Stephen Hawking's "Genius" series looks at free will confusingly

Wow! As a big Stephen Hawking fan, I never thought that I'd write a blog post where I took him to task for getting a scientific subject wrong. 

But after watching Episode 3 of Hawking's new "Genius" series, I've got to point out how confusing this Why Are We Here? episode was when it came to free will. 

I've read a lot about free will. I've thought a lot about free will. I've written a lot about free will. (For example, see here, here, and here.)

So I was all eyes and ears as Hawking led three ordinary people -- meaning, non-scientists -- through exercises designed to get them thinking in a scientific way. Clips can be viewed on the PBS web page devoted to Episode 3, along with the entire hour long show. 

We see them marveling at floating plates in a room within an English castle. Not surprisingly, this isn't the result of magic, but magnetism. The lesson learned is that scientific understanding of the laws of nature is the way to comprehend the world, not supernatural explanations.

Then the three Genius explorers tackle a difficult problem: how to knock an olive on a toothpick that's balanced on the edge of a cocktail glass into the drink. Without touching it with their hands.

A pendulum device on a long chain looks promising. The swinging round ball definitely has what it takes, but the scientific students keep either missing short (no contact) or long (too much contact, so the glass breaks). After many tries, and many refills of the drink by a bartender in the room, they figure out what to do.

Use a board with markings to get the ball in a precise spot, and use a button that deactivates a magnet holding the ball in place so the "push" on the ball is exactly the same every time. It doesn't take long for them to find the sweet spot where the olive is gently knocked into the glass. 

And they can do this repeatedly. Lesson: if something is done in exactly the same way, the same thing will happen according to the laws of nature. 

A replication of the famous Libet experiment about conscious vs. unconscious choice gets us directly into questions of free will. The three people are asked to push a button (which sets off fireworks!) at a moment of their choice while staring at a large clock projected onto a castle wall. 

They note the time they consciously chose to push the button. As Libet found, and as other researchers have confirmed, a conscious decision to do something is preceded by unconscious activity in the brain. So this teaches the threesome that free will doesn't really exist, since the sense of "I freely choose to do this" is an illusion.

Actually, brain processes outside of our awareness determine what we choose. Thus they learn that determinism resulting from the laws of nature rules the universe, and us.

I was nodding along agreeably with Episode 3 up to this point. The points Hawking was making seemed eminently justified, being in line with familiar scientific principles I'd read about in numerous books and articles.

But then the episode took a turn.

A Doppelganger challenge featured many people wearing masks of the three Genius explorers. They lined up behind the real person. Then each individual decided to take a step to the right or left when a loud "beep" sounded. Before long these choices resulted in the Original and Doppelgangers being considerably out of step with each other, so to speak.

The lesson Hawking was teaching here struck me as way more scientifically problematic than what had been presented before. This exercise pointed to the Many Worlds (or Many Universes) theory of quantum mechanics. 

As a Wikipedia article discusses, the notion that all possible outcomes occur, that the "universe splits into all possible universes all the time" (as Hawking says near the end of Episode 3) is by no means a settled understanding of science. The Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics has a lot of fans, but the article quotes a critic: "And who here believes the laws of physics are decided by a democratic vote?"

Yet Hawking and some other scientists, such as physicist Sean Carroll, speak as if it is virtually certain that every possible action or choice does occur in a parallel universe. 

Now, obviously there's no problem entertaining this hypothesis. It makes a lot of sense, and resolves some difficult questions about the quantum world. My problem is with how Episode 3 related free will to the Many Worlds theory. I failed to see how everything happening that could happen saves free will, as one of the threesome seemed to believe.

After all, Hawking had just led the three people to several understandings: the laws of nature rule the universe, and unconscious brain processes determine our conscious choices.

So someone decides to step to the right when hearing the beep in the Doppelganger exercise. This wasn't a freely willed choice. Yet certainly a different choice -- step to the left -- could have been made by the person's brain, given different causes acting within the brain.

I fail to see how everything that could happen, does happen has any relevance to free will. If anything, the Many Worlds theory points to Determinism Gone Wild. Not only does one thing happen according to the laws of nature, everything happens. 

Assuming the Many Worlds theory of the quantum realm is true. I'm not aware of any empirical evidence that it is. Thus Hawking's conclusion in Episode 3 struck me as poetic and appealing, but not convincing: "The universe you see is the one that gives rise to you out of all possible universes."

A member of the threesome said, "It took a whole universe to make me." OK, granted. The Big Bang can be viewed as the cosmic event that led to the present moment. Another quote from the episode: "We are a product of the universe, but the universe we live in is personal to us."

