+ Solving the free will problem is a matter of logic rather than of mechanism. Mechanism is 'parts pushing each other' (Leibniz). But this presupposes an ability for parts to push - to act upon each other. If parts can do that, then they are already exercising (rudimentary) free will. We will never explain free will if we assume it at the start. When we eliminate mechanism, we are left with logic. Logic is well-placed to specify both natural and man-made objects and explain the difference between them.
+ We must not assume that objects have 'selves' (i.e., that they are things 'in themselves'), because the notion of self is not robust in physics. (It is the conventional scientific position, however.) The trouble with assuming that animate or inanimate objects have selves is that it largely assumes what we are trying to explain. A self has an individual identity and an ability to do things i.e., it has a degree of free will.
+ The free will problem is best addressed in terms of the world's things, the objects considered to exist in the world. This contrasts with the traditional approach to free will which is to focus on people doing things. The latter assumes people have an ability to do things, which is another example of assuming what we are trying to explain. In terms of objects, the free will problem reduces to finding a way to have all the things of the world in the one category. They must not be divided into 'natural' and 'artificial' categories.
+ The answer to the free will problem lies in looking at the world the right way. There are similarities with Einstein's explanation of the force of gravity. Einstein showed that what we call gravitational force is our invention, something we make up to preserve a contrived view of the world ('contrived' meaning not in accordance with the 'natural' way of looking at things, which is from a position of free fall). If we were to look at the world in the natural way, he said, there would be no need to invent a force of gravity. Similarly, we can explain free will by taking the right viewpoint concerning, in this case, reality.
+ The solution to the free will problem presented here involves the specification of the world's objects from the platform of logic. That is to say, it is logic that says what objects shall exist in any particular world. The specification of these objects must be unconscious (i.e., non-objective, or undetermined) to avoid the logical circularity of objects specifying objects.
+ A certain amount of discomfit is to be expected with any new approach to reality. But the ontological status of reality must be addressed if we are to solve the free will problem.
Einstein thought that his introduction of the cosmological constant was the biggest mistake he made in his career, but it's possible he made a bigger mistake in his last 30 years when he moved away from relativity theory. During this final period of his life, he became bogged down in a fruitless duel with quantum physicists over what constituted the reality of the world. In retrospect he should have stuck with relativity, because an extension of relativity provides the answer he was seeking.
The relativity problem that Einstein failed to address may be called 'the invariance of objects'. It is the question of why an object stays the same in reality when its appearance changes. The appearance of an object certainly will change according to how the object is viewed by or interacts with different people. When two people look at an apple on the table, for instance, they will get different views of it. One might see the apple from a particular perspective and say it is yellow and slightly pear-shaped. The other might say it is red and mango-shaped. Based on what those two observers report, we might be justified in concluding that there are two apples on the table. So what guarantees the oneness of the apple? What is it that sets the apple's unique identity and causes it to be a single object, or the 'same thing', when it appears differently to different people?
Like most people, Einstein assumed that the apple had a 'self' which answered the question. The apple was a thing-in-itself, and this selfhood guaranteed the object's identity, at least from the object's own imagined point of view.
Einstein should not have accepted this answer. He would have been well advised, instead, to work out the rule that guaranteed the object's invariance. (i.e., that made it independent of different people's viewpoints). That rule determines the answer to many problems of science and philosophy.
When he was working on relativity, Einstein was driven by the idea that the equations describing how an object moves need to be independent of people's viewpoints. This independence was necessary because reality was defined as independent of people. Although Einstein succeeded in that quest, his equations governing how an object moves did not address the problem of how the object comes to be the object that undergoes the movement. Objects were outside relativity theory. They were 'givens' to be manipulated by the equations of the theory, not things to be explained by it. In retrospect, Einstein should have extended his relativity ideas to the objects themselves and not been content just with explaining their movement.
The prevailing idea in Einstein's time, and persisting today, is that an object is defined in terms of its parts. A unique or particular object is defined by its unique or particular parts. Such an idea has the benefit of avoiding the definition of an object in terms of a mystical 'self'. The parts can have sub-parts, of course - and sub-sub-parts, and so on. It might be parts 'all the way down'. Physicists hope that at some point in this reductionism a natural stopping point will be reached. This does not seem likely in practice. The quest has degenerated into quantum randomness and become bogged down in complexity. The answer to the problem of object invariance is unlikely to come from reductionism.
An answer to this problem will now be presented. It is an answer justified by later argument, but it boils down to three 'keys'. Together they unlock the secret of free will:
Key 1: An object is defined by how it fits into the logic of our world.
