Solving the free will problem is a matter of finding the rule that determines what objects shall be considered to populate our world. Some of these objects we will call natural and some artificial, but the rule will not distinguish between them. Whatever procedure man uses to make artificial things - the things produced by his free will - that is also the procedure that will make the things of Nature. This includes the things that existed before man - a seemingly impossible scenario, until we find that it's all done by logic.
And what is this rule? It is belief. The world's objects are believed to be as they are.
We can also say that the world's objects are not different from what they are believed to be - an uncontentious statement. But our understanding of belief is now different. Belief is no longer a passive commentary on a pre-existing world, but an implementation of it.
Belief is not something that emerges from a mechanism (a brain, for instance) but is an element of logic. Its role within logic is the determiner of what real objects shall exist, selecting one world from an infinite range of possible worlds, all of which are 'Real' in the sense of being independent of people. The selected world is independent of people too, because that's how we have set it up to be. (i.e., it is independent by definition.) But the selected world has an essential difference from the others: it has been selected. To reflect this difference, I have called it the 'real' world (with a lower-case 'r'). The other worlds are Real (with an upper-case 'R') and we ignore them. We unconsciously choose the selected world - our world - by believing it to exist.
Undoubtedly an uncomfortable aspect of this theory is the requirement that belief be unconscious (i.e., subjective). I gave the reason earlier: belief could not have the role of determining objects if it were itself an object. Our preference would have been that belief be a mechanism that we can study, manipulate and control. Now we need to accept that objective manipulation of belief is not possible. It is not possible to decide what to believe, instead we are at the mercy of what we happen to believe. Equivalently, the world is what we actually believe it to be, and not what we might tell ourselves we believe it to be. That is a disadvantage, as I said, but it does have the fortunate result of ruling out charlatans and miracle-workers 'psyching themselves up' to believe outrageous things into reality. The world is what it is unconsciously believed to be, and this rules out all funny business of an unscientific nature.
Some of the things believed to exist in our world may be described as 'local', as they relate to just one person or to a few people. These things are the products of our free will in the normal sense - things we make and do. Libet confirms that our free will acts are made unconsciously, that we only objectivise them after we have made them.
Other aspects of our world may be described as 'global': the stars, big bang, laws of physics, and so on. They are implemented the same way as local things i.e., unconsciously. The difference is that a large number of people contribute to the belief that these global things exist. A single person does not see their personal contribution, but they contribute nonetheless. The global action of free will results in the world being what it is globally believed to be. (And if it were believed to be different, it would be different.)
As I said, the local manifestation of free will is local objects - this document that I am working on right now, the table I am trying to assemble, and so on. I bring such local objects into existence by believing them to exist. To everyone else the objects are determined; they arise through the impersonal laws of physics working through my body. But I am different from other people: I believe I made the items in question.
(I have yet to describe how people enter the scheme of things; please bear with me.)
One of the objects in the world is the big bang. Like all objects, the big bang is believed to exist i.e., it gets its real existence - its 'self' - by being believed to exist. We who are alive today help implement the big bang. This might at first seem a nonsensical statement - us altering the past. But belief is an element of logic and lies outside physical things, including time. When logic is in charge of the world, we can be sure that the world will be free of logical deficiency regardless of whether or not there is any alteration of the past. Effectively there is an overarching requirement for the world to be logically consistent. In the new understanding of logic, the world must be plausible, or believed.
Imagine that we have a time machine which we can use to travel backward and forward through time. If I want to exercise my free will to move a chair from here to there, I get into the time machine and travel back to the big bang to when the initial conditions of the universe were being set. There I tweak the initial conditions such that the world evolves deterministically into the world of the present day, but with the chair in its new position. Since the backward journey uses 'negative' time, the 'positive' time used in the journey back to the present (all 14 billion years of it) cancels it out. Thus the chair moves to its new position as soon as I begin the time travel i.e., immediately I enter the time machine. Other people see the chair's movement as determined by physical effects working through my body, and I see that too. But I know about the time travel. I am in the unique position of believing that the chair's movement was caused by me. Thus, alone in the world, I have a free will relationship with the chair's change in position.
Of course, the time machine is not a telephone booth or other outlandish mechanism. It is simply logic, the logic of belief. I believe the chair to be in its initial position, then I believe it to be in some other positions and then in its final position. The chair's movement conforms to the beliefs of onlookers, too. They believe that I made the chair move, and also that they didn't.
I now move on to showing how this solves many long-standing problems in science and philosophy, beginning with the problem of people.
