Free Will (or: the post where you all run screaming for the hills, no matter how far away they may be)

Edited to add two quick administrative notes: 1. I took the ability to put html into the comments and to auto-link urls out. Sorry, but the comment spam is getting ridiculous and I am taking extreme measures. I hope this doesn't inconvenience anyone too much. 2. In honour of Disabled Persons Day, which was yesterday, I've switched out the 'blogs I'm reading' section and listed three blogs by disabled persons that I really enjoy reading. They are smart, engaging, often funny, direct and write on a variety of topics near and dear to my heart. Nickie of Nickie's Nook is seen around these parts frequently; The Gimp Parade reminds me of Bitch PhD; and Diary of a Goldfish reminds me of a lot of you.

What I love most about modern physics is how counter-intuitive it all is. Consider: that chair you're sitting on? Not actually solid. The walls and floors? Also not actually solid. You? Not solid. Just about everything in your environment that you experience as a satisfyingly hard and resistant object is far more empty space than anything. Solidity is an illusion.

Also: Dimensions. You know about three, yes? And possibly also the fourth, time. But theories of ten or eleven dimensions to our universe, all but four of them twisted away on themselves so as to be invisible, incomprehensibly tiny bits of something-or-other that make everything go even though we can't in any way ever experience them ... well. I doubt this will elevate your opinion of me, but it all makes me very happy. Because why should reality be simple? Why should it be obvious? There are far greater mysteries, Horatio, than are explained in your philosophies, and so on.

Personally, I love it when cutting-edge science throws things at me that are stranger by far than my religious practice ever could. A witch? Are you kidding me? Have you talked to a physicist lately?

There's been one minor exception to this love-in: time.

We experience time in a way utterly different from the other dimensions. The three dimensions of space (width, height, length) remain fixed, while time does not. Time has a now, and a past, and a future; except that large parts of modern physics claim it's all bunk and there's no such thing. No such thing as past-present-future (which makes a hash of most English departments, I'm afraid). It is, they say, an artifact of consciousness (as far as my limited familiarity can summarize it). We are aware only of a particular spot in the dimension of time known as "now," but the whole thing exists, at all times, always. The past is now, the future is now. It already has happened and it is happening, all of it, always. Much like both ends of the table exist at once, though not in the same place.

As I said, the whole thing is counter-intuitive, so this might make absolutely no sense. But as far as I understand it, one could analogize it as a block of ice. The block of ice is time; within that block of ice are frozen the small coloured threads of our own lives (too small, but that's another issue). The whole of our lives has, in some sense, existed since the Big Bang set the picture show in motion. The world in which you existed, and were born in a particular place to particular parents with particular talents and weaknesses, has always existed. You have always existed, and every moment of your life so far, with all of its great and trivial moments, has always existed. The tangled bit of coloured thread that is your life has always been frozen in the same spot in that block of ice. You are only aware, however, of potentially one molecule of that thread, so it appears to move and change around you.

Of course, this appears to be incompatible with any concept of free will, since in essence it argues that you woke up this morning, stumbled to the kitchen, rubbed your eyes and overboiled the egg because it was inevitable that you would do so. There was never a universe in which you did not.

Robert Sawyer (a Canadian science fiction author) wrote a book called Flash Forward which argued against this. In the book he had the entire world experience a kind of hallucination in which each person was able to live a moment of their 'future' lives, and bring that memory back with them into the present. One of the characters, a waiter who wanted to be an author, saw an image of himself decades in the future, still waiting tables, still not publishing. In despair, he killed himself, and thus altered the future. So there! The characters cried. Free will exists, and the future is not fixed.

I suppose the proponents of the theory would argue that the character would have been unable to kill himself, no matter how often he had tried; that the vision of his future self would always have been part of the fabric of his life story, and so eventually he would have come to terms with his future and gone on to live his life as the vision forecast. And I've struggled with this idea that my life is fixed, my choices made even as I make them, the consequences known, the end of the world by one means or another unavoidable at whatever point it was set at from the beginning of the Universe.

Of course this is only one theory and I don't want to give the impression that even all physicists agree, but it's a theory I've read in many places, and the mere possibility is disturbing. Why bother struggling with self-improvement of any sort, from fitness to health to ethics to virtue to faith to crafting skills, if the outcome is known? Why fight battles with internal demons if your response is foreordained? Why work at making the right choices if you are in fact incapable of making choices at all?

See? Disturbing.

(The answer, I suspect, would be that grappling with these questions is for us as inevitable as their outcomes.)

But over the last little while I've found a weird kind of peace from this idea. It is, in a way, comforting to know that perhaps I cannot be more well informed, more talented, a better writer, more widely published, a kinder person, a more effective activist. Maybe, if everything I think and do and feel is already known and set, I can let myself off the hook for all the things I think I ought to be doing, but am not.

Taken to extremes this path leads to fatalism and it probably would not make sense to adopt it as a lifestyle choice, in much the same way as it would not be wise to live as if doorjambs, coffee tables, Mac trucks and knifeblades are not actually solid. So I'm not going to abandon my lifelong policy of trying to determine what the right thing to do is, and then try to do it; but it might make it, maybe, just a little bit easier to forgive myself for the lapses and the unintended consequences.

Posted by Andrea at December 4, 2006 6:39 AM under Me

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