This seemingly innocuous statement represents a significant departure from traditional science. It says that an object is not defined by its parts, as scientific people generally assume. Nor is it defined by the possession of a mysterious 'self', as the layman vaguely assumes. Nor is an object dependent on how man chooses to define it. Instead, the object's identity is set solely by an overarching requirement that it fit into the world's logic. It might fit in as a vague or random object, or as something precise and unambiguous, but however it fits in, the fit must be logical.
The object might start off vague or random and then become precise and well defined. If it does, we will be tempted to think that the object always was (in itself) well defined but that our knowledge of it increased from 'vague' to 'precise' at a certain point. That is not acceptable under Key 1. Instead, the object's very identity varies according to the dictates of logic.
We need, of course, to consider the world's logic that does this dictating. We also need to clarify what is meant by 'fitting into' that logic. Key 1 also mentions 'our' world, the 'our' being a reference to us people. We need to eliminate this apparent requirement for people.
While still considering Key 1, let us reflect on some ancient philosophical puzzles that have never been adequately resolved. The puzzles all have a bearing on our understanding of the notion of 'real'.
Puzzle 1. Do mathematical truths exist before a mathematician reveals them? Some would say that Green's Theorem in the Plane, for example, was always true and all Green did was draw our attention to it. Others would say that until attention was drawn to Green's theorem, it did not exist .
Puzzle 2. Did Michelangelo's 'captive' sculptures exist before he chipped away the stone and revealed the figures lurking within? Some would say that the stone of each sculpture - i.e., the set of atoms comprising each figure - was always there, and all Michelangelo did was reveal it.
Puzzle 3. Does a piece of music exist before it is thought of by the composer and written down? All the notes exist beforehand. The composer merely makes a selection of the notes for our attention. 'Selecting' is drawing attention to what already exists.
Puzzle 4. In physics, does a particle have reality before it is measured?
Puzzle 5. Is it possible that God is entirely real but unrevealed? Religious people say that God exists in himself and is as real as anything else that exists in itself, such as a chair. They would say that whether or not we happen to see God's existence is irrelevant to his actual existence. An unseen chair exists in itself and God might do the same.
To avoid the difficulties presented by these puzzles, scientists decided a few hundred years ago that reality shall not be a matter purely of whether an object exists in itself, but a matter of whether an object exists in itself and has been revealed (i.e., there is evidence for it). In the case of God, for instance, there is no evidence so he is considered not real. We do not study him scientifically, even if he is somehow real in himself. Michelangelo's Captives did not exist as real objects until Michelangelo removed the excess stone and revealed them. Green's theorem did not exist until Green revealed it. And so on.
This scientific understanding says that there is a world of possible objects existing in themselves (and it might include a deity) but these objects do not necessarily comprise the 'real' world. The real world studied by scientists is a subset of the world of self-existing-but-unknown objects. It is the subset of objects that we know about. Reality refers to the particular subset of self-existing objects that not only self-exist, but also have been 'revealed'. As soon as an object is revealed, we include it in reality and thereafter it takes part in the logic of our world. By revealing it we transfer it from the world of objects-merely-existing-in-themselves to the real world of our experience.
Upon discovering an object and entering its name in the Book of the World's Real Objects, we proceed to give the object a 'history' explaining how it came to exist. We choose that history to show that we did not really need to reveal the object after all. Instead, the history we choose shows that the object existed all along in its own right. This history is intended to suppress our role in determining the object's reality, something we need to do if we want a world independent of us.
Having reality as self-existence-plus-revelation seems a good solution to this problem (in spite of the fudge over the 'history' we assign to each object) but it has difficulties. It is easy to accept that Michelangelo's captives were not real until the sculptor removed the stone and revealed them - but what about genes? Were they real before they were revealed? The situation is almost the same as with Michelangelo's captives. A lot of junk had to be chipped away before the genes were revealed. It seems that genes were not real until that was done.
In fact the situation with genes is worse than with the stone. A gene is not necessarily a continuous segment of a DNA molecule, but possibly a collection of scattered segments. What justification have we for saying that that particular combination of separated parts is a real object and existed before we revealed it? If we say that in respect of genes, why shouldn't we say it in respect of Michelangelo's captives? The captives in fact have a stronger claim: the atoms of the statues were at least adjacent to each other before Michelangelo came along.