How do people fit into the theory I have been describing? First we must get an understanding of what people are (or what a person is). It has long been a problem in philosophy as to what determines personhood. Obviously the identity of a person does not lie in his or her elbows or navel. Those things can be removed and we still have the same person. Nor does it lie in anything else physical - e.g., brain cells - because nothing in the body is ontologically different from elbows or navels.
The problem of personal identity is easily solved here. A person's identity lies in their unconscious beliefs. A person is the vector-like sum of their hidden beliefs. Identical twins who are exactly alike, and who behave exactly the same, will know by their beliefs as to which one is which - but we onlookers will have no way of telling them apart.
Earlier I described how a material object gets it identity by entering the logic of the world according to what it is believed to be (and does not enter the world through the possession of a pre-existing 'self'). I described how two people seeing an apple will believe it to be slightly different, but that a kind of 'vector sum' of the two beliefs can represent the apple's self. A vector sum has the desirable property that the resultant vector replaces the component vectors and leaves us with a single vector able to represent the apple's identity. This resultant vector might change in magnitude and direction but it is still a single thing.
Just as with the apple, the beliefs that define a person can be added together into a single resultant, and this can be identified with the person (i.e., can constitute the person's selfhood). The person's beliefs do not sit alongside each other as 'parts' of the person. Instead they sum to a single belief that points somewhere in logic space. [Ref. 3] The changing components of a person's beliefs might change the direction of the resultant vector but the vector will still be a single thing. Thus we have an explanation of why a person feels themselves to be a unity (and is treated as such by other people). It is because they are a unity. They are that one vector pointing somewhere in logic space. The movement of this vector as it waves around might be identified with 'consciousness'. Consciousness does appear to be associated with change of some sort.
With personhood defined in terms of belief, there is no problem with us undertaking the time travel back to the big bang that I described earlier. People live in logic space rather than in time-space and can in principle accomplish anything that doesn't offend logic. Whatever they accomplish must be logically consistent with the rest of the world. It must be belief-preserving, or 'plausible'. It would be illogical if belief were destroyed by belief.
Thus we see why it is not possible to do unbelievable things such as change the objective past or perform blatant miracles. Such actions would be implausible (more correctly, not believed) and would contradict logic. It might appear that the ordinary world has roots in the past, making it impossible for us to change it. But that is only partly true. Much of the past still lies undetermined. It can be chosen to agree with whatever we choose the present to be.
If we were to believe in a current world with some unusual characteristic - no poverty, perhaps - then we would have a world with that characteristic. The poverty would be eliminated without physical effort, and we might never know that it ever existed. In practice, the elimination of poverty in our present world is a struggle, but that is because we have a long-winded way of getting ourselves to believe in a world without it. It would appear possible to eliminate poverty without this struggle, but we would need to find a plausible means.
Roger Penrose in his several popular books (e.g., The Emperor's New Mind) has championed the idea that the asymmetry of the world - the direction of time - has something to do with the Weyl tensor being zero at initial singularities (e.g., the big bang) and infinite at final singularities (e.g., black holes). 'Initial' and 'final' indicate the direction of time. The theory of free will presented here suggest that Roger Penrose's 'conjecture' (as he calls it) is likely to be correct. (The Weyl tensor effectively describes objects.)
The things that fall into black holes are objects. They get crushed out of existence and no longer take part in the logic of our world. If the big bang were a time-reversed version of a black hole we would expect objects to come out of the big bang, because that is the opposite of objects falling into a black hole. But it does not happen that way. Big bangs produce nothing in the way of objects, only the potential for objects to be born later.
If the world's objects are not produced at the start (in the big bang), but exist to be destroyed in black holes at the end, clearly they must be produced along the way. They must be created at some point between the big bang and the final black hole.
This is supported by the theory on this site. Objects are not 'givens' presented to us by the world. Instead they are created 'on the fly', coming into existence as real things as and when they are believed to exist. We create them as things fitting into the logic of the world somewhere between the big bang and a black hole. If we didn't do this, there would be no objects to fall into the black hole and the hole could indeed look like a time-reversed version of the big bang. [Ref. 4]
This explanation of time's direction may be given another way. A person creates an object by believing it to exist, but he or she cannot uncreate it by believing it not to exist. Consider the object known as a 'Bolivian unicyclist's jockstrap'. (I encountered this on a TV show in a scientific context!) I would never have invented that object myself, but somebody did and now neither of us can get rid of it by fiat. We believe it to exist. (Note that this object isn't an object by virtue of it being a physical thing; it is an object by virtue of it being an 'it' that can be referred to.) The plain fact is that uncreation is not an easy thing to do, not when the created object has a self and fits into the logic of the world of other people. (It is possible that only in black holes is the death of an object guaranteed.) It is easy to see a connection between this object asymmetry and the direction of time.
