Chapter 12                                           Part D

Unlike the Newtonian paradigm, the quantum one has opened up the possibility that we humans really can influence probabilities by skillfully executed action in the real world. The odds that the flap of a butterfly's wing will cause a hurricane or a rockslide are extremely remote. The odds that if I hear a roaring and duck beneath an overhanging shelf of basalt, I will not get hit by a rockslide are much better. I can react successfully to the unforeseen. The odds that a field in April, left alone, will be full of corn ripening by October are extremely remote. The odds that the same field will contain a harvestable corn crop if I seed it with corn now in April, and water and weed it for the next five months, are much higher. Human knowledge and skill enable us to intervene in the flows of events around us. At present, we can't stop the hurricane, but our computer models, when fed enough data, can tell us when we need to get out of the hurricane's way, if we want to have reasonable odds of going on with our lives.

                                            planaria swimming away from a flashlight 

The programming in life forms as humble as planaria enables them to swim to the side of the petri dish that is out of the direct light. To use their tiny "intelligence", in other words, to alter the odds surrounding the possible outcomes associated with their dying under incoming beams of light. How much more empowering is human programming? Thus, the quantum view is a view of ourselves that deeply resonates with our belief in the free will which directs the actions of our daily selves. 

We are, within certain human, physical limits, free. We can take measures and do actions that alter the odds of some possible future events happening. We think, learn, and act to increase the odds of our experiencing future events that will support our survival, health, and comfort, and decrease the odds of our experiencing events that will lead us to pain and death. We think, learn, and act in ways that make it more likely that we may continue to think, learn, and act. This is the nature of human freedom, and the varying lesser degrees of freedom in all other life forms.

                                     Ebenezer Scrooge on his own grave begs for a chance 

                                                       to go back to life and mend his ways

     

                                         (Alistair Sim in the film "A Christmas Carol", 1951) 

We gain a better understanding of how profoundly different this world view is when we contrast it with the old Newtonian one. Philosophers who understood the old Newtonian one believed that natural laws like Newton's laws of motion would eventually explain phenomena in the realms of Physics, then Chemistry, then Biology, Psychology, and History. In this model, every event and every action performed by animals or humans, is seen as being governed by rigorous natural laws that in each case must lead to only only one outcome. Thus, only one history for all the universe is possible. Human intuitions about their own freedom are but comforting illusions.   

This is the view called "determinism": it says that there is no such thing as free will because the future is already set, even if no human being will ever be able to know all of the natural laws and the positions and momenta of all of the particles. In principle, under the Newtonian view, there is no free will for humans or anything else in this universe because the future is already fixed. The quantum view, by contrast, opens up the possibility that living things can learn to spot patterns in the sense data that they receive from the world around them, recognize the ones that tell of hazards and opportunities, and act to alter the probabilities of future events so that those humans survive.

That is a picture that resonates with our habitual and intuitive view of ourselves. We are, to a degree that varies from situation to situation, free.