A similar argument applies to the collection of musical notes known as Schubert's Notturno. Schubert revealed (or discovered) that collection of notes, but before he did that, the notes already existed. Why shouldn't that unknown collection of notes - a scattered collection similar to the parts of a gene molecule - be considered as real as a gene before discovery?
We are forced into these considerations if the comparison with genes is valid. If we are going to assign pre-existing reality to some of the world's objects, we ought to do it for all of them. We should not be permitted to pick and choose how we want our reality to be - not if we want a scientific theory independent of our picking and choosing. Glossing over this is why we cannot solve the free will problem.
Things are worse when we come to examine the history that we give an object after it is revealed. We assign a history to reassure ourselves that the object 'was real all along', and that we were not really needed to make it real. The problem is that, for some objects, assigning a history is impossible. One example arises in quantum particle physics. When a quantum particle is measured it achieves characteristics out of nowhere, there being no pre-existing history that might determine the characteristics we now see the particle to have. If we insist that there be a history for these characteristics when in fact there is none, we are forced into inventing a mysterious 'force' to do the job for us, in this case the force of randomness. This is hardly satisfactory.
In evolutionary theory, suppose that 'meringue-utans' have evolved and exist in a jungle somewhere. We of course don't enter them into the Book of the World's Real Objects until we see one (in spite of them existing in themselves). When we do see a meringue-utan for the first time, we are surprised; but we quickly realise that evolutionary theory forbids us from predicting the existence of these or any other creatures. Of course we should be surprised. As Richard Dawkins has put it, evolution's 'watchmaker' is blind and there is no way, even in principle, to predict evolution's outcomes. Meringue-utans are entirely unpredicted and unreal until they are revealed.
We have to see an evolutionary product to make it real. That is not a problem in the case of meringue-utans - we are happy to wait until we see one. But what about the evolutionary product called man? How can man be the seeing agent that makes real the evolutionary product known as man? That would be a logical circularity.
Obviously, man cannot be the required seeing agent in the case of man. For the same reason, man cannot be the seeing agent that makes real the evolutionary pre-cursors to man. He would have had to exist to do that, but he won't exist until the pre-cursors have evolved somewhat further down the track. There is a serious logical problem here. The usual answer is to say that man's self-inspection is a mystery which we are yet to solve (but will do so one day). We might grudgingly go along with such an answer, if it weren't for a curious fact: the measurement problem in particle physics seems to be exactly the same problem. And in that case we know for certain that (a knowable) determinism is ruled out. More on this later. We might also feel some discomfort about relying on man to reveal meringue-utans, but ruling him out in the case of the closely-related species called humans.
In both cases (evolutionary theory and quantum measurement), the problem is a logical one and needs to be solved in the domain of logic. It is pointless looking for a mechanism to produce a quantum particle's measured characteristics because we are certain that it is not possible. It is equally pointless looking for a mechanism to replace man's 'seeing agent' status in evolutionary theory.
A puzzle: Is it possible for everyone to be certain that something is true, yet proof of the truth be impossible?
Some would say it is not possible. They would say that without proof, we can't be certain. Others would say that the 'everyone' doesn't include them. Personally, they will wait until proof does become available.
But the answer to this puzzle is simple. A true-but-unprovable situation arises when the thing in question is defined to be true. Since it is impossible to prove a definition, we arrive at something being true but unable to be proved so.
Of course, this is not a serious puzzle. Unfortunately, a similar thing occurs in the real world all the time. In the real world we look for the 'proof' of objects, a plausible explanation of how the objects came to exist, and we use reductionism to do it. But if objects need to be revealed before they are real, the parts and sub-parts revealed by the reductionism are defined by the reduction process. So if we accept that the original object is determined by the sub-parts, all we are achieving by the reductionism is a definition of the original object. If the object in question is a real 'truth' of our world, it has that status because we have defined it so. This conclusion is reinforced by the realisation that we could have broken down the original object a different way and obtained a different set of sub-parts, thereby defining the object differently. Whatever the truth, clearly it depends on us.
(The case will be made that all objects are real (or 'true') because we define them to be so. Even macro-sized things, such as human beings, get their identity by definition rather than by parts or mechanism. This sounds circular but it turns out not to be.)
Sometimes our reductionism reveals a surprising new object, perhaps a thing of exquisite complexity. If we accept that revelation (our seeing something) causes the something to become real, we must accept that this complex object is our making too. To repeat, what we see defines an object. Our act of seeing it transfers it from the domain of self-existing-but-not-yet-real objects into the domain of real objects - those that self exist and have been seen. The selfhood of the transferred object is defined by what we see the object to be. If later on (in an attempt to extricate ourselves from the scene) we assign a history to the object, or if we pull the object to pieces to explain it in terms of sub-objects, that is something we do after we have already given the object its selfhood by seeing it.
