 Dr.Henry Stapps recent speech at the Sages and Scientists Symposium 2011
Nice speech given by the great Henry Stapp, powerful points against materialism.
Henry Stapp:
My Talk at the Chopra 2011 Symposium “Sages and Scientists”
I’m a quantum physicist, and I’m going to tell you about some profound changes in science’s conception of the connection between your mind and your body, and hence in science’s conception of your essential nature as a human being, and science’s assessment of the validity of the idea that you possess “Causally Effective Free Will”.
My talk has three parts: The first part explain the difference between yout mind and your brain. Second part explains some key difference between Classical Mechanics and Quantum Mechanics. The third part uses what is said in the first two parts to justify the intuitive idea that you possess Causally Effective Free Will.
Part 1: Mind versus Brain
By ‘’your mind” I mean the collection of your thoughts, ideas, and feelings. This includes your feelings of joy or sorrow, your sensations of color and form, your experiences of conscious intent, and of the mathematical and philosophical concepts that enter your abstract thinking.
By “your body” I mean a collection of physically described things located inside your skin.
By “physically described things” I mean things that are described by assigning mathematical properties to space-time points, or to tiny space-time regions.
Thus your brain is the part of you that is described in physical terms, whereas your mind is the aspect described is psychological terms.
Part 2. Classical Mechanics versus Quantum Mechanics.
Classical mechanics is the theory of nature that originated in the seventeenth century work of Isaac Newton. Its core precept is the notion of physical determinism. This principle asserts that a complete causal description of the evolution of all physically described aspects of nature is given in terms physically described things alone, with no mention of mental properties
This principle means, simply stated, that you are a mechanical automaton. Your conscious intentions and feelings and judgments can have no effect upon your bodily actions beyond what is already fixed and settled by physically described properties alone.
People who accept this mechanical conception of human beings speak of
“the illusion of conscious will.”
Classical Mechanics reigned supreme for two hundred years. But during the early part of the twentieth century it was found to be incompatible with a host of empirical phenomena, and was replaced as our basic scientific theory by quantum theory.
Quantum Mechanics, in contrast to classical mechanics, is specifically about mental things. It is about relationships between mental events. Standard Copenhagen quantum mechanics, as defined by its creators, and as taught in our universities, and as tested and used by practicing quantum physicists, consists of a set of rules that allow scientists to form, by means of prescribed mathematical procedures, on the basis of knowledge gained from past experiences, reliable statistical expectations about what they will experience in the future.
A prediction about what an observer will experience depends, of course, upon which aspect of nature the observer chooses to probe: The knowledge acquired by a person depends in general on what that person seeks to know!
On this matter of ‘acquiring knowledge’, quantum mechanics departs in a major way from classical mechanics. And this departure has profound consequences!
In classical mechanics an observer can, in principle, know every physical property of the system being observed, and the acquisition of knowledge has no effect upon the system being observed. A person’s knowledge of the system being observed can be regarded as just a partial representation of the full physical description of that system
But in quantum mechanics each acquisition of knowledge about the observed system comes on a discrete chunk, which corresponds to a single complex combination of
the bits of information contained in the physical description. And the acquisition of knowledge changes the physically described state.
The process of acquiring knowledge has three steps:
1. The observer chooses a yes-or-no question about the system he or she is observing,
and this queation must be from among a highly restricted set of possibilities.
2. Nature delivers a statistically controlled answer “Yes” or “No”, to the chosen question. 3. The physical state of the system being observed then reduces to the part of itself compatible with nature’s answer.
Thus the process of acquiring knowledge affects the physical state of the observed system in a way that depends jointly upon the choice of question made by the observer, and the logically subsequent (random) choice made by nature!
John Von Neumann, in a seminal book, assumed that the entire physically described world, including the brains of the observers, should be described quantum mechanically, and argued that the system normally observed by a human being is precisely his or her own brain. Thus the knowledge normally acquired by a person is restricted to the information residing in his or her own brain. This conclusion is in complete accord with the normal scientific understanding of the physical world, and our acquisition of knowledge about it.
Part 3. The Third Power and Causally Effective Free Will.
Two key dynamical points are:
1. The observer’s choice of probing question, as represented in the quantum dynamics, is not determined by the Schroedinger equation, which is the quantum analog of the physically deterministic laws of classical physics, and
2. The observer’s choice is not influenced the random choice of reply, which is logically subsequent to the observer’s choice of the question.
Thus the observer’s choice is a “Free Choice”, in the specific sense that it is determined neither by the quantum analog of the mechanistic determinism of classical mechanics, nor by the ‘random’ element of quantum mechanics.
Yet the observer’s choice can affect the observer’s brain!
Thus the observer’s “Free Choices” can have physical effects!
I have explained in detail elsewhere how this effect of the person’s free choices upon his or her brain allows a person’s ‘concept of an intended bodily action’ to be converted to the intended physical action by an exertion of will, in close accord with the ideas of William James and of David Hume.
“When a person is possessed of any power, there is no more required to convert it into action but the exertion of the will.” (Hume)
The bottom line of this argument is that the downfall of classical mechanics, and its replacement by orthodox (Copenhagen-von Neumann) quantum mechanics, converts you, in the eyes of science, from mechanical automaton to an agent able to make free choices that can affect your physical actions in the way you intend!
In quantum mechanics, the physical power your conscious free will is not an illusion,
The idea that the switch from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics could rescue the idea of causally efficacious free will is routinely dismissed by philosophers on the grounds that introducing QM merely brings in the quantum element of chance, but that the injection of randomness or chance in no way rescues a satisfactory notion of free will!
That routine argument is faulty because the switch to quantum mechanics introduces a third power that is neither the quantum analog of the physical determinism classical mechanics nor the quantum element of chance: it is the power of the observer’s free choices to affect the physically described world.  |
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