Time can be seen as logical sequence objectivised - an objective version of a subjective logical sequence. We start with a subjective logical sequence, then because we want to communicate it to other people, we objectivise it and call the result time.
Logic certainly can be sequential. We see this in our use of words such as 'before' and 'prior' when used in a logical sense. With logic augmented by a facility to create objects rather than just manipulate them, the sequential nature of logic becomes strong enough to allow identification with time. Time is our objective description of a subjective logic.
Here is a syllogism:
If A then B
A
----------
B
Clearly the logic of this syllogism has a sequence, from top to bottom. A and B are givens. But what if A and B were not givens but obtained their existence from logic? (By being believed to exist.) Then we would have logic applying not only to the form of the syllogism but to its references as well - to everything. A and B are thought-objects in the present case, but we can consider the case where A and B are real objects. In that case, the syllogism's sequence would be real too. What might an objectively real logical sequence look like? Time.
If time is something we create, so is space. We create space as a context for the physical objects that we believe to exist. (We create both at the same time, and it is all done unconsciously.) We also create the physical laws that govern objects. Our conception of an object requires that it exhibit certain 'behaviour', and when we remove ourselves from the scene we pass the cause of this behaviour over to physical laws. (Again, this is something we do unconsciously.) In the case of the physical laws, scientists have already discovered some of our creating action. The law of conservation of energy, for instance, is traceable to our desire that physical laws not vary with time. Similarly, the laws of conservation of linear and angular momentum are traceable to our preference (again unconscious) to having physical laws that do not depend on whereabouts we are located in space, or on what direction we are facing.
The anthropic principle purports to explain why several of the world's fundamental characteristics (such as the values of the physical constants) happen to have special values allowing man to evolve. The conventional explanation is that we wouldn't be in a position to see this specialness if the world had been otherwise and we hadn't evolved. In other words, our presence in the world today requires those features of the distant past. One can avoid saying that we cause those past things to happen by putting the blame on a quasi-mystical selection principle. Our existence selects a world with the required special characteristics.
But, as Roger Penrose explains, there are problems with the anthropic principle. Firstly, it can only explain features of the world that have some link to the evolution of man. There are other features of the world which are also remarkably special but which do not have a bearing on man's evolution. Whatever it is that eventually is found to explain those features might as well explain everything i.e., including the features that we now choose to explain anthropically.
Secondly, even when it explains features necessary for the existence of man, the anthropic principle falls short of explaining why these features have special values far exceeding the requirements for man's evolution. For instance, we need a 'flat' universe to evolve man, but the world is extremely flat. Its flatness might exceed that necessary for man by a factor of 60 powers of 10. Again, whatever it is that explains this extreme specialness will, when it is found, obviate the need for an anthropic explanation.
A more mundane problem with the anthropic principle is that it amounts to choosing past reality to support a preferred view of the present. That procedure is not much different from one of the cardinal sins of science - a researcher choosing evidence to support a pre-chosen conclusion. [Ref. 6]
In view of these problems it is surprising that any scientific person would support the principle. Many scientists flirt with it merely because they can see no other explanation of the phenomena in question. [Ref. 7]
The theory presented on this site can be seen as taking the anthropic principle to its ultimate conclusion. Everything about the past is determined from the present. The whole objective world is our creation. The world is as we believe it to be, and that includes its starting point. Everybody who has lived, or who will ever live, takes part in setting the meticulous initial conditions of the world at its inception. Those conditions are not just things like the values of the physical constants, but are also the deterministic histories of all the objects of the world as and when they are believed into existence. In this way, the 'creator's aim', as Roger Penrose puts it, is guided into the extremely special location in phase space that we see the world to have been put at its birth.
When a quantum measurement is made, a particle obtains characteristics seemingly out of nowhere. Before the measurement, each possible outcome has a predetermined probability of occurrence, but only one outcome actually gets implemented when the measurement is made. The problem is to know what constitutes a measurement and when it occurs. Some scientists have said that consciousness seems to be involved. Their reasoning is that any non-conscious piece of apparatus carrying out the measurement could be adjoined to the thing being measured and treated as part of an extended apparatus. We only get a measurement when a conscious person checks the extended apparatus. Up until he or she does that, the measurement is not complete and the whole extended apparatus remains in a state of quantum superposition. Most physicists shudder at the mention of consciousness in this regard. Before invoking an explanation of quantum measurement based on consciousness, they would want to know how consciousness is accommodated within science. There hasn't been such accommodation to date.