It is important to respect this logical sequence. Many of the problems of science and philosophy are traceable to our making a fudge of this. The actual order of events is this. We see something new; we remove ourselves from the scene (that is, we objectivise what we see); we come back into the scene as a person surprised at what now objectively exists (all this happens in a fraction of a second); then we develop a would-be self-explaining history for the new object.
The logic of this sequence ought to be respected. In particular, if a seeing-agent is required in the first step, we are not allowed to derive the seeing agent in a later step. These ideas will be developed later, when we incorporate the notion of 'seeing' into logic.
Recapitulation
Some say that there is no need to talk about objects 'entering the logic of the world' because objects are real from the start. But how do we know that those objects are real from the start? 'By observing them,' the other person will reply. 'By using all of our senses and applying our reasoning ability and Ockham's Razor, we will come to accept that those objects really do exist in themselves without us. The simplest explanation of why everybody sees the same objects is that the objects exist in themselves and are out there waiting to be seen.'
Perhaps. The problem is that 'observing things' requires an observer. Further, the observer must logically exist prior to the things observed. In effect the observer is a 'gatekeeper' allowing the entry of particular objects into the world (the real world) and keeping out other objects. The objects allowed in are those that are seen to exist. Those kept out are those that have not been seen to exist (and which we cannot even refer to). Thus the set of 'seen' objects - the real objects of our world - is defined by the actions of the observer. Obviously this requires that the observer exist beforehand.
The die-hard realist might reluctantly agree to this but claim that the objects seen by the gatekeeper nevertheless were in existence before they were seen. Well - if so, prove it. The die-hard realist needs to show that unseen objects exist before they are seen.
The example of 'meringue-utans' was presented earlier. These creatures might exist in themselves in some jungle somewhere, but until someone actually sees one, we don't accept their existence. We make this non-existence call even when the meringue-utans exist in themselves. We do the same with God. A deity might exist somewhere in himself but is not an element of the real world because we haven't confirmed the supposed reality of that object.
Thus the superset of objects that exist in themselves can be split into two subsets: the subset of objects that have been seen and are accepted as real; and the subset of remaining objects that have not been seen (and which we might not even have a conception of) but which still exist in themselves.
Which set should be given the name 'real'? Should it be the superset of all objects that exist in themselves? Or should it be the subset of seen objects, those that we have admitted into the reality of our world by observing them? Historically, the word 'real' has been given to the superset, where an object exists in itself independently of us. But this leaves a problem for scientists, because they are concerned with the subset of objects that have been seen, and this is different from the superset of objects that are real in themselves. If they use the word 'real' for the superset (i.e., for objects self existent but unseen), scientists should not use the same word for the objects that they study (objects that are self existent and seen). My own preference is to use 'Real' (with an upper-case 'R') for the superset, and 'real' (lower case 'r') for the objects that scientists deal with.
And what objects do scientists deal with? With those that take part in the logic of the world. It is a perfectly respectable set of objects. It includes chairs (seen to exist), Higgs particles (not seen to exist but believed so), and so on. The set excludes meringue-utans, angels, deities, and lots of other possible objects that might exist in themselves but don't take part in the logic of the world. The 'real' objects of scientific study ('real' with a lower-case 'r') are those that take part in the logic of the world. They need not literally be seen with eyes, but they are believed to exist.
Having reality defined by objects that take part in the logic of the world is a significant change from the usual scientific notion, which is that reality is 'stuff existing in itself'. The new idea is not so much 'stuff existing in itself' but more like 'stuff defined by a rule'.
This might seem a small philosophical point of no importance to science, but it is quite significant. If real objects are specified by a rule, we can go out and look for that rule. Hitherto we have not thought of doing that. We have just assumed that objects themselves know who they are. The rule we are looking for is a specification of what particular objects shall contribute to the logic of the world. At present we know very little about this rule. All we can say is that the rule is not a test for pre-existing reality. That is to say, the sought-after rule is not a matter of objects existing in themselves. That would be the set of 'Real' objects, whereas we want the set of 'real' objects.
The word 'our' in 'the logic of our world' implies that other worlds exist, possibly of equal reality to our world, but not 'our'. This notion of 'other worlds' has proved very productive in philosophy since David Lewis championed the reality of these worlds in 1973. Real other worlds also appear in the 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics. I will be suggesting that those worlds are the same - that the real semantic worlds of philosophy are a description of the 'many worlds' of quantum physics. I repeat that the 'other worlds' studied in philosophy are real, and not mere hypothetical constructs. This is also the case in quantum theory.
