Response to Sabine Hossenfelder on Free Will

 Here is the link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI5FMj5D9zU&t=321s

   Very interesting presentation! Is this a valid criticism of the basic argument? I put this forward in fear and trembling, having admired your logical prowess in many other videos.

   The basic assumption of the argument is that reality – absolutely, not just an aspect of nature, nature as it reveals itself to physics – is a closed, deterministic system. Not only physically, but metaphysically. What makes sense as an axiomatic assumption in physics – it yields interesting results – may or may not make sense as a metaphysical interpretation of reality as a whole. I agree that free will (in any meaningful definition) is incompatible with nature as a deterministic system – and therefore, with physics. The area of disagreement is over whether physics is not only valid as science – if I doubted that, I wouldn’t be here; I love physics – but whether science also provides us with a metaphysical interpretation of reality as such.

   The assumption that reality as a whole, in an absolute sense, is a closed system is not a possible scientific proposition. No experiment could prove it. No logical-mathematical proof could establish its soundness. The assumption that reality is not a closed system (e.g. the “strong emergence” view) is also not a scientific proposition for the same reason. It is an attempt to make sense of our experience of the world: the experience of being responsible for our actions, of being amazed over the goodness of certain people and actions, horrified over the evil that exists, of loving – find a person or a place good (‘good that you exist!), of being self-conscious (my particles change but the form of my particles show a kind of unity and I am conscious of it). I could go on. I don’t see how any conceptual space for the genuine experience of love, meaning, goodness, beauty, or freedom can exist in a closed system. Or rather, our experience of love, meaning, goodness, beauty, or freedom could reveal nothing about the world (or ourselves) if we in advance adopt a theory of determinism.

   I think such things reveal a deeper level of reality than physics can, as much as I love physics. The lived experience of all these spiritual qualities is powerful evidence that at some level determinism does not apply but our inner lives emerge, like Bach’s music emerges from the physics of sound; the fugue does not violate the laws of physics but it is qualitatively different and cannot be reduced to the latter. Physics is blind to the reality of the fugue.  (No I don’t think this implies a ghost in my machine; it does imply that my body is not a machine, or at least that it is more than a machine.)

    Equating all of Being to the closed systems studied by natural science is a possible, logically consistent version of the world. But to adopt it, if it makes sense to you, then you will have to reinterpret much of our experiential lives. When most of us say, for example, “The earth is beautiful”, we do not mean ‘when I see a picture of the earth my brain, following algorithms, produces a certain response in my organism, and we call that beauty.’ This is subject to further reductions until we get to the right equations. No, when we say the earth is beautiful we mean the earth is beautiful, really. The deterministic world interpretation reduces our experience to other categories – equations in the end. Our biographies could be translated without remainder into equations. Etc. It's like we lived in a Matrix. As though we must subject all experience to doubt and radical reinterpretation to see the world right: like we correct our experience of the sun rising.  Only one class of experience, science, reveals the world as it really is. I don’t really love my children, at least not in the common meaning of love; I am programmed by evolution, which reduces to particle physics, to behave and feel in certain ways about them, all things being equal. Same with the grief when a parent loses a child. I can’t refute that reductionism because to refute it we would have to get out of determinism and my common-sense worldview (“folk metaphysics”) and compare our versions of the world to the world as it is in itself, undescribed, unperceived, unconceptualized.

     You quoted Wittgenstein, perhaps the most powerful critic of reductionism in metaphysics. Philosophy leaves the world as it is. The urge to reduce it, to make one practice, science, epistemologically absolute, is the problem here, as I see it.

     Believing in reality as a closed system is no less an act of faith – of what makes sense – than my belief that at a certain level of complexity, determinism doesn’t apply. That all of reality conforms to one human epistemological construction, even one that gives us such power over nature, is a breathtaking leap of faith.

     I agree many conceptions of free will don’t make sense. We are never absolutely free – we are conditioned by our culture, our families, and much more, no doubt. But the kind of causality and determinism that makes sense in physics doesn’t make sense in a courtroom, for example, or in a family. As a physicist trying to understand nature, I can understand how determinism makes sense. But when the physicist leaves the laboratory, I can’t imagine how it can make sense without turning the world upside down.