In the theory here, a measurement's timing coincides with the world being believed to be in some state. The thing produced by the measurement is an object, but before the measurement it was a virtual or possible object, inhabiting a virtual or possible world. Upon being believed to exist, that possible object gets transferred to our world, the world of reality, as a real object. Thereafter it is able to take part in our world's logic. The object's appearance in the real world is sudden precisely because our belief is sudden. This is in agreement with the suddenness of state vector reduction in the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics. Thus we have an explanation of what a measurement is and when it occurs. This explanation will get further support later on this site.
The main alternative to the Copenhagen Interpretation is the so-called 'Many Worlds' interpretation. As originally understood in about 1980, a 'Many Worlds' quantum measurement results in the measuring apparatus 'splitting' so that each possible outcome of the measurement is realised in a different world. These worlds are orthogonal to each other but otherwise have the same degree of reality. In more recent times the measurement apparatus has been identified with the 'environment' so that now the state vector can be reduced by a spontaneous measurement (i.e., not initiated by a person). The reduction is supposed to occur when a 'sufficient' interaction with the environment takes place. This is called 'decoherence'.
Two serious problems with the Many Worlds view (augmented by decoherence) are, firstly, how to divide the world up into that which is measured and that which is doing the measuring (the environment), and secondly, how to eliminate the subjectivity implied in the word 'sufficient'. There is also the problem of why we perceive only one world when the theory says there are a huge number of them. I repeat that according to the Many Worlds theory, all of the worlds have the same degree of reality. If one of them is real - and we presume that the world of our experience is - then all of them must be.
The free will theory on this site agrees that all of the Many Worlds have the same degree of Reality. But it is Reality with a capital 'R'. In other words, all of the Many Worlds are possible worlds. Their degree of reality (with a lower case 'r') is zero. But now, from the exterior platform of logic, we select one of these Real worlds to become our real world (with a lower case 'r'). This selecting is possible because the platform of logic lies outside all possible worlds. In this way, we get an explanation of measurement that is the same in both the Copenhagen amd Many Worlds interpretations.
Returning to the Copenhagen version, the moment of measurement is the moment that the measurement is believed to be a measurement. If the experiment involves reading a dial pointer but the experimenter photographs the dial instead of looking at it directly, the state vector reduction gets delayed until he or she looks at the photograph. The camera is a macroscopic device (and conventionally might be expected to effect state vector reduction), but nothing gets believed when a camera takes a photo. Belief only happens when the photos are viewed. Until something is believed, it does not enter into the logic of the world. But 'measurements' need not be carried out in laboratories. A measurement is any occasion where the world is forced to produce a value contributing to the world's logic. Thus a layperson casually observing the world can be measuring it.
Where does the randomness come from? I will devote a page to randomness later on. For the moment we may note that the experimenter's belief in the outcome of the experiment is constrained by what he or she believes the experiment to consist of. For instance, if the experiment is the measurement of a particle's location, the experimenter will expect it to appear somewhere in his or her laboratory, and not in someone else's laboratory. In the limit, when the experimenter's beliefs are very constraining, the particle might be expected to appear in a spot with nearly 100% certainty. But if there are no constraints, the experimenter will see the result as totally random. That is to say, if he or she insists on there being a causal agent, they will create randomness to be that agent. (Thus the randomness exists because the experimenter demands a causative agent, not because it is 'real'.)
The theory here does not make a distinction between the thing-being-measured and a measuring environment, a distinction that the Many Worlds theory awkwardly relies upon. Here, everything is in the 'thing-being-measured' category, and there is no need to pick out an 'environment' to do the measuring. The measuring is not done by anything of a physical nature, but is our beliefs acting from the exterior platform of logic. Our beliefs are the environment.
It is interesting to speculate that when a measurement occurs, the environment still splits as in the conventional Many Worlds account, but now it is belief that splits. (In the conventional account it is not necessary that the whole world split, only the measuring apparatus.) This suggests the following explanation of why belief happens in practice to be split over many people (i.e., of why there is more than one person in the world).