Where does this leave us in our search for free will? So far I have described some uncomfortable aspects of science - how we give a mystical notion of 'selfhood' to objects, how Einstein was remiss in not ensuring the invariance of objects, and how scientists confuse themselves over the meaning of 'real'.
My solution has been this: the objects of science (i.e., real objects) are those that contribute to the logic of the world. They are not to be thought of as things existing in themselves - at least, not purely existing in themselves. They have a kind of flexibility (to be described in Key 2 below) that adjusts their selfhood to whatever is necessary. This solution allows us to get rid of the non-scientific notion of an object having a self-specified 'self' that determines its unique identity. It puts us on the right road to answering the free will problem because, in scientific terms, free will is just a matter of something (logic) specifying what objects shall exist in our world: cars, computers, trees, stars, etc. The fact that some of these objects seem to have a 'free will' relationship to man (cars, computers), while others don't (trees, stars) turns out not to be important. It is 'one rule to bind them all'.
Key 1 said that an object's selfhood is set by the way the object fits into the logic of the world. Let us now consider Key 2. This concerns how an object achieves that result i.e., the mechanism. This explanation will involve people (as indeed the notion of 'our' world does), but people will be removed later on in the third key.
To see how an object obtains its 'self', let us return to the apple lying on the table and viewed by two people. As before, the two people will see the apple from different perspectives and we might conclude that there were two apples there. The problem comes down to making these two perspectives one. We note that if there were only one person in the world, that person's perspective would entirely represent the apple. There would be no way for the person to prove to themselves that the apple was different from what they thought it to be. So in that case the apple would be what the person thought it to be. The problem of the apple's unique selfhood is a problem of there being more than one person in the world. How can we get two people into being one person? This is another way of asking how 'our' world can be a single thing when the people comprising the 'our' are not.
If we have two real objects on the table - say two apples - when we add them together we get a bunch of apples, where the parts comprising the bunch clearly remain. What we don't get - but what we want in this case - is a single thing replacing two things. We want to achieve one representation of the apple when two representations exist (one from each person). Adding two vectors has a property of that nature. When two vectors are added together, the resultant vector replaces the two original vectors. We can be sure that it is 'replacement' by noting that if we start off with a vector, it can be decomposed into an infinite choice of component vectors i.e., there is no unique combination. The decomposition of a bunch of two apples, however, must be into the two apples that comprise the bunch
Vector addition allows the component vectors to be forgotten about. That is what we want to combine two people's views of an apple into one 'real' view. If we could have a vector representation of the apple, then two different representations could be added together and we would have a single representation which could be identified with the apple's selfhood. The resultant vector would have its magnitude and direction altered by the components but it would be a single thing without parts, and that's what a self is.
With this in mind, I propose that the 'vector representation' of the apple be the person's belief as to what the apple is. That's because human belief is very much akin to a vector quantity, as I will explain. (In all this talk about vectors and so on, I hasten to point out that I am talking heuristically - using mathematics and physics as a guide to philosophical thinking.)
As I said, if there is only one person in the world, the apple must be whatever the person believes it to be. If there are two people in the world, each of them will believe the apple to be a different object (because of their different perspectives) but the vector sum of those two beliefs can represent the apple to the world. The apple's reality - its selfhood - is contained in the vector sum of the two people's beliefs. It is but a short step to saying that this belief as to what the apple is, is actually the apple. [Ref. 1]
This conclusion may be summarised as the second of the three keys:
Key 2: An object enters the logic of the world by being whatever we believe it to be.
The persistence of real objects - the fact that the apple is still on the table the next day - does not reside in a supposed 'self' inherent in the object, but in the fact that our beliefs remain the same (all else being equal). When we walk away from the table, we still believe the apple to be there and we continue to treat it as a real object in the world. If the apple were not on the table but we believed it to be, our beliefs would win. If someone took the apple away without my knowing, its existence on the table would still take part in the logic of my world, but obviously not in the logic of the person who took it away. As far as the total world is concerned - 7 billion people and their beliefs - the state of the table would enter the world's logic as completely uncertain. That's because of the two people who report the state of the table, one believes it to have an apple and the other doesn't. Self-existent 'reality' doesn't come into it.
