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Chapter 10. Why
Change as the Basic Universal
Process Makes Free Will Impossible
Our civilization, and mindset, and
personal lives are all founded on
this notion that we human beings can
freely choose whatever we want –
that we have a free will. The
problem is that we don’t, and apart
from our seeing reality completely
contrary to the way it is, our
belief in free will causes problems
both in our personal lives and
societally. Hopefully by our
understanding that our wills are
causal, and not free, we can create
a more compassionate world. Before I
get into our topic, I just want to
go a bit more into what we mean when
we say we have a free will.
Basically we mean that our thoughts
are completely up to us – there is
nothing compelling us to decide what
we do. We mean that what we do, what
we eat, what we say, and what kind
of work we do – everything – is
completely up to us. Naturally, we
have an unconscious that is always
active, and makes free will
impossible. But, the more basic
reason why we don’t have a free will
is the process of cause and effect.
This chapter is about the fact that
everything that happens in the
world, including our decisions, has
a cause. If everything has a cause,
then whatever causes us to make a
decision will have a cause. And
there will be a cause of that cause,
and a cause of that cause, etc. Note
that a cause will always precede its
effect. A cause can never come after
its effect. When we consider this
chain of cause and effect that leads
back further and further into the
past, we can see how the causes that
ultimately led up to any kind of
decision we might make were made
long before we were born, and long
before the planet was created.
Consider that the first fact of
existence – and this is undeniable,
a priori, and axiomatic – is that
the universe exists. Everything
exists; we are here. The second a
priori fact is that the basic
process of the universe is change.
Think about that. If the universe
didn’t change, everything would be
completely frozen. I wouldn’t have
written, and you wouldn’t be
reading, this book. Planets like our
Earth would not be rotating around
their axis, and revolving around
stars like our Sun. If there were no
change, nothing would move. There
would not be a world, as we know it.
We have a priori knowledge that the
universe exists, and a priori
knowledge that the fundamental
process of the universe is change.
What is change? Change is something
moving from one state to another.
Change is a particle being at one
point at one moment, and then at
another point the next moment. That
is what change is. It is matter
moving through space in time. At one
moment, you’ll have a particle or
something at a certain point, and
then at the next moment, because of
change, it will be at a different
point. That’s change. Two axiomatic
facts - reality exists, and reality
changes. What pulls this all
together, and what makes free will
impossible, is the idea that in
order for change to take place,
there has to be causality. In fact,
causality is the process that allows
for change. No change could ever
happen without causality. There is a
statement to the effect that
“nothing can be causa sui,” meaning
that nothing can be the cause of
itself (unless we want to perhaps
consider that God, as the first
cause, is the cause of Her/Himself).
But after that, every other cause
has to have a prior cause. It’s not
necessary to know the first cause,
if it exists, to understand the
process of causality that operates
thereafter.
If you have causality – cause and
effect – as the process that is
required for any change to take
place in the universe, you can
understand how causality is as
axiomatic as the fact that there is
a universe, and the fact that the
universe changes. I say this to
clarify a confusion that has arisen
in physics since 1927 when Werner
Heisenberg published his Heisenberg
Uncertainty Principle. Basically
it’s a mathematical equation that
demonstrates that you can’t at the
same time measure the position and
the momentum of a quantum particle
with the precision required for
successful prediction using
classical mechanics. If you measure
the particle’s position, then its
momentum becomes less clear. If you
measure the particle’s momentum,
then its position becomes less
clear. That’s the basic Uncertainty
Principle, and it applies to other
conjugate variables like particle
spin, particle charge and particle
phase. For some reason that doesn’t
really make sense, this discovery
led some physicists, most notably
Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, to
formulate what came to be known as
the Copenhagen Interpretation of
quantum mechanics, and conclude that
since we can’t measure
simultaneously position and
momentum, or two of other conjugate
variables, somehow these processes
are uncaused.
It is important to see that if the
universe exists as an axiomatic
fact, and change is axiomatic,
causality must also be axiomatic.