Well, sure.

We all experience the world through our own subjectivity. And the Many Worlds theory takes this farther, since there supposedly are countless other "me's" having subjective experiences in parallel universes. Naturally the only universe I'm aware of is the one I'm in.

It makes sense for Hawking and his collaborators on "Genius" to end Episode 3 on a semi-uplifting note after effectively putting free will on a skewer and roasting it to death. The basic answer he gives to the episode's main question, Why Are We Here?, is that we are here because we're not in an infinity of other parallel universes. 

Again, how this relates to free will and choice eludes me. But maybe the universe simply has determined that I'm not supposed to understand this.

Comments

[David]

Hi Brian,

If an action is determined then presumably it is the only possible outcome in the circumstances. Alternative outcomes would not be possible and therefore would not result in world fission. The idea that choices with multiple theoretical outcomes must lead to multiple universes in which all these outcomes are realised would suggest that choices are freely made.

[Appreciative Reader]

In both his "Brief History" and "In a Nutshell" (certainly the former, and probably the latter as well), I remember Hawking referring to the multiverse theory as merely a poetic representation of the anthropic principle. In its literal sense, he seemed to regard multiverses as an exotic hypothesis that has by no means been proved (to the extent that science does "prove" stuff). [But of course, both those books are pretty old, and he may have changed his views since then I suppose, as he famously did with black holes.]

I shan't comment on "no free will" all over again [ :-) ], except to quote Hawking (not in words, which I don't remember, but an idea I remember reading him expressing, in one of those two books of his) : It is meaningless to think of scientific hypothesis as "real" or "unreal", or as "correct" or incorrect", or to ask if they "make sense" -- the only meaningful question to ask of scientific hypotheses is whether they can make predictions, and whether these predictions hold up when put to the test. (He was talking in reference to the weirdness one comes across in physics, like quantum mechanics and negative time and string theory.) I suppose we can accept no-free-will in the same spirit that we accept other counter-intuitive hypotheses like quantum mechanics, and an apparently arbitrary limit to how fast stuff can go, as well as Einstein's four dimensions, if the no-free-will hypothesis passes that test : but does it?

[Brian Hines]

David, here's my take on your view that the Many Worlds theory supports a belief in free will/choices. This doesn't make sense to me. In the traditional view of quantum mechanics, the wave function (which evolves in a deterministic fashion) somehow "collapses" when an observation or measurement is made.

In other words, many possibilities, some of which are more possible than others, collapse into one actuality when an observation of a quantum system occurs. Of course, there is a lot of debate about what an observation/measurement consists of, and what the role of consciousness is in all this.

Regardless, one thing ends up happening in the traditional (Copenhagen) viewpoint. So this seems to support, albeit weakly, a belief in free will. I decide to observe a photon as a wave and it appears as a wave. Observe as a particle and it appears as a particle. In some sense I choose, and the choice has a single real consequence in the world.

But the Many Worlds theory does away with the wave function collapse. As noted in this post, everything that could happen, does happen -- in parallel universes. So it is difficult for me to see how this supports a belief in free will. Under the Many Worlds theory, everything that is allowed to happen by the quantum wave function DOES happen. And it happens deterministically, I'd assume, given that this is a characteristic of the wave function.

Here's a link to a piece about implications of the Many Worlds Interpretation that says "You still have free will." But the reasons given actually imply the opposite. I'll share that section after the link.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-9-weirdest-implications-of-the-many-worlds-interpre-1692618056
----------------------
"Given that all possible decisions will be made by different versions of you, the MWI makes it difficult to reconcile the issue of free will. If all options of a choice are selected in alternate worlds, then why go through all the trouble of weighing all the evidence before choosing? The collective fate of our totality, it would seem, has already been determined.

But as MWI expert Michael Clive Price points out, while all decisions are realized, some are realized more often than others. In other words, each branch of a decision has its own "weight" that's enforcing the usual laws of quantum statistics.

Also, the MWI would imply a certain indeterminism to existence, albeit in an unintuitive way. Whenever we ask ourselves, "Could I have chosen a different course of action?," the MWI would strongly imply that the answer is most definitely yes. What's more, not only could you have chosen a different course of action, an alternate version of you actually did! As for why you chose differently, or why you fared a certain way on a test or sporting event, it all boils down to how the quantum events affected objects at the classical scale — including the cogitations of your brain."

[777]

After reading the last free will chapter again
and most f us agree on almost zero free will here , . .
my mind came up with the following :

What's nicer (to clear things up ) , . . makes more sense :

a)
A creation without a perfect God in human Form

b)
With such a phenomenon

777