It is important for the theory here that belief be unconscious. We are talking about belief creating the objects that take part in the logic of the world - i.e., creating reality. It would be logical nonsense to suppose that the belief doing this creation could be an object itself; i.e., itself determined by reality.
In fact, scientists do treat belief as an unconscious element. No scientist would tolerate somebody 'psyching themselves up' to believe something, which would be possible if belief were an objective element. Instead, scientists insist that people believe 'naturally', perhaps by letting evidence speak for itself. The idea of evidence 'speaking for itself' is erroneous (because evidence doesn't have a 'self') but the sentiment is correct: belief is not an object to be bought and sold. That is just another way of saying that belief must be unconscious, or entirely subjective. There are other demonstrations which I will present on a later page.
We now come to the third key, which concerns the removal of people from the equation. People are implied by the word 'our' in 'our world'. They are also implied by the very nature of belief, which we think of as having a home in a person's brain cells.
People must of course be removed from this theory if they are to be considered as objects. All objects are created by belief and we would get into a logical tangle if the objects known as people were created by an action of people. There are several ways to remove people, but I prefer to do it by what might initially be seen as a linguistic 'trick':
Key 3: The world is what it is believed to be, not what people believe it to be.
This statement speaks for itself. It says we can get rid of people by using the passive voice! This might seem a trivial play with words, the active and passive voices expressing the same thing in different ways. Critics will say that people are equally implied by the construction 'is believed' as by the construction 'we believe'. But this objection belittles the role that language plays in logic. If the passive construction makes logical sense without reference to people, then we can accept it at face value. We end up with belief being an element of logic. So belief is not caused by the collections of hardware known as people, nor is it the action of some mechanism. Instead it is part of the logic specifying what things shall exist in the world, some of those 'things' being the hardware collections known as people.
The conventional picture of belief is a 'feeling in the mind'. It is perhaps similar to the feeling of warmth or colour. In olden days, warmth was thought to be the action of salamanders, the spirits that inhabited flames. Eventually scientists explained warmth in terms of the agitation of molecules. Colour was explained as the wavelength of lightwaves. We now ask ourselves what the physical equivalent of the feeling known as belief might be. Conventional science recognises that belief must have a physical equivalent (but has no idea what it might be).
In the theory here, belief does indeed have a physical equivalent. But it does not lie in the objects of the world like the equivalents of warmth and colour. Instead, belief's physical equivalent lies in logic. It lies in the logic that specifies the objects of the world.
Thus there is nothing 'mystical' about belief. It is a natural scientific element of the world, rather like the physical laws. If it helps, we can think of the 'feeling of belief' as a sensing of the logic that governs the world.
This view finds support in many areas of science. I mentioned one above: scientists have an active dislike of people deciding to believe something. (As Tarski might have said, deciding to believe something results in a decision to believe something, not in belief.) 'Plausibility' is another area. Scientists frequently use plausibility arguments to support a theory or to condemn contrived arguments. They are appealing to belief, effectively using belief as a logical element.
Scientists sometimes make explicit use of belief to judge truth. One scientist might say of some phenomenon 'I don't believe it's real'. Their colleague might reply 'But there is a lot of evidence for it - I believe it is real'. Regardless of which conclusion they eventually come to regarding the reality of the phenomenon in question, they are using their beliefs to judge reality. That can only mean that their beliefs are logically prior to reality.
Perhaps scientists' most common use of belief as an element of logic occurs with the meaning of words. Instead of defining the stuffing out of every word, scientists simply rely on a shared scientific understanding of what words mean. 'Shared understanding' means what they believe. As an example, Charles Darwin famously said that his theory would 'absolutely break down' if evolution could not proceed by 'numerous, successive, slight' changes to species. His use of the subjective words 'numerous' and 'slight' is technically inadmissible for a scientist. To be correct, Darwin should have defined numerous as, say, eight. (I once saw the fundamental particles of physics described as 'numerous' when there were eight known at the time.) Having decided that 'numerous' means eight, he should have used that meaning everywhere else in his work. He might have determined 'slight' to mean 1%, perhaps. With firm definitions of these words, Darwin could have avoided people choosing the meanings to suit their prejudices. Choosing word meanings retrospectively to support a theory is not too different from choosing evidence retrospectively to support a theory. Scientists should not do it.
If we accept belief as a legitimate element of science (as part of logic), scientists become free to rely on the believed meanings of words. The believed meaning of a word is part of the logic that makes up the world.