Again, otherwise everything would be
frozen. If causality is necessary,
and describes change, obviously
causality is as fundamental a fact
of nature. In other words, this
explanation of causality is at a
much more fundamental level than
interpreting the results of the
Heisenberg and stronger, more
recent, uncertainty relations. There
is more to it. It has never been
shown in any way that something
could be uncaused. Think about it.
Change requires causality. This can
be demonstrated through certain laws
of physics. For example, there is a
Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy.
This law has never been violated.
When one particle interacts with
another particle, there is an
exchange of mass-energy. One
particle will gain mass-energy, and
the other will lose mass-energy.
Again, that conservation law has
never been violated. If one particle
gains mass-energy, then the cause of
that gain has to be the interaction
with the other particle.
A problem with that conservation law
may arise when you consider matter
in terms of either mass or energy.
Mass-Energy is what Einstein
explained the universe as in his
theory of Special Relativity. It’s
the idea that mass and energy are
actually one. E=mc² where “E” means
energy, “m” means mass and “c²”
means the speed of light squared.
That gets a little confusing because
apparently there have been some
seeming violations of conservation
of mass, and some seeming violations
of conservation of energy that make
this law appear less ironclad. But,
there is another conservation law in
physics, which came out of Newton’s
Laws of Motion. This is the Law of
Conservation of Momentum. When a
particle is moving through space, it
has momentum. Momentum means
velocity and direction. So, when a
particle is at one point, its
momentum at that point will
determine its position at the second
point. You can never lose momentum.
If one particle interacts with
another, momentum is always
conserved. That we have this law of
conservation of momentum that
requires causality is another proof
at the most fundamental level of
physics that causality is the
process for change – is the basic
process by which events happen.
Another law of physics that I think
is obvious to us all is that matter
moves through space in time. Time is
what allows for change. If there was
no time, there could be no change.
So, you have a particle at one point
at a certain moment in time, and
since everything is moving, it will
be at another point the next moment
in time. This movement applies to
every particle on Earth. The
universe is expanding. So, our whole
solar system and Milky Way galaxy
are expanding outward. The Galaxy is
expanding toward a region of the
universe called the Great Attractor
Anomaly. And, our solar system is
moving in time as it revolves around
the Milky Way Galaxy. There are
various kinds of motions that are
always happening that include every
particle and every part of the
Earth. This motion all requires
time. Time is what allows change.
It’s what allows causality to
happen.
Another axiom in physics is that
there is an arrow of time, in the
sense that time will always go from
past to present to future. It will
never go from future to present to
past. The reason I say that’s
axiomatic is because there has never
been a known violation, and because
it is so obvious. In physics, there
are certain kinds of theories and
equations that are deemed
symmetrical, in the sense that they
allow, mathematically, for time to
travel backward. But, when you think
of these kinds of equations and
theories, you have to remember that
mathematics is a measuring tool. It
is not a descriptor of the nature of
reality. It helps physicists come up
with measurements of reality to then
reach their conclusions. With
mathematics, you can subtract two
from one and get a negative one, but
that doesn’t mean that you can
subtract two apples from one apple
and get as a physical entity a
“negative apple.” Negative apples do
not exist in reality. That is why I
say that although there are
equations that allow for time to go
backwards, it’s just the math. It
has never been demonstrated, and is
clearly impossible.
One of the claims for free will is
that our mind is not physical, and
so our thoughts are not physical.
Some say that if our thoughts are
not physical, then that means that
maybe they are not caused, and maybe
they are the result of a free will.
The problem with that assertion is
the existence of time. Let’s say we
make a decision, and we call it
“spiritual.” We say it doesn’t have
a physical presence, however that
decision would have to take place
within a moment in time. It has a
precise position in this timeline
that goes from past, to present, to
future. Naturally, if it has a
precise moment in our timeline, it
is completely subject to the
causality that governs everything
else in the universe. Let’s say we
make a decision. We define it as
spiritual, but it happens in the
present moment. We should realize
that the present moment – anything
that happens in the present moment –
is the complete result of the state
of the universe at the previous
moment. Naturally, if we have a
spiritual decision taking place at a
certain point in time, and thus
being caused by the state of the
universe at the prior moment, and
that state being caused by the state
immediately before that, we now have
a causal regression that leads back
presumably to the Big Bang, and who
knows what happened before. Defining
decisions as not being physical does
not allow for a free will because
any decision we make, and any
thought we have, occupies a specific
point in time, and time is causal.