The explanation goes as follows. In the beginning there was one person. (Remember: a person is defined by their beliefs. The existence of this one person is assumed to be a 'given' i.e., is unexplained.) The person's life consisted of their changing beliefs. There were no 'real' objects in that person's world. It was a state of perfect symmetry, there being an infinite choice as to what real world might be implemented if an implementation were to occur. At some point, the person made the logical error of believing that his or her beliefs were unreliable (so the speculation goes). He or she decided that there shall exist real objects - objects existing in themselves - that would be a reliable source of his or her belief. This choosing of reality - a symmetry breaking - was a kind of 'measurement' of Reality. It brought about a splitting of the measuring apparatus as just described. But with the 'measuring apparatus' being belief, this resulted in belief being split over different believers i.e., different people. In a 'Many Worlds' view of this, the different possibilities for making 'real' out of 'Real' were realised in different orthogonal worlds, namely in different people. In support of this, we note that people are indeed orthogonal to one another; they have no access at all to each other's beliefs. It might seem implausible, in this account, for there to be one person at one moment, then a multitude of people the next. However, it is only implausible if we are accustomed to seeing things in a time sequence rather than logically. The logical sequence could indeed be as described. [Ref. 8]
The much-discussed problem of Schrodinger's Cat has a simple explanation in terms of the theory here. Unexpectedly, the explanation lies in why the walls of Schrodinger's 'steel chamber' need to be opaque. When we think about it, this opaqueness does seem to be an unreasonable requirement. If we are worried about extraneous influences affecting the experiment, why not just consider an idealised situation where extraneous influences are simply ignored? Why is it necessary to deliberately exclude them? In other experiments we ignore friction when it suits us, or we assume that a test particle is 'small', and so on. In the case of Schrodinger's Cat, it seems essential for the walls of the chamber to be opaque, the implication being that we will not obtain a proper experiment by peering through translucent walls, whether or not we make the idealisation that our observation does not affect the measurement.
According to the theory I am presenting here, the opacity of the walls is indeed essential to the experiment. We make the chamber opaque so that the included objects (notably the cat) are excluded from our world i.e., they no longer take part in the logic of our world. The 'paradox' of Schrodinger's Cat arises when, having sent these objects out of our world, we pretend that we didn't do that. We pretend to look at things from the cat's point of view i.e., from whether it knows if it is dead or alive. That is illogical. If we have sent the cat out of our world, it is not valid to pretend that it still remains one of our real objects. The paradox of Schrodinger's Cat comes down to our sloppy use of logic (which is what all paradoxes are).
It is interesting to make the walls transparent and see what happens. What happens is that the cat is seen to suffer, the experimenters get chastised, funding dries up - and the threat of that happening prevents the experiment from being done in the first place. So no paradox. One of the experimenters then suggests doing the experiment without the cat; in fact, with nothing in the chamber apart from the would-be triggering atom. The 'paradox' then involves the radioactive atom being in a superposed state of integrated/disintegrated. Not a big deal. This thought experiment confirms that the 'paradox' does indeed lie in taken-for-granted factors such as wall opacity.
The lesson from Schrodinger's experiment is that we need to be careful as to what objects are deemed to be taking part in the logic of our world.
I believe Roger Penrose is careless in this regard when, in one of his popular books (The Road to Reality, p820), he discusses the asymmetry of time. He describes a simple experiment where a photon is fired at a half-silvered mirror, the electron going on to trigger a detector if transmitted through the mirror, or getting diverted into the ceiling if reflected. He invites us to consider the time-reverse of this, starting with the detection of the photon. Given that the photon is detected, where did it come from? According to the quantum formalism, the probability is only 50% that it was transmitted through the mirror. The other 50% probability is that the photon rose from the floor and entered the detector by reflection! This is 'paradoxical' because we know full well that the photon could only have come from the laboratory's photon source. We are 100% certain it was transmitted through the mirror and did not come from the floor.
The mistake he makes is to introduce the floor as a prejudicial object in the time-reversed scenario. In the forward-in-time scenario, a photon that gets reflected leaves the world by striking the ceiling or otherwise escaping from the system. In the reversed-time version, the photon which Penrose said came from the floor should have been seen as entering the world. It should not have been seen as emitted from a floor. When we make this adjustment, we realise that it is indeed quite possible that the photon striking the detector could have come from the outside. The odds on that happening depend on what the outside is like, on how hot it is. To avoid prejudice, we need to give the outside the only temperature that the system has a gauge for - the temperature of the forward-in-time photon source. When we give the outside environment that particular temperature, hey presto, the time-reversed scenario has exactly the same probabilities as the time-forward scenario. Again, the lesson is that we need to be careful about what objects are 'system' and what are not. (What is being measured and what is the measuring environment.) We choose what objects there shall be in an experimental system and we equally choose (but unconsciously) what objects there shall be in the real world. [Ref. 9]
In the next page I will talk about biological evolution and the logical difficulties of that theory. (The difficulties have nothing to do with religious objections). The theory on this site allows removal of these difficulties and we can continue having evolution as a real mechanism. But it will be a mechanism that we unconsciously choose to exist. Like everything else about the world, it will not be a mysteriously pre-existing truth.
Back to beginning of Page 1 ('A solution to the problem of free will')