Other areas of science where belief is used unavoidably are Ockhams Razor (the belief that simplest is best); the choosing of axioms; the use of principles of elegance, symmetry, aesthetics; the choosing of 'worlds' to study; the nature of scientific explanation (a believed account); and so on. With belief installed as an element of science (actually of logic) we are justified in using it in all of these areas.
We are also justified in saying things like 'The world is not different from what it is believed to be' or 'the world is believed to be as it is'. Those informal statements, which have always seemed irrefutable, are now confirmed as indeed irrefutable. When we think about it, of course the world cannot be different from what it is believed to be. How could we possibly prove that it was different? It would be like scientists enthusiastically announcing at a press conference that they had finally discovered the explanation of some important phenomenon, but then adding: 'Unfortunately, we do not believe this to be the correct explanation'.
In the theory here, believe is to be understood as the generalisation of see or observe. Thus when we 'see the truth' of a proposition, we believe the proposition to be correct. I mention this because some scientific people limit 'see' to the operation of eyes. For most of us, however, the atomic nucleus is real even though we've never seen one with our eyes. I would even say that the Higgs particle is real, even though its existence is yet to be confirmed. It is real because it is believed to exist.
Let us now look at a practical example of how belief is used to create objects in the world. The objects created will be real objects, meaning that they will take part in the logic of the world after their creation. Prior to this creation, the objects in question will be totally invisible, and, strictly speaking, we cannot even refer to them. If they exist at all, they do so in 'possible worlds' - worlds where, for example, angels might exist, also meringue-utans and lots of other objects unknown to us. The act of creation transfers these possible-world inhabitants to our world, the world of real objects.
The example I will use is from biology. Suppose a biologist slices into an organ and uncovers a previously unknown biological machine lurking within. We might think the machine existed all along and all that the biologist did was 'reveal' it. In a sense that is indeed all they did - but we should not belittle the revealing process by saying that's 'all' that they did. (It's like saying that all Michelangelo did was reveal the Captive that was always there.) The revealing is in fact the creation of the object revealed. The intricate biological machine, prior to its discovery, did not take part in the logic of the world. The biologist did not cut into the organ intending to make the machine take such a part. No, prior to that event there was no conception of the machine's existence, no way of even referring to it. The machine was not an 'it' that could be referred to.
At the moment the machine was 'discovered' - i.e., believed to exist - it became a real object of our world, and began to take part in our world's logic. That was the moment the machine became an 'it'. Almost immediately after this creation event, the biologist assigned a (tentative) history to the machine. He or she gave it a past to bolster its reality. The particular past was intended to carry the object forward from the past into the present, and through the present into the future. That would place the object firmly as part of the world's logic. Additionally, this assignment of reality was intended to provide an explanation of why different people saw the same thing when they looked at it. They saw the same thing because that thing now existed in itself. Prior to this assignment of reality, nobody saw it. It had to be created first i.e., discovered, demonstrated, explained, given a history, assigned causal abilities, and so on. All that having been done, the object was now real. It had a 'self' and now existed in itself.
This assignment of reality status to the machine - the invention of a self, the creation of an explanatory past - was something we did for our own purposes. It was not a matter of 'reality' forcing itself onto us. No - it was a matter of us wanting real objects in the world, and getting them.
The organ revealed by the biologist could have been the human brain. The biologist might have been cutting into the human skull and 'discovered' this particular organ. In that case, you might ask, how could the brain not have existed as a real object until that moment? Surely the biologist was using their brain to do the cutting? Brains must have been real all along.
No - such thinking makes a fudge of the logical sequence. The brain did not exist all along; that particular idea was assigned only after we had discovered it. (Check the sequence.) It is a rule of science that in a competition between facts and logic, logic wins. The logical sequence is that the brain was not an element of our world until we did something, namely, cut into the skull and observe its existence. As a result of us doing this 'something', the brain became an element of our world. It is clear that we needed to do this 'something' before the brain achieved that status.
Perhaps we could have elements of our world existing without us 'doing something'? OK Let us try to find something that we believe to exist before it is believed to exist... Clearly, this is nonsense. The conclusion that we come to, like it or not, is that reality depends on us. It is no good us fudging the matter. It is no good us leaving the scene a picosecond after we have created an object and pretending that our presence was never needed.
Where does this leave us regarding free will? The explanation of free will is simply that we believe the world to exist. More correctly, the world is believed to exist. That includes all the objects in it. There is no distinction between 'private' objects (this table I am making) and 'public' objects (that range of hills in the distance). They all get there by being believed to exist. Although this removal of the distinction between natural and man-made objects is a victory for science, clearly there is a distinction between these objects at the level of individual people. We will explore this distinction in the next page.
