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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Siobhan Roberts has written a very interesting article in the Globe and Mail (March 19) about two Princeton mathematicians who have proven that fundamental particles have free will. Unfortunately you need a paid subscription to read the whole article online. John Conway and Simon Kochen have addressed particle behaviour mathematically, skirting quantum mechanics, and come up with a theorem that refutes the idea of "hidden variables," a notion that "if we only knew every possible force affecting the world and all its particles, then we would be able to predict their predetermined paths." The term free will is pretty loaded. It sounds at first as if these guys are suggesting sentience at the subatomic level, which is too trippy even for me. Roberts is careful to point out, however, that this is not the case. She quotes Hans Halvorson, a Princeton philosopher:
In fact, what it seems is that [they] proved indeterminism that the future is not fixed by the past. There are good arguments that free will and indeterminism don't have a lot to do with one another."Dr. Conway and Dr. Kochen rebut.
Kochen: There is no essential difference [between free will and determinism]. We're not talking about free will as a moral decision, about good and evil, or whether or not you should divorce your wife. If the experimenter's choice is to be called 'free will,' I don't see why one may not use 'free will' for the same property of the particle.
Conway: The world is a wonderful, willful place. Where does free will come from? Well, we're made of particles. So probably, somehow, our own free will is derived from that of the particles we're made of....
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Surprisingly, the article makes no mention of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Anyone who has read Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver trilogy will be a bit familiar with Liebniz' 17th century theory of monads. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy has a useful quote:
...it must be said that there is nothing in things except simple substances, and, in them, nothing but perception and appetite. Moreover, matter and motion are not so much substances or things as they are the phenomena of percipient beings, the reality of which is located in the harmony of each percipient with itself (with respect to different times) and with other percipients.Neal Stephenson puts words in Leibniz' mouth, and as is often the case, the fictional account is easier to grasp than the real source material. The following (long) quote is from the second book in the trilogy, The Confusion (p. 655-6), and is part of a conversation between Leibniz and a young princess.
Leibniz:...summing up, it would appear that monads perceive, think, and act. And this is where the idea comes from, that a monad is a little soul. For perception, cogitation, and action are soul-like, as opposed to billiard-ball-like, attributes. Does this mean that monads have souls in the same way that you and I do? I doubt it.
Princess: Then what sort of souls do they have, doctor?
Leibniz: Well, let us answer that by taking an inventory of what we know they do. They perceive all the other monads, then think, so that they may act. The thinking is an internal process of each monad it is not supplied from an outside brain. So the monad must have its own brain. By this I do not mean a great spongy mass of tissue, like your highness's brain, but rather some faculty that can alter its internal state depending on the state of the rest of the universe which the monad has somehow perceived, and stored internally.
Princess: But would not the state of the universe fill an infinite number of books!? How can each monad store so much knowledge?
Leibniz: It does because it has to. Don't think of books. Think of a mirrored ball, which holds a complete image of the universe, yet is very simple. The 'brain' of the monad, then, is a mechanism whereby some rule of action is carried out, based upon the stored state of the rest of the universe. Very crudely, you might think of it as like one of those books that gamblers are forever poring over: let us say, 'Monsieur Belfort's Infallible System for Winning at Basset.' The book, when all the verbiage is stripped away, consists essentially of a rule a complicated one that dictates how a player should act, given a particular arrangement of cards and wagers on the basset-table. A player who goes by such a book is not really thinking, in the higher sense; rather, she perceives the state of the game the cards and wagers and stores that information in her mind, and then applies Monsieur Belfort's rule to that information. The result of applying the rule is an action the placing of a wager, say that alters the state of the game. Meanwhile the other players around the table are doing likewise though some may have different books and apply different rules. The game is, au fond, not really that complicated, and neither is Monsieur Belfort's Infallible System; yet when these simple rules are set to working around a basset-table, the results are vastly more complex and unpredictable than one would ever expect. From which I venture to say that monads and their internal rules need not be all that complicated in order to produce the stupendous variety, and the diverse mysteries and wonders of Creation, that we see all about us.
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Then there's Mary Midgley ...more on this topic coming soon...