I Choose To Believe In Free Will
Bell’s theorem leaves one loophole — superdeterminism — and taking it costs you causation itself. A short follow-up on why the loophole is untestable, and unnecessary.
What I’m about to say might undo everything I’ve said in my prior post. Or it might do the opposite and cement it for you.
Confused? Bring on Bell’s Theorem.
Bell’s inequalities, in their mathematical formulation, are laws that state that there are no hidden variable theories that can explain quantum mechanical phenomena. If true, they state that quantum mechanics deals with things that really are truly random, not due to some deterministic process involving variables we don’t know about or can’t measure. For many this seems to be the ultimate proof that indeterminism is the law of the land.
But… there is a thought experiment that results in a subtle loophole.
Bell tells us that if there is any choice at all, then you can’t have hidden local variables explaining QM. More concretely, it requires that the detector settings and readings referenced in the proof must not be completely predetermined by the history of the universe.
Now, you can accept that assumption to be true or not. If you instead accept that every state of the universe is pre-determined (including the random “next steps” we see quantum particles doing), and that the detectors readings were hard coded ahead of time, then you violate the assumption, and thus potentially work around Bell’s theorem. Now this is a stronger statement than regular determinism. It’s so much stronger, that it’s called “superdeterminism”. Let’s explore what that means.
Superdeterminism doesn’t follow the regular laws of cause and effect that normal determinism does. Regular determinism expects things like “A bumps into B, causing C”. Some state T results from some state T - 1 due to a chain of causation within the known laws of physics governing existence. Superdeterminism does away with causation, and explains random things like electrons disappearing and reappearing, or a virtual particle coming into existent and leaving, as just happened “because a script that lives outside our universe said so”.
Superdeterminism is something that requires “a something” outside of physics. A substrate onto which every random shuffling or process has its outcomes and subsequent trees of outcomes etched. Even describing it leads us into shaky logical territory. A “something”… a “substrate”? To accept superdeterminism is just as destructive to cause and effect as accepting pure randomness, and probably more so. At least true randomness implies a probability distribution for the very small. A pattern for things to follow. A rule that lives within our physical universe. We can define it to be a physical law that says that a particle is likely to have certain characteristics according to a probability distribution. And more importantly, it leaves cause and effect intact for the large. Superdeterminism on the other hand says that things happened because something outside physics, outside reality itself, said that it had to. No cause.
Now here is the mind blowing thing.
Free will exists if you choose it to exists. That is, if you can choose not to believe in superdeterminism, then Bell’s inequalities come into play and randomness does exist. If you “choose” to believe in superdeterminism, then that means that from the perspective of the omniscient outcome script you cannot make choices, because every state of the universe was predetermined, including the random seeming quantum phenomena. There is a surface level paradox that you can escape if you don’t believe in choice, just the illusion of choice, like Sam Harris does. But there is a not so obvious potential logical fallacy lurking just a bit beneath the surface. We don’t exist in the “same plane” or operate “from the perspective” of this omniscient outcome script. We only exist… within our physical existence. More importantly, our notions of causality don’t make sense across these two incompatible layers (the omniscient script, and reality). To accept consequences like “there is no free will” implies that things happened because it was predestined. This is something we do not have the power to imply since the word “because” means “caused by”, and causation doesn’t really make sense outside the context of existence. It’s the road to crazy town.
Superdeterminism is untestable scientifically. You could imagine a test setup involving time machines and re-verification of past experimental outcomes, but then the superdeterminists would evoke “multi-timeline superdeterminism”. Egads! In truth, superdeterminism is totally indistinguishable from actual randomness, within the system of our existence and of physics. Superdeterminism can never be proven true within the system, that is, within our reality. In essence, indeterminism (though maybe not super-indeterminism, whatever that might mean) can be true within the system irrespective of superdeterminism.
I choose to believe in free will ;).