Unlike the Newtonian paradigm, the quantum one has opened up the possibility that we humans really can influence probabilities by skilfully 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 I will not get hit by a rockslide if I hear a roaring and duck beneath an overhanging shelf of basalt are much better. I can react successfully to the unforeseen. The odds that a cornfield in April, left alone, will be full of corn ripening by October are extremely remote. 

The odds are much higher that the same field will contain a harvestable corn crop if I seed it with corn in April and water and weed it for the next five months. 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. They use their innate intelligence—their unique instincts—to improve their odds of survival by avoiding 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 that directs our daily actions.

We are, within human limits, free. We can perform actions that alter the odds of some possible futures happening. We learn, think, and act to increase the odds of our experiencing futures that will support our survival, health, and comfort, and decrease the odds of our experiencing futures that will lead us to pain, injury, and death. We think, learn, and act in ways that make it more likely that we will keep being able to to think, learn, and act. This is the nature of human freedom, and the lesser degrees of freedom in other life forms.

  

        Ebenezer Scrooge on his own grave begs for a chance to return to life and mend his ways

                                  Photo of Alastair Sim in the film A Christmas Carol, 1951

We gain a better understanding of how profoundly different this worldview is when we contrast it with the old Newtonian one. Philosophers who understood the old Newtonian worldview believed that natural laws like Newton’s laws of motion would eventually explain phenomena in the realms of physics, then chemistry, 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 one outcome. Thus, only one history for the entire universe is possible. Human intuitions about the extent of our own freedom are illusions.

This view is called determinism: it says 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 they detect in the world around them, recognize the ones that tell of hazards and opportunities, and act to alter the probabilities of future events so that their chances of survival improve.

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

     

                                                                       Albert Einstein

It is important to reiterate here that quantum theory is not talking about the uncertainty of events at the macro level, a kind of uncertainty that we say we are forced to accept because of practical limits on our measuring abilities. Under the Newtonian view, one may believe that we humans see events that look unpredictable, from the limited human level, but still also think that the universe is a deterministic place. But quantum theory says that the processes taking place at the subatomic level are always occurring in ways that appear to us to be uncaused—what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” (he hated the idea of it). Furthermore, the point for my goal of trying to find a basis in physical reality for a moral code is not affected by these distinctions. Probability, quantum and non-quantum, as an overriding quality of reality, is ubiquitous and eternal. We must live with a probabilistic reality and adapt to it as a fact of life.

Physicists are unclear about how or even whether quantum uncertainty and non-quantum uncertainty enhance each other. The huge range of outcomes in complex systems may be influenced by both quantum and non-quantum forces. Currently, we just don’t know. The exact nature of what is going on down there is still being debated.

However, our moral models are not affected by these distinctions. In the level of reality at which our choices are made and our actions are measured, we experience reality as being made of probabilistic events. And in those chains of events, informed, guided, chosen human actions can effectively intervene and alter the likelihoods of at least some outcomes. This is all that really matters for moral philosophy.

Therefore, in all that follows, I will speak of the probabilistic quality of nature as being one of the crucial and basic characteristics of reality that we humans must deal with. When I speak of quantum uncertainty, I will be referring to the total uncertainty of reality that human beings have to learn to accommodate and react effectively to.

                    

                                                                 Charles S. Peirce

Quantum theory breaks the backbone of classical determinism. At the tiniest level that we have been able to study, events are not connected by single paths of direct cause and effect. They are connected by forces that do not obey exact laws of cause and effect, but instead can be described only by laws of probability. The consequence for humans is that life is full of uncertainty, or to be exact, probabilities. In science, the usual term for this kind of system “stochastic”. Most of the time we know to a high degree of probability what is going to happen next, and also, with a fair degree of reliability, how we may be able to influence what is going to happen next, but we never know for certain what is going to happen. This view was anticipated by American philosopher and scientist Charles Peirce in the 1890s and has been further developed by many thinkers right into the twenty-first century.^4,5

We can and do act in bold, informed, calculated, and skillful ways, and our actions alter the probabilities of the various events that may happen in the next few seconds or decades, but it is also true that we can’t ever act so intelligently or skilfully that we can be 100 percent sure of any outcome, good or bad. The elements of surprise and risk are built into reality.