I want to now consider randomness,
or indeterminism, defined as
acausality. It’s greatly perplexing
how otherwise brilliant people have
proposed this hypothesis. My guess
is that physicists like Bohr and
Heisenberg were more than “shut up
and calculate” researchers; they
were also interested in the
fundamental nature of reality. It’s
likely they had an interest in the
question of whether our human will
is free or not. My guess is that it
was this philosophical interest,
which to some physicists meant
finding a way to preserve the notion
of a free will, which led them to
reach incoherent, internally
inconsistent, conclusions, like the
idea of acausality, that basically
make no sense. Sometimes we
understand randomness in the sense
of having a deck of cards, and
picking one “at random.” This is
more accurately described as
“apparent randomness.” What some
physicists mean, however – and
what’s actually taught in many
college level physics courses – is
the Copenhagen Interpretation of
quantum mechanics that considers
elementary particle behavior as
random in the strong sense of not
having been caused. Think about the
concept of randomness in that sense
of something happening that is not
caused. It doesn’t make sense. There
is a cause to everything. Things do
not just happen for no reason, and
without cause.
Let’s say something was to “just
happen.” Let’s say a particle could
just come into existence out of
nowhere. A particle is somewhere,
when a moment earlier it was
nowhere. That too would be a causal
process, and you cannot rationally
consider the coming into existence
of the particle as random. Sometimes
physicists will say to themselves,
“I know everything that is happening
in this system.” For example, with
radioactive decay, for isotopes that
have a half-life, meaning they will
decay at a certain rate and within a
specific window of time – physicists
cannot predict exactly when a single
isotope will undergo this decay. So,
for many years some have claimed
that since we can’t predict its
behavior, it can’t have a cause, and
that it must be random in the strong
sense meaning acausal. I trust you
understand the illogic of that
conclusion. There is no true
randomness, in the sense of events
happening without a cause.
Everything has to be caused. Another
reason some physicists,
philosophers, and psychologists
became confused regarding this
matter involves a statement by
Pierre-Simon Laplace, who was a
famous French mathematician and
physicist. He penned what came to be
understood as the classic statement
describing determinism, or
causality. He essentially said that
if we knew the position of every
particle in the universe, and every
force acting upon every particle,
and if we could compute that data,
we could know both the past and the
future. Nothing would be hidden from
us. In his own words:
We may regard the
present state of the universe as the
effect of its past and the cause of
its future. An intellect which at a
certain moment would know all forces
that set nature in motion, and all
positions of all items of which
nature is composed, if this
intellect were also vast enough to
submit these data to analysis, it
would embrace in a single formula
the movements of the greatest bodies
of the universe and those of the
tiniest atom; for such an intellect
nothing would be uncertain and the
future just like the past would be
present before its eyes.
What confused some is that
because we can’t simultaneously
measure the position and momentum of
a particle, and therefore can’t know
the position and force acting upon
every particle, (and more generally,
because we can’t know everything in
the universe) we can’t make such
predictions using either classical
or quantum mechanics. Somehow, that
realization led some physicists to
conclude that there is such a
reality as indeterminism, defined as
randomness, or acausality. Whichever
term you want to use, these
physicists are claiming that some
things are simply uncaused.
Sometimes physicists will define
randomness as unpredictability, but
that is a slight-of-hand assertion
because when they are asked what
they mean by unpredictable, they
ultimately equate it with
acausality. Bringing all of this
back to the question of human will,
if the universe exists
axiomatically, and if change is the
fundamental process of the universe,
without which nothing can happen,
and if causality is necessary to all
change, then causality is the
fundamental process in nature. If
everything has a cause, that means
that every one of our decisions has
a cause, and that cause has a cause,
and that cause has a cause. That is
a very powerful way to understand
why free will is impossible.
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