quantum processes play no role.

p184 "How free will fits into the structure of nature remains a deep and difficult question." Determinism has been overthrown by quantum physics, but the problems remain exceedingly difficult.

p184 Hermann Weyl, "The Open World", 1931 "We may say that there exists a world, causally closed and determined by precise laws, but .. the new insight which modern [quantum] physics affords ... opens several ways of reconciling personal freedom with natural law. It would be premature, however, to propose a definite and complete solution of the problem. One of the great differences between the scientist and the impatient philosopher is that the scientist bides his time. We must await the further development of science, perhaps for centuries, perhaps for thousands of years, before we can design and true and detailed picture of the interwoven texture of Matter, Life, and Soul. But the old classical determinism of Hobbes and Laplace need not oppress us longer."

p184 Is Free Will Real?

p184 If free will, then materialism wrong. Rule or randomness. Free will neither, so a third kind of thing.

p185 "Since free will is fatal to scientific materialism, the materialist is forced to deny its reality. This is done in two ways. Some simply assert that free will is altogether an illusion. It is a "naive" idea, a myth, and there is simply nothing in the real world that corresponds to it."

p185 Others say that decisions we call "free will" are just internally determined, but not really free. Lots of people weigh in.

p185 Francis Crick "What you're aware of is a decision, but you're not aware of what makes you do the decision. It seems free to you, but it's the result of things you are not aware of."

p185 Edward O. Wilson "The hidden preparation of mental activity gives the illusion of free will." Barr attributes this position to Daniel Dennett as well.

p185-6 Discusses moral dimension "When we believe that a human being is not acting freely, as in cases of truly compulsive behavior or insanity, we do not assign moral praise or blame."

p186 further discussion and defense of our feeling our decisions have freedom

p186 "science as debunker" emboldens science to challenge "common sense"

p186 "let us not pretend to deny in our philosophy what we know in our hearts to be true" C. S. Pierce, to which Stephen Jay Gould in "Full House" replied "Pierce may have been our greatest thinker, but his line in this context almost sounds scary. Nothing could be more antithetical to intellectual reform than an appeal against thoughtful scrutiny of our most hidebound mental habits - notions so 'obviously' true that we stopped thinking about them generations ago, and moved them into our hearts and bosoms. Please do not forget that the sun really does rise in the east, move through the sky each day, and set in the west. What knowledge could be more visceral than the earth's central stability and the suns subordinate motion?"

p188 Wonderful general discussion of the fact that our perceptions are internal to our brain and do not require proof.

Stephen M. Barr

Ch 25 Alternatives to Traditional Quantum Theory

p Brief treatments of "hidden variables" and "pilot wave" theories, but argues against their plausibility.

p248 The "many-worlds" idea discussed as more plausible. Avoids the collapse of the wavefunction upon observation by saying that all the states that have non-zero probabilities are regarded as co-existing after the measurement.

p252 Many-worlds interpretation postulates an infinite number of branches of reality.

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Modern Physics and Ancient Faith

Stephen M. Barr

Ch 26 Is a Pattern Emerging?

p253 "the things that are of most concern to religion are things that cannot be smelled, or touched, or tasted - such as freedom and rationality, good and evil, truth and falsehood, love and beauty."

p254 Quantum view made the observer an essential part of the process - a universe that is not causally closed.

p254Godel's theorem and the Lucas-Penrose formulation of it treats mind as more than matter.

p254-255 "These are the most profound discoveries in mathematics and physics. Each deals with aspects of what it is to know; in one case to know through pure reason, and in the other to know through physical observation. In each case the totalistic dream of describing everything by a mathematical formulism or a law of physics runs into a contradiction: the contradictions pointed out by Lucas on the one hand and by von Neumann on the other."

255 In Godelian case, have to deny the consistency of one's own mind, or accept that mind is more than a machine, more than a computer. In the quantum case, have to accept "many-worlds" view

p255 "The materialist seems to be forced to assert of himself not only that he is a machine, which for most people is absurd enough, but that he is really an infinite number of inconsistent machines dividing and subdividing into more and more realities as the universe unfolds."

p255 quotes from Penrose, Chalmers, Nagel, Newman hanging on to materialism

p255 Wigner wonders at "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in understanding the physical world. "The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve."

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