For the moment, we note that people exercise their free will by believing objects to exist. (That is, they believe objects into existence.) Some objects, such as a chair they are making, may be described as 'local'. Public objects, such as a range of hills, may be described as 'global'. We will need to look into this distinction between local and global, it having a dependence on how people fit into the scheme of things.
Another puzzling matter is the need, in this theory, for free will to be unconscious, even though we feel ourselves to be particularly conscious when we commit a free will act. I will leave the explanation of this mainly to another page, but I must confess to a slight subterfuge that I have been practising. I have been using the word 'unconscious' to give the flavour of 'not being under our deliberate control', but this usage is not quite correct.
For logical reasons it is necessary that objects not be determined 'deliberately' i.e., they must not be caused by objects. That would have been an absurdity: objects the creator of objects. For a similar reason, it is necessary that a person believing something into existence must not be able to believe lots of alternative things into existence, then choose one of them to be 'real'. Apart from the logical problem that would entail, it would make a presumption of an ability to 'choose', and that is something we are trying to explain. The same problem is implicit in the idea of people 'deciding' to believe something.
For all those reasons (and others to come), it was necessary that belief be 'unconscious'. But a more correct word is 'subjective' i.e., belief must be purely subjective. The unknown element of the world's logic (the 'curious aspect' of free will referred to on the first page) is not exactly 'unconscious belief', but subjectivity. Unfortunately, it is difficult to form a picture of subjectivity, whereas we can easily form a picture of unconscious belief. In the latter case, all we have to do is picture conscious belief then imagine that we are unaware of it. When we feel ourselves to be 'fully conscious' in conducting a free will act, actually we are being 'fully subjective'. But I will continue to use 'unconscious belief' because it is easier to picture. I trust that this will not cause confusion.
In the next page I will move on to describing the enormous range of problems that the theory is able to solve. But I can give one of the solutions here. It concerns Benjamin Libet's classic experiments on free will conducted in the 1960s.
Libet found (and there have been several confirmations since) that when a human volunteer is asked to make a voluntary movement at a moment of their choice, electrical probes attached to the person record the initiation of the action before the person is aware that they have decided to act! This is truly a momentous finding. Most scientists seem to explain it by saying that the person doesn't have free will after all. The movement is caused by the determining forces of physics and we merely have an illusion that we acted freely. Unfortunately, that leaves the illusion unexplained. Roger Penrose makes this comment in Shadows of the Mind (1995, p386): 'Perhaps one's apparent conscious decisions are really made unconsciously at some earlier time'. (The italics are his.)
Needless to say, Roger Penrose's sentiment agrees exactly with the theory I have presented here. We might even regard Libet's experimental results as a kind of retrospective 'proof' of this theory. There are other 'proofs ' to be described. I put proof in quotes to show that this is not exactly the notion of proof we are used to in science. In fact it is impossible to prove the theory presented on this site according to current scientific axioms. Science's axioms are chosen by our free will, and obviously a theory of free will cannot be proved from within the axioms it chooses.
So instead of this theory being 'proved' in the normal sense, we have to rely on 'demonstrations'. One of these demonstrations is the theory's utility in solving problems. Another demonstration lies in the theory's plausibility. However, the plausibility is not whether the theory itself is plausible (to many people it isn't!) but whether the theory can be disproved on grounds other than plausibility. If we can show that the theory is wrong for good scientific reasons - such as logical consistency - and without relying on plausibility - then we are justified in throwing it out. But suppose the theory is logically consistent and agrees with the evidence of the world? Are we allowed, in that case, to discard the theory on grounds that it is 'contrived', or not a 'satisfactory' explanation of the world? Or that it is 'implausible'? No we are not. The words in quotes have a dependence on belief, and it would be illogical to use belief to discard a theory concerning the logical relevance of belief. It would be like saying 'I don't believe belief has any relevance to science.' [Ref. 2] Any argument that relies on belief is surely an argument for theories that say belief is important!
There are two respectable ways by which the theory might be discarded. One is to find some other explanation of each of the puzzles solved by this theory. The other is to formulate the workings and results of science so that there is no reference to belief (and perhaps without belief being used in the formulation process). A good place to start such an exercise would be with the scientific theory of biological evolution - to formulate that theory without using subjective words. If we find that belief is an indispensable element of science, we become obliged to accommodate it within scientific formalities. The theory presented here can be considered to do that.
Back to beginning of Page 1 ('A solution